4 Steps to Secure a Grade 9 - GCSE Maths

A lot of really, really successful students do ask me what they need to do to secure the grade 9 in year 11 and there are some really good, it's a really good question because it's not just about learning content. Learning content will get you to a 7. Getting the 8 or 9 requires a specific set of skills that a lot of schools and private tuitions and things like that don't actually cover. So just give some context. My name is Mitchell. I've been a teacher for quite a few years now. I've been tutoring for 10 years and I've taken a lot of students through year 10, 11, 12 and 13 in maths. And so I feel like I do have a really good place to tell you how to get that grade 9. So I'm going to go through my exact four steps that I would take to get that grade 9 if I were to redo the whole thing again. And it's the four steps that I give to my own students at school. So step one is starting exam practice early. This is something that a lot of students, they try and save the exam papers for later. So the first thing is you actually know the majority of the content already. If your school has kind of a scheme of work or something that they're following, I'd recommend having a look at it because the one at my school finishes usually in like November, December time, and the rest of it is just kind of exam practice and things like that. So you actually know, I would probably say around 90% of the content already, but you don't know how to apply it properly. And you also don't know how the topics all link together, because in an exam, it's not just questions like solve quadratic, algebraic fraction, etc. And all these topics can be blurred together and you have to apply them in questions. I've seen questions that use ratios, but actually they turn into algebraic fraction questions. I've seen probability questions that then use algebraic fractions or solving quadratics in them. Will you be able to recognize that or will you be able to actually do it? Well, that's a good question, right? You won't know until you practice. The number one reason students miss out on the eights or nines, so they get seven or eights instead of their nines, for example, is because of problem solving skills. There's normally kind of one or two questions across the whole of the three papers that knock their grade down by quite a bit. So what I mean by this is a lot of students will make mistakes throughout the papers, of course, that's just natural. It happens. But then there's one or two questions where instead of getting five or six marks, they get like two or one because they just don't know how to approach the problem. They don't even know how to get to the first step, which means they lose the entire set of marks. So my key point here is you don't want to save exam papers for later, which is the common thing I get from year 11 students. There are plenty and there's plenty that you don't even know about. You can go back to GCSE papers from literally the 1990s and it has the same content anyway. But there's also things like shadow papers, mock papers, aiming for grade nine papers, etc. I don't really know of any student that's ever done all of them. So just keep in mind that there are thousands of practice papers that you can do. So you don't need to save them for later. You can get started literally from September. Step two is focusing on your weak areas. So once again, with the doing exam practice, what a lot of students will do is they'll do entire exam papers. And there's nothing wrong with that. But there is a bit of a problem if you're already on a grade seven. That means you get around 55 to 60 percent of the marks, depending on the grade boundary for that year. That means over half of the paper you already know. So why are you redoing it? So I see students, they'll say, I'm going to study for like an hour or whatever. They crack open a past paper and they start from the front. And it's like, well, hang on a minute. You're going to waste half an hour at least on just writing down answers to questions you already know how to do. In fact, the only reason why it takes you half an hour is because you have to write it out. Right. But you know how to do it. So focus on your weak areas. There are two ways to do this, which I really like. The first one is starting from the back of a paper. Really, really, really good idea, because that way you're starting when you're freshest. Bear in mind, if you do, let's say, a whole past paper, by the time you get to those last questions, the hard ones, you're tired because you've been writing for an hour. Right. Even doing something easy, even if I got you to do your times tables, you would get tired after an hour. It's not about how easy it is. You still get tired. So starting from the back of a paper is a really good idea. Or just pick a couple of topics. So the key weaknesses I find for students in terms of topics are conditional probability, probability of algebraic fractions. So they sometimes call this probability equations, vector geometry and proofs. So doing exam questions on these specific topics can also be a really good way to do it. Now, there is a place for you to do the entire exam paper, which is closer to the exam time. So I'd say a couple of months beforehand where you need to practice your timing, because, yes, there are some grade nine students that run out of time or they have to rush a question. But for now, at least let's say up until January, up until 2027, you can just focus on spending time on these exam questions. And take your time with them. It's OK if a five mark question takes you 15 minutes because you're learning. That's the key thing. Step three is getting help early. Now, as I mentioned, with the problem solving skills being the key thing, and they are the thing that will stop you, guaranteed they stop everyone, is problem solving skills take a long time to build up. So if you're going to, let's say, start exam papers two months before the exam and you're going to do loads and loads and loads, it doesn't matter if you do 50 exam papers. In a month or 50 exam papers in two months, because that doesn't actually develop your problem solving skills. That just means you can do papers. OK, well done. Problem solving skills take a long time to build up and it's a way of thinking. So you have to try and it's going to sound very esoteric, but you need to rewire your brain into thinking in a different way. That takes a long time. OK, it's not just about adapting to exam papers. It's about actually developing the skills. Now, in my videos, if you've watched my videos, you can see that I approach problems the same way every single time because it's a problem solving skill. My maths, yes, is good, but the problem solving skill is what separates me from a grade eight student to being a teacher. It's just problem solving. The problem with problem solving, that's kind of ironic, is schools and private tuition do not focus on them. So schools, firstly, if you're not in set one, they will not focus on problem solving skills because they want to focus on... Bear in mind, when you're a teacher, you're taught to focus on the lowest end of the class or the average. So if you think about it, if you're trying to aim for a grade nine, you're in the top three percent of the country. So by definition, your teachers are not going to teach you for the grade nine. Most teachers won't, most schools won't. Instead, they want to teach everyone to try and get at least a grade seven if you're in set one. In set two, it's like a grade six, maybe a grade seven. And with private tuition, a lot of in-person tuition is taught by students or it's taught by people who haven't taught for that long. Which means they're teaching you the exam questions, they're teaching you the content, they're teaching you what's already come up. Here's the key thing. Every year, the exam papers change by a massive amount. Massive. And the key part that changes is the grade eight and nine. So every year you'll see a new style of question come up that separates the grade eight and nine students. Schools and tuition, most tuition centres do not teach you that. They teach you what's already come up. So if you think about it, if they only teach you what's already come up, the highest possible grade you'll get is an eight, which means you'll likely get a seven because you have to take into account any mistakes you make. So that's a key thing. Whereas if you get proper help, you can actually predict exam questions. So for me personally, when I teach at school, when I do my private tuition, this year I managed to predict the hardest questions that came up. In fact, I created questions and taught them to students and they came up in the exam. So again, I'm not saying that always happens, but it's something that you need to take into account with getting help early. So my recommendation for getting help early is as early as you can check out my Aiming for Grade 9 videos. I made a massive playlist. I think there's like 30 videos in there or something. Or you can book a free lesson with me. I'll leave the link in the description and you can see what I mean by problem solving and getting the help early. Step four, improve your problem solving. Yeah, I know, I've kind of reiterated the same thing three times, but I've got a more specific plan for you. So I've mentioned this before. In terms of this year specifically, there was a rationalising denominator question that tripped up students. Rationalising denominator is not that difficult. It's Grade 5 and 6, but it just messed them up because they hadn't seen that type of question before. Because their problem solving is not good, right? They know how to rationalise only because they've seen a thousand rationalising questions. They don't know the logic behind it. They don't know the problem solving behind it. So what you need to do is find weird questions and learn how to solve them. Even if they're not GCSE questions, you can find questions that cover GCSE content. So here's kind of the places I would find them. So university entrance exam questions can be really good because certain entry exams don't require A-level knowledge. A-level questions to an extent, for example, completing the square comes up in A-level. Probability comes up in A-level. Vectors comes up in A-level. Sine and cosine will come up in A-level. So you can have a look at those because it's the same content. Questions on my YouTube channel, of course. And then obviously the maths challenge questions can also be really, really good. So again, that is my four step programme. But my key thing is definitely step three, which is getting help if you need it. If you think your school's not focusing on it, if you think the tuition that you have at the moment is not focusing on it, you need to change what you're doing to secure that grade nine. OK, it's not just about doing loads of questions, it's about doing the right type of questions, which is where a lot of schools and a lot of tuition kind of go badly on. So again, those links will be in the description for you to have a look at.