I taught PE for years before I realised I was failing my students on extended writing

That title. I know. It’s an uncomfortable one to write. And if you’re reading it and feeling a flicker of recognition, good. That flicker is worth sitting with.

Here is the position I want to make in this post: across PE and Sport qualifications in the UK, students are failing in extended writing. Not because they don’t know enough, but because we haven’t taught them how to write. This is a teaching problem. And for a long time, I was part of it.

I am not here to lecture. I am not here to make PE teachers feel inadequate. I’m here because I think this is one of the most important and least discussed issues in examined PE, and because I genuinely believe it is solvable. But only if we’re honest about what’s actually going wrong.

So let’s be honest.

Early in my career, I did what most PE teachers do with extended writing: I taught the content, I set the question, I marked the answers, I wrote “develop your points more” or “include a conclusion” in the margin, and then I moved on to the next topic.

I told myself this was fine. After all, students had English lessons. They knew how to write. My job was the PE content. Where exactly was I supposed to find time to explicitly teach writing technique as well?

That reasoning felt completely sound at the time. It wasn’t.

What I eventually had to accept, and what the data shows with uncomfortable clarity, is that “develop your points more” is not a teaching strategy. It’s a hope. And hope, in the PE theory room, is not a pedagogical approach.

Here is what we’re looking at. Across all PE and Sport external examinations over the past five years, students collectively achieve less than 50% of available raw marks. Less than half. And the single most disproportionate area of underperformance? Extended writing.

Let that land for a moment.

On AQA A-level PE, extended writing questions make up approximately 66% of each paper. Two-thirds of the marks, and the section where students consistently perform worst. On OCR GCSE PE, extended writing is around 10% of the paper. Even there, students who can’t answer extended questions are systematically capping their grade before the short-answer section has even been completed.

Here’s the thing: this is not a knowledge problem.

I’ve watched knowledgeable students, students who could explain exactly how cardiac output increases during exercise, or who could describe every component of the FITT principle without hesitation, fall apart the moment a question said “Evaluate.” They had the knowledge. What they didn’t have was the skill to deploy it under an evaluative command word demand. Those are not the same thing.

Most PE teaching reaches what I’d call the “apply ceiling.” We teach students to know things and to explain them in context. That’s AO1 and AO2 territory, and most of us are reasonably good at developing those capabilities. But extended writing demands AO3: analysis and evaluation. The ability to break concepts apart, weigh evidence, take a position, and sustain an argument across multiple paragraphs. Most PE teaching never explicitly builds that skill. Then we’re surprised when students don’t demonstrate it under exam conditions.

Let me be direct: students cannot write what they cannot think or say. If we haven’t caused them to analyse and evaluate in our classrooms, verbally, repeatedly, before ever putting pen to paper, we haven’t taught extended writing. We’ve assigned it. There is a meaningful difference.

There’s also a significant opportunity hiding in this picture. Centres whose students score well on extended writing are differentiating themselves on the exact part of the paper where most centres fall down. Developing the skill of extended writing doesn’t just improve marks on six- or 10-mark questions. It makes students more confident and more strategic writers across the whole paper. Extended writing is the knowledge gateway, not the final destination.

1. Extended writing is a skill, not a test of knowledge. Most PE classrooms treat extended writing questions as the culmination of content teaching: the moment we find out if students know enough. But this is a distinct, teachable skill which involves the ability to structure an argument, use evidence purposefully, and reach a conclusion under a specific command-word demand. A student can know everything and still fail a nine-marker if they haven’t been taught how to write one.

2. Command words are cognitive instructions, not interchangeable vocabulary. “Evaluate”, “Analyse”, “Assess”, “Discuss”, “Justify”… In most PE classrooms, these words are treated as if they mean the same thing: “Write a lot about this.” They don’t. Each one makes a distinct cognitive demand. “Evaluate” means “make a judgement, weigh evidence and reach a conclusion.” “Analyse” means “break a concept down and examine how its parts relate.” “Discuss” means “present multiple perspectives.” Students who don’t understand that distinction will write the same answer to every command word. The mark scheme will penalise them every time.

3. AO3 is where the marks are. We barely teach it. AO1 is knowledge. AO2 is application. AO3 is analysis and evaluation. Extended writing is the primary vehicle for AO3 marks across every PE qualification, and yet most PE lesson time is spent on AO1. Students who write AO1 answers to AO3 questions will always underperform, regardless of how much they know. Check the mark scheme for any eight-mark or 15-mark AQA A-level question. The marks are not for knowing. They’re for evaluating or analysing.

4. We introduce extended writing too late. The most common model (and the one I used for years) is to introduce extended writing properly in the second half of Year 1 or early Year 2. By that point, students have spent months writing short answers. They have deeply ingrained habits that are hard to shift. Extended writing is a skill like any other: it requires time, practice and feedback across a full course. The ideal model is not “extended writing unit in Term 3.” It’s extended writing woven into the course from the first half-term, low stakes, heavily scaffolded.

5. “Assign and mark” is not teaching extended writing. Setting a nine-mark question for homework and writing “develop your points” in the margin is not instruction. Writing research is unambiguous on this: increasing writing volume alone does not make students better writers. Explicit instruction in the how of writing (how to interpret the command word, how to plan the structure and how to sequence an argument) is what drives improvement. I assigned extended writing for years. I barely taught it.

6. Students cannot write what they cannot think or say. Before students write an evaluated answer, they need to have evaluated something verbally. Before they analyse, they need to have pulled a concept apart out loud. The talking is not a warm-up to the real work. The talking is the preparation. Activities that force students to take positions, defend arguments, and consider opposing evidence (Agreement Circles, Folded Lines, Pass the Buck) are not discussion for discussion’s sake. They are the cognitive rehearsal for the writing that follows.

7. Modelling live is the single highest-impact change most PE teachers could make. If you have never written a full, extended-writing answer in front of your students (on a whiteboard, on screen, narrating your thinking out loud) you are missing the most powerful instructional move available to you. Students cannot replicate a process they have never seen. The “I do, We do, You do” model applies directly here: teacher models a full answer with thinking made visible; class constructs one together with the teacher facilitating; students attempt one independently. This is not complicated. It is just rarely done in PE classrooms.

8. WAGOLL without WABOLL is incomplete. Showing students a good answer (What A Good One Looks Like) is valuable. But showing them a bad answer, a common failure mode annotated honestly, and asking them to diagnose and improve it, is arguably more powerful still. Students often don’t know what they’re doing wrong until they can see it from the outside. WABOLL makes the failure mode visible. WAGOLL shows the alternative. Used together, they are the most efficient route to improving extended writing quality that I know. A word of warning: It is my opinion that PE students receive a lot of WABOLL without any WAGOLL. WABOLL alone, because a student is told what is not very good about their answer, is not only ineffective but potentially dangerous when we consider the student’s self-efficacy for extended writing.

9. Scaffolds should be introduced early and removed gradually. Planning frames, sentence starters, structured writing guides: these are not crutches. In the early stages of extended writing development, they are the instruction itself. The goal is progressive removal: high scaffolding early in Year 1, reduced scaffolding as confidence builds, and independent writing under exam conditions as the course matures. Students asked to write extended answers cold (no scaffold, no modelling, no verbal rehearsal) will default to what they already know, which is usually listing.

10. The six-pointer effect is real, and it’s where departments separate. Here’s the opportunity hiding inside all of this. Most PE departments lose marks on extended writing. The departments whose students perform well on extended questions are, by definition, scoring on the exact part of the paper where everyone else falls down. If your students can write a well-structured, well-argued nine-marker while others are listing three bullet points and stopping, your results will look different. Not just on the extended questions, but across the whole paper, because skilled writers are more confident, more strategic and more likely to deploy their time effectively.

I know what some of you are thinking. James, this sounds reasonable, but I have a full specification content to cover, a mock exam in eight weeks, and a department who are already stretched. When exactly am I supposed to redesign my approach to extended writing?

That is a fair and honest question. And I don’t want to minimise it.

The time pressure in examined PE is real. The content volume is real. The discomfort that comes with extended writing practice is real, and –I’ll be honest– it was one of the reasons I avoided confronting this for so long. It felt easier to test content and move on than to create the conditions for genuine extended writing development.

But here is what I eventually had to face: the cost of not addressing it showed up in my results. Students who knew their content and still left extended writing questions half-finished. A-grade students who received a B because two 15-mark questions that should have been 10/15 were 6/15 instead. That gap wasn’t a knowledge gap. It was a teaching gap.

The good news? You don’t need to rebuild your entire course this week. You need to make one change.

Quick win (this week): Pick one upcoming extended-writing question. Before students attempt it, spend 10 minutes modelling a full answer live: thinking aloud, planning on the board, narrating every decision. See what happens to the quality of their attempts.

This term: Introduce verbal rehearsal before every extended-writing task. Agreement Circles for “Evaluate” questions. Idea Piles for “Analyse” questions. Make the talking the requirement, not the preamble.

This year: Map your course and identify where extended writing is first introduced. If it’s not in the first half-term, move it. Low stakes, high scaffolding, early in the course. The habits form early.

If you’d like to take this further, and particularly if you lead a department and want a model to share with your colleagues, I’d love you to join us for the PE Teacher CPD Webinar on Monday 20th April 2026. We’ll be walking through the full Academy content, including a dedicated course on Extended Writing in PE and Sport. Come and turn every principle in this post into a structured CPD programme your whole department can work through in their own time.

It’s free to attend. Everyone who joins will receive an exclusive £50 discount on a full department Academy subscription. Register here:

I fully expect some of you will push back on parts of this. Perhaps you’ve developed an approach to extended writing that works well and looks nothing like what I’ve described here. Perhaps you think the issue really is knowledge-deep, and that students who know their content thoroughly enough can write about it effectively without explicit writing instruction.

If so, I genuinely want to hear from you. Use the comments below, or email us directly. I’m not claiming to have this completely figured out. I’m sharing what I’ve learned from years of getting it wrong, and what the evidence and honest experience suggest about how to get it right.

Have a wonderful week.

James