Where the levers marks are won in AQA GCSE PE (lessons from a Monday at Bullers Wood)

The short version: when you analyse accurately where the marks sit, you can teach the exact skills that earn them. For AQA GCSE PE levers, drawing is 57% of the marks across nine Paper 1 sittings. Give drawing the minutes it earns, teach every lever in the context of movement, and your cohort pulls away.

Dear PE colleagues,

On Monday 2 November, I taught a lesson on levers. Not to students this time, but to PE teachers from four schools: Bullers Wood School for Boys, Bullers Wood School for Girls, Charles Darwin School and Chislehurst School. It was a Project Perfect PE Teaching session: a full AQA GCSE PE lesson, delivered exactly as I would teach it to a Year 10 group, with the teachers in the students’ seats.

I left proud. Not because everything went perfectly, but because every single minute of the lesson did what I wanted it to do: it led with application. Every lever was drawn in the context of a movement. There were no exceptions.

Here’s the thing: that lesson only worked because of an analysis I’d done before I ever walked in.

How did the levers lesson run?

The teachers sat at tables of four, and that shaped every activity I chose.

We started with a “stand and stare”. On the wall were three unlabelled lever diagrams. Each table had greyed-out images of the body in movement, given in a different order, and the job was to decide which lever belonged to which movement and draw it onto the body. Then we marked every drawing against a strict standard: a sharp pencil, a ruled line, the fulcrum’s point touching the bar, the load on the bar, and the effort arrow’s tail on the bar, pointing the way the force acts.

What they saw stood at the front

Where they had to draw on their sheets

What they had to produce

And how we marked it per table

Next came classification. No lever appeared on its own. The elbow extending in a throw. The ankle as a jumper rises onto the toes. The elbow flexing in a biceps curl. Each class arrived inside its movement, never as a definition on a slide.

Then I demonstrated mechanical advantage and how to calculate it. A fun practical experiment with a hockey stick, a dumbbell and we used a box of chocolates as the load. Moving the fulcrum allowed the demonstration of greater and lesser mechanical advantage.

Then the table robin. Four exam-style questions, written by us in AQA’s style, and four pen colours per table. Two minutes to read with CUB, then four 90-second rotations: each person adds to the answer in front of them, and nobody crosses out a good point. Then we marked them together. With four people at every table, every answer had four minds on it, and every gap showed up in a different colour.

The lesson finished with me showing this slide and asking the group's thoughts on what the structure of the 2027 and 2028 assessment might be.

After some Derren Brown-style manipulation on my part, the group suggested a first class lever and a cricket throw from the boundary. Miraculously, I had the homework below under my desk waiting for the big reveal.

Why was the lesson effective?

Looking back, the lesson was effective for one reason above all: it targeted the three skills that the AQA levers questions actually require. Drawing. Classifying. Understanding mechanical advantage. Nothing else got in the way.

Let’s be candid, though. It was not always like this.

For many years, I taught levers classification first. I stood at the front and taught “For 1, 2, 3, think F, L, E”. Nothing wrong with that line. It’s a useful hook. But it came first, and it was the target, and it shouldn’t have been either. Classifying matters, of course. It just doesn’t matter as much as the thing I was rushing past: embodying the idea and drawing it, over a real movement, onto a real body.

So what changed?

The analysis. Across the nine AQA GCSE PE Paper 1 sittings from 2018 to 2026, levers questions were worth 30 marks. When we split those marks by skill, the picture was stark:

Classifying overlaps drawing, so the minutes add to more than 100%. Mark shares are rounded.

Drawing is more than half the marks. For years, it wasn’t where my levers lessons started.

After Monday, I sharpened the slides. The lesson now follows one routine for every lever: see a real movement, draw it on the body, straighten it into a linear lever, then name it. Nothing is named until students have drawn it, so the rule (what sits between the other two decides the class) comes out of their own drawings rather than off my slide. Students finish with at least eleven drawings and a ten-mark exit ticket.

What does this mean for your department?

I want to make a very clear statement: this isn’t about levers.

Levers is simply where I could see it most clearly. If we analyse accurately, we can find the exact skills and knowledge that earn the marks, the ones many students across the country drop, and give them the minutes they deserve. When our students win those marks, they don’t just add to their total. They pull away from the cohort they are measured against. That’s the 6-point Effect.

Now, I am not claiming that you’ve been teaching levers wrong. I taught it classification-first for years, and my students did fine. Fine. But “fine” leaves marks on the table, and that is exactly the gap this kind of analysis closes.

So, what am I asking you to do? Total the minutes your students spend producing each skill in your next levers lesson, and set them beside the marks. Where the two columns part company, decide whether that’s a choice or an accident.

And if you teach AQA GCSE PE, please join us on the 24th.

That’s what Monday looked like: a room of PE teachers, pencils and rulers out, drawing levers over real movements. That is application-first teaching, and it is where the marks are won.

Thank you for reading. I’d be grateful to hear how your levers minutes compare with the marks.

Have a lovely week.

James