Assessing our Year 11 geographers

Assessing our Year 11 geographers: What do we need to consider and why?
Written October 2026
With the dust having settled on the GCSE results from Summer 2026, the attention of geography teams will turn towards the first mock exams of this year’s Year 11 cohort. In many schools, Year 11 students sit a series of mock exams around November time (often the first of two sets of mock exams) and the data gained informs intervention strategies for the remainder of the school year. However, the quality of the decisions we make afterwards depends on the quality of the assessment data we collect in the first place. For this reason, we need to ensure the data we gain from this assessment point is as valid and reliable as possible and, to achieve this, we need to give careful thought to our approach. Unfortunately, in my experience, this careful thought and consideration can, in some contexts, be lacking- perhaps owing to a lack of experience or as a result of (understandably) always working at pace with plenty of other tasks to get done…

So, what do we need to consider ahead of Year 11 mocks in order to ensure we can yield purposeful, and thus more insightful, data? This blog poses three big questions for you and your teams to consider.

Which paper will be sat?
This will likely be determined by how many full mocks your Year 11 cohort sit. If they have 2 assessment points in Year 11, you need to consider when you will use the most recent 2026 paper and the pros and cons of different approaches.

Option A: you use the 2026 paper in their first set of mocks and an older paper (likely 2025) in the second set of mocks.
Advantages: you’re using the most recent paper earlier on which means you have longer to respond to the knowledge and skills gaps that appear.
Disadvantages: students will have lots of the course still to complete which means much of the most recent 2026 paper won’t be used in these assessments. Additionally,
the second set of mocks can, for many, be a higher-stakes assessment and, in this approach, it will use an older paper which is no longer locked online- meaning students might have accessed both the paper and the answers.

Option B: you use an older paper (likely 2025) in the first set of mocks and the most recent paper (2026) in the second set of mocks.
Advantages: students will nearly have completed the course by the second set of mocks meaning most of the questions from the 2026 paper can be tested in true exam conditions.
Disadvantages: depending on how far into Year 11 the second assessment point is, there will be limited time left to respond to the knowledge and skills gaps evident from the most recent paper.

As is clear, there are pros and cons of either option but personally I go for Option B to ensure we use as many of the questions from the most recent (and thus locked online) papers as we can in the final assessment of Year 11.

When are you testing fieldwork?
We know that both the familiar and unfamiliar fieldwork questions of GCSE geography remain challenging for many students and this is reflected in their performance on these questions. A key decision for teachers to make is when, and how frequently, to test students on these fieldwork questions. Should fieldwork questions be included in every assessment point?

Option A: you include fieldwork questions in every assessment point of Year 11
Advantages: students are exposed to more fieldwork questions and realise the significance of these questions for their GCSE geography grade. They take the fieldwork element of the course seriously and realise that there is core knowledge to be learnt for these questions, just as in other topics.
Disadvantages: in many schools, the embedding and securing of fieldwork knowledge happens at the end of the course and quite near to the final exams. If it is tested in mocks but not given sufficient teaching or revision time in class ahead of these assessments, it can affect the reliability of the data. Students will, likely, perform badly and this can affect motivation too.

Option B: you only include fieldwork questions in the final assessment point of Year 11
Advantages: students will have been taught the knowledge they need to answer these fieldwork questions and feel confident on how to approach them. They will likely perform better and feel more confident ahead of the final exams.
Disadvantages: students are not exposed to many fieldwork questions across their two year course and may not consider it a significant area to revise for.

Again, pros and cons of both approaches! In my decade leading geography departments, I’ve switched back and further between approaches and am still not sure I know which answer is best! Currently, we do Option B as we don’t give enough curriculum time to fieldwork until the end of Year 11, thus making it feel unfair on students to test it beforehand. To account for this, we ensure that when we do explicitly teach the fieldwork, we embed as many past exam questions into the lessons and revision sessions as possible.

What data are you recording?
Having decided which questions you’ll use and why, the final thing for geographers to consider is what data we’re recording from Year 11 mocks and why. Here, we have to balance teacher workload against the insights we want to glean about student performance and attainment.

Clearly, just recording the overall attainment of students in a paper (e.g. what they achieved out of 90 marks) is unlikely to tell us much. Given the diversity of questions in a geography paper, we need to dive into the data in more detail to be able to analyse patterns and think about how to move our students forward- to maximise their outcomes.

Option A: you record how students performed in each section of the paper (e.g. in the tectonics questions compared to the urban challenges questions).
Advantages: you have a clear insight into which topic(s) students struggle with and can use this information to inform revision and intervention sessions. You can sub-divide the cohort into intervention groups using this data to ensure you are closing the right gaps, for the right students.
Disadvantages: if you used the 2026 paper, the exact areas of the topic tested are unlikely to be directly repeated in the 2027 paper. This needs to be accounted for when you’re considering what this section-level information tells you as it might be specific knowledge within a topic that students struggled with, rather than the whole topic.

Option B: you record granular detail about question-level performance and use a question-level analysis (QLA) approach.
Advantages: QLA enables you to see exactly how your students performed on each question and analyse the patterns. Were 4 mark ‘explain’ questions answered better than 2 mark ‘describe’ questions? Did students answer ‘to what extent’ extended answer questions better than questions using ‘assess’ as a command word? This information can be used to inform revision and intervention sessions and also used to improve the lessons used to first teach this content.
Disadvantages: depending on how this data is recorded, it can amount to hours of additional work for the teacher on top of the workload of marking papers. If asking teachers to enter QLA data, you need to be very clear on how this data is being used and the impact it is having.

Personally, I prefer to use Option A- mainly owing to the workload implications of Option B. I think that, in geography, knowing how students performed in each topic is useful for informing intervention and revision plans as it can highlight which topics to focus on.

So, there we have it, three big questions to consider ahead of any upcoming Year 11 mocks. As always, all feedback and alternative thoughts welcome!
Good luck to all of this year’s Year 11 geographers!