Why Reading for 10 Minutes a Day Could Transform Your Child’s GCSE English Result

25% of 15 year olds have a reading age of 12.

I’m just going to let that sit there for a moment.

If you feel like your child isn’t reading enough, you’re not alone, it’s one of the most talked-about topics and concerns I discuss with parents each year as a GCSE English tutor.

With only 1 in 5 young people reading something daily in their free time, it’s no wonder it’s such a prevalent worry across the country.

As a teacher, I see the impacts of this daily. All students who come to me for GCSE English tuition and are already casually reading get higher results. Which might not sound surprising, but let me explain why.

All exam boards want to test the reading and inference skills of all students. That means that every single student is given at least one extract of around 30 to 50 lines and are expected to be able to infer ideas and perspectives and find language and structure techniques. This is the area I see students struggle with the most, if they aren’t already reading. I always say to students - if you read just one chapter, or say 10 minutes of a book, in the day, that is about 100 to 200 lines of text. That’s the equivalent of ALL the reading they would have to do on exam day. The benefits of that for a student in GCSE English are immeasurable. They are training themselves, through exposure, to understand ways in which writers communicate story and description - the key parts of analysis the examiner wants to see.

“But my child simply doesn’t find anything they want to read about!”

Again, this is a pretty common one for me and here’s how I get around this with my GCSE English students. I do this by asking a few simple questions (and I make sure they answer them - none of this ‘I don’t know!’):

1. What are your interests or hobbies?

2. What kind of films, TV shows or games do you like watching?

From this I can generally gather what genre they might be most interested in and from there you start the search! I’ll let you in on a secret here… I use AI for my own book suggestions. I will explain what I like and what I’ve read most recently and get about 5 recommendations. Then I read up separately on each suggestion and read human reviews on them to check which I might like the most. The reason this really works for me is because across a year my tastes might change and so I start a new discussion each time I begin the hunt for another book with my updated interests.

Ok, so you’ve done the exercise, you’ve got the book on order - but they’re never going to read it, right?

Just like any habit, it takes a while to get bedded in. 66 days is the reported science on building a habit so it’s a couple of months of commitment, but I do find that with the right book aimed at the right age range, we can achieve that. I would definitely recommend trying this out. When I say to students - “I’m only looking for a 10 minute a day commitment” they are normally on board with just a couple of months of this to start with. But once they can appreciate how it could help them, they are almost always willing to give it a go.

If you add up 10 minutes a day through Year 11 that’s 50 hours of reading. That comes to about 60,000 lines of text read. The equivalent of 1,200 GCSE English exam extracts.

That’s probably why you can see that those who read - even a little - get better GCSE English results. They’ve got such a head start over the others, struggling their way through the reading section of the papers.

If this has resonated and you’d like to find out more about my GCSE English tuition, or are looking for a GCSE English tutor, you can get in touch with me directly here.

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