The Metacognition Lab: Explorations in student thinking for English resits

New City College, London is an Ofsted Outstanding college of further education with campuses across East London and Essex where three and half thousand learners study English resits.

Teachers of GCSE resits recognise the double disadvantage that many young people shoulder. Socio-economically disadvantaged learners are significantly less likely than their peers to achieve ‘good’ passes in GCSE English and maths at 16. The gap for learners with special educational needs is even wider.

A young person’s experience of this ‘failure’ delivers an additional disadvantage when confidence and efficacy suffer.

The post-16 resit classroom is a crucible of complex vulnerabilities and layered disadvantage. It is also the site of enormous potential opportunity with resilient and creative thinkers, and resit teachers share a mission to get practice right.

For English teachers at New City College, the challenge was clear:

• Remove barriers to deep, lasting learning.
• Make progress more tangible.
• Help resitters feel that what they do makes a difference.

While effective professional development can connect practitioners with quality evidence-based research, translating those approaches into context is the ongoing work of practitioners, particularly in the post-16 sector, with so little robust, contextually relevant research available.

The EEF Toolkit led us to high impact, evidence-backed approaches. The potential in metacognition and self-regulated learning was clear – the robust evidence base shows it works across age groups and across the curriculum, with a high effect for reading outcomes.

Our own expertise in the resit setting supported the view that metacognition was a good bet. Could we build staff expertise to support learners to make connections, build resilience and transfer skills and knowledge with confidence?

In 2021, within our directorate, we began aligning our understanding of metacognition. We are guided by the following shared principles:

• We prompt resitters to activate their significant prior knowledge
• We model our thinking to demonstrate metacognitive strategies
• We use approaches that support resitters to become critical experts in their progress
• We use feedback as a driver of reflection and action.

New City College English is made up of over 50 English practitioners, a powerful internal network. Through the various threads of our professional development strategy such as supported experiments, peer collaboration, and peer-led professional development, the team has developed, adapted and honed strategies with transformational impact on our most vulnerable resitters. Here are three examples from practitioners in practice:

Scott (NCC Ardleigh Green) describes the heavy “baggage of disappointment” that many students arrive with. Like all NCC English teachers, Scott spends the first seven weeks building routine and relationships, with no obvious assessments or exam tasks. He explores a variety of contexts, teaching students to connect new learning with existing knowledge and experience. Reviewing and reflecting from the outset is key. Scott graduates his feedback to ensure learners can focus on manageable improvements over time. “Once they learn that the help actually helps,” threat is reduced and learning is possible.

Teachers explicitly teach students how to trial and review new strategies. Della (NCC Hackney) describes the need to “open their mind to doing something differently.” Students are encouraged to break from common writing scaffolds from school, such as PEASY paragraphs. Instead, teachers model comprehension strategies and personal interaction with texts.

Daniel (NCC Epping) shared with the team his “student conferencing” approach to feedback. Scott now employs this in most lessons. Inviting students to sit with him to review their work, he poses challenges that develop critical self-assessment skills, including reading their work aloud to him, explaining their best idea, or finding their “best sentence” and justifying their choice.

Education Endowment Foundation (2025). Metacognition and Self-regulationHow children monitor their emotions and thoughts, and adapt their behaviour in different circumstances.: Guidance Report, pp. 32-25. Available at: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/education-evidence/guidance-reports/metacognition.

Education Endowment Foundation. (2025). Effective Professional Development in 16-19 Settings. EEF. Available at: https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/16-19/continuing-professional-development.