Sarah Pemberton

GCSE English Teacher, Leeds (former AQA Examiner)

Sarah Pemberton has taught GCSE English Language and Literature in Leeds secondary schools for eleven years, and spent four of those as an active AQA 8700 examiner — reading thousands of scripts across Paper 1 (creative reading and writing) and Paper 2 (writers' viewpoints and perspectives). Her PGCE is from the University of Leeds, where her specialism was reading comprehension pedagogy in Key Stage 4. Sarah's teaching approach is structured around the insight that most Year 11 students lose marks not through ignorance of content but through poor question-reading habits and insufficient command of the vocabulary the mark scheme rewards. For Paper 1 Question 5 (creative writing), she teaches a structured pre-writing process — establishing narrative voice, crafting a concrete opening image and planning the structural device before writing a word — that consistently improves the Quality of Language and Structural and Grammatical marks even for reluctant writers. For Paper 2, her signature technique is 'viewpoint stacking': training students to identify a writer's stated, implied and contradicted positions in sequence before comparing. Her specialty topics include the grade 6-7 boundary strategies for AQA 8700, the specific differences between the Language Paper 1 and Language Paper 2 assessment criteria, and how to approach the Literature component (8702) alongside Language revision in Year 11 without sacrificing depth in either. She writes about exam technique for GCSE English, mark scheme language demystified, and how parents can support Year 11 students through exam season without adding to the pressure. Outside school, she runs a free YouTube channel where she breaks down AQA past-paper questions section by section, currently with over 15,000 subscribers — primarily Year 11 students accessing revision support beyond their school's timetabled provision.