If you could change one period in your school timetable, which one would you choose? Why do you think it needs to be changed and with which subject or activity would you replace it?

MODEL ANSWER (approximately 330 words)

If I could change one period in our timetable, I would take the last period on Saturday — forty minutes of what is called Moral Science — and replace it with a period of Personal Finance.

I should say first that I have nothing against moral science as an idea. But in practice the period consists of a textbook of parables read aloud, chapter by chapter, to a class that is already looking at the clock because it is the last period of the week. Nobody is examined on it. Nobody discusses it. Whatever moral instruction is actually happening in our school is happening in the way our teachers treat us, not in that book — and a lesson that everyone has silently agreed not to take seriously teaches its own lesson.

What I would put in its place is the thing none of us is taught and all of us will need within five years. How a bank account works. What interest actually is, and how it compounds for you in a deposit and against you on a credit card. How to read a payslip. What income tax is and who pays it. How a loan is repaid and what happens when it is not.

I know the objection: that school is for education and not for training, and that a boy of fifteen has no money to manage. But I have watched capable adults in my own family make bad decisions with money purely because nobody ever explained the arithmetic to them, and I do not think an education that leaves out something that consequential is complete.

The period would need no new staff — our mathematics teacher already teaches compound interest, and the difference is only that she would apply it to a real bank statement instead of to Question 14.

One period a week. Forty minutes. I think it would be the most useful forty minutes in the timetable.

WHAT THIS QUESTION SPECIFICALLY REQUIRES

Three tasks are named, and ALL THREE must be visible or content marks go:

1. WHICH period you would change
2. WHY it needs changing
3. WHAT you would replace it with

Budget roughly a quarter, a third and a third, with a short opening and closing. The third task is the one candidates shortchange — they spend 300 words complaining and two lines on the replacement.

This is a reflective-argumentative hybrid, so the register is personal but reasoned. First person is correct here, unlike a pure argumentative essay.

BE SPECIFIC. "I would replace it with something more useful" earns little; naming the actual content — how interest compounds, how to read a payslip — is what carries the content mark.

Answering the objection ("I know the objection...") lifts a reflective piece into an argued one, and examiners reward it. FORMAT AND MARKS DIVISION: see "Composition — grade bands and marking" in the Writing Formats & Marking (Reference) chapter, along with the worked model for this composition type.

USE THIS AS A MODEL, NOT AS AN ANSWER TO MEMORISE. The question asks for an ORIGINAL composition, and every year examiners identify scripts reproduced from guide books; a memorised answer can be penalised for plagiarism and will in any case read as borrowed. Study this piece for its STRUCTURE — how it opens, how the paragraphs are ordered, where the required tasks are answered, how it ends — and then write your own, about your own school, your own family, your own town. Your own specific detail is worth more marks than anyone else’s polished sentence.