Dr Suzanne Kobeisse
September has a particular feeling. In Lebanon we called it la rentrée, the return, and it carried real weight. Schools reopened, the streets filled again, and you understood without being told that the easy days were behind you. Now, teaching in the UK, I see the same mixture of energy and apprehension in the families I work with. For Year 10 and Year 11 students, this September matters. GCSE French is either just beginning or entering its final stretch, and how you spend the next few months will make a significant difference.
I want to give you a realistic picture of what that should look like, term by term. Not a revision timetable crammed with bullet points, but a thoughtful plan that takes your teen from wherever they are right now to confident, capable, and prepared.
Autumn term: build the foundations
The autumn term is the most valuable one, and the most wasted. Most students arrive back and coast on whatever residual French they carried out of Year 9. That is understandable. But this term is where the real distance gets made up, or where the gap quietly widens.
For Year 10, the priority is vocabulary acquisition and core grammar. I know that sounds dry, but it does not have to be. The GCSE topic areas: la famille (family), les loisirs (leisure), le travail (work), l'environnement (the environment), are completely learnable if you approach them with a system rather than hoping for osmosis. I work with students on grouping vocabulary by theme and revisiting it regularly. The research on spaced repetition is solid: you need to encounter a word multiple times across multiple days before it sticks.
Grammar in the autumn should focus on the essential tenses. The present tense, obviously. But also the perfect tense (le passé composé), because it appears in every single paper. And the near future (le futur proche), which is both useful and genuinely easy to learn. If your teen can use all three with reasonable accuracy, they are already ahead of a large proportion of the cohort.
For Year 11, the autumn term is not about discovering new content. It is about consolidating what was taught in Year 10 and identifying the gaps. I always start a Year 11 student with a diagnostic conversation. We talk for ten minutes in French, unprepared, and I listen carefully. Within that conversation I can tell where the grammar breaks down, which tenses are being avoided, and where vocabulary is thin. That gives us a clear picture of what the autumn needs to address.
Spring term: speaking and writing take centre stage
By January, the written components of the GCSE are coming into focus. For AQA and Edexcel students, writing involves structured tasks at foundation and higher tier, and they reward specific things: variety of tense, opinion phrases, connectives, and accuracy in gender and agreement.
I spend a lot of spring term time on writing structures. Not templates to memorise word for word (examiners are not fooled, and nor are students well served by them), but genuine frameworks. How to open a response. How to include a justification (justification) without it sounding mechanical. How to build a sentence from the bottom up rather than translating from English in your head, which is how most mistakes happen.
Speaking prep starts properly in spring. The speaking component is examined separately from the written papers, often earlier in the year for some schools, and it deserves its own dedicated preparation. There are two tasks: a role play and a photo card discussion, followed by a conversation on prepared topics. The photo card in particular catches students out because it requires spontaneous language in response to unseen questions. The only way to get comfortable with that is to practise it, repeatedly, with a real person asking real questions.
I also introduce listening strategies in the spring. It is the component students feel least in control of, because they cannot prepare the content the way they can for writing. But there are techniques: listening for gist first rather than trying to catch every word, understanding how French speakers elide and abbreviate in natural speech, and managing the anxiety that comes with fast audio. These skills improve with practice. They do not arrive by magic in the exam hall.
Summer term: revision with purpose
The summer term revision period should not start from scratch. If the autumn and spring have gone well, your teen already has a vocabulary base, functional grammar, and some speaking confidence. Summer is about exam technique, targeted consolidation, and managing the pressure.
Past papers are essential, but only if used properly. Doing a past paper and checking the answers is not revision. Going through each wrong answer, understanding why it was wrong, and correcting the thinking behind it: that is revision. I sit with students and work through papers question by question, not just marking but unpicking the reasoning.
In the final two weeks before exams, I tend to move away from new content altogether. We work on confidence. Short daily sessions in French. Reviewing the speaking topics one more time. Running through the role play scenarios until they feel familiar rather than frightening. The students who do best are rarely the ones who worked hardest in the last fortnight. They are the ones who built a solid base in September and had enough left in the tank to stay calm.
A note for parents
You do not need to speak French to support your teen. What helps most is consistency: a quiet space to study, encouragement when it is hard, and the willingness to listen if they want to read something aloud to you. Some parents I work with go as far as asking their child to teach them a French phrase each week. It is a small thing, but it creates a reason to practise that goes beyond homework.
If you are thinking about private tuition, September is the right time to start. Not January, not after the mocks. The students who make the most progress are the ones who begin early and build steadily. One session a week across a full academic year adds up to an enormous amount of progress.
Bonne rentrée to your teen, and to you. It is going to be a good year.