At UExL Academy, year 9 students can learn to answer questions on articles, stories, speeches and paired texts. Lessons can cover finding stated details, drawing inferences and working out what a word or technique does to the reader. Students can also study text structure, tone shifts, author’s purpose, and persuasive writing.

Year 9 students can build speed and accuracy in algebra, percentages, ratios, rates, financial maths, Pythagoras, trigonometry and similar figures. They can practise reading graphs, comparing data sets with box plots, and working out probability from tree diagrams and Venn diagrams. Lessons can also cover multi-step problems, and estimation and spotting the error in a worked method.

Punctuation covers commas, apostrophes, colons, semicolons and speech marks. Grammar covers sentence types, fragments and run-ons, subject-verb agreement, tense, pronouns, adjectives and adverbs. Year 9 students can also work on spelling, word meaning in context, connectives, sentence editing and putting sentences in a logical order.

Students prepare for either a narrative or a persuasive task and learn what each marking criterion rewards. Narrative lessons can cover point of view, structure, character, setting, language devices, and strong openings and endings. Persuasive lessons can cover paragraph structure, evidence, rebuttals, persuasive language and formal tone. Students also work on punctuation, spelling, sentence variety and timed planning.