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A full Paper 2 with Section A directed writing and Section B composition. Stimulus text is original. Model answers included for both sections.
Read the short opinion piece below, then answer the task underneath it.
Walk into any secondary school corridor at lunchtime and you'll see the same scene: teenagers bent over bright rectangles, fingers flickering, eyes elsewhere. Some schools have begun asking whether this level of attachment is healthy - and whether the classroom, at least, should be a phone-free zone.
Supporters of phone bans point to better concentration, fewer distractions and, importantly, more face-to-face conversation. Teachers report that students engage more actively when phones are locked away during lessons. Parents, too, have welcomed the change: one mother told a local paper that her daughter was “finally reading again” after her school introduced a ban.
Yet not everyone is convinced. Students argue that phones are a vital safety tool, a lifeline in emergencies and a source of quick information. Banning them, they say, treats teenagers like children and ignores the way modern life actually works. Some parents agree, preferring to be contactable during the school day.
The question isn't really whether phones are useful - they clearly are. It's whether schools should be the place where young people finally look up from the screen.
Imagine your school is considering introducing a phone ban. Write a speech to be delivered to the student council, in which you present your view on the proposed ban and persuade them to agree with you.
You should:
Write between 250 and 350 words. Up to 15 marks are available for reading and up to 25 for writing.
Fellow students, I know what you're thinking. A phone ban? Really? But before you reach for your pockets in protest, hear me out - because I believe that locking our phones away for five hours a day is one of the few things this school could do that would actually change our lives.
Consider the numbers. A recent article reminded us that teenagers spend entire lunch breaks “bent over bright rectangles”, and that teachers notice a sharp rise in engagement when phones are locked away. I don't find that surprising. When my phone buzzes on my desk, even silently, my concentration fractures. The classroom becomes a waiting room for the next notification. Surely we deserve better than that.
I know the counter-arguments. What about safety? What about emergencies? These concerns are fair, but they don't need to defeat the proposal. A locked phone in a pouch at the front of the class is still a phone that the teacher can reach in a crisis. The choice isn't between connection and isolation - it's between ambient distraction and focused attention.
We talk a lot in this council about “wellbeing”. Here's a chance to act on it. Let's give ourselves five hours a day to think, to talk, to read - without the glow of a screen competing for our eyes. Not forever. Just during lessons. Just long enough to remember what full attention feels like.
I ask the council to vote in favour of the phone policy. Your pocket will survive. Your focus will thank you.
Narrative option 1
Write a story that begins with the sentence: The message on the screen was meant for somebody else.
Narrative option 2
Write a story called The Empty Classroom.
Descriptive option 1
Describe a busy market at the end of the day, as the stallholders pack up and the last customers leave.
Descriptive option 2
Describe a place that holds an important memory for you. Focus on the details that make the place feel significant.
Write between 350 and 450 words. Up to 24 marks are available for content and structure, and up to 16 for style and accuracy.
The light is going. It slips over the canvas roofs of the stalls like water sliding off a leaf, pooling in the narrow alleys where the flower sellers pack their last bunches. The scent of damp paper and crushed mint hangs in the air, softer now that the crowds have thinned, as if the market itself is exhaling.
At the fish stall, a woman in a rubber apron tips a last bowl of ice into a drain. The steam rises, curls, and vanishes. Behind her, rows of empty trays gleam where the silver bodies lay an hour ago. She moves with the patient economy of someone who has done this a thousand times: rinse, wipe, fold, turn. Nothing is wasted, not even the quiet.
Further down, a boy sweeps a carpet of leaves and broken crates into a single dark pile. His broom scrapes a steady rhythm against the cobbles - ssh, ssh, ssh - like the market's own heartbeat winding down. The fruit trader beside him is already halfway into a van, his forearms dusted with sugar from the last of the dates.
In one stall, a lone string of paper lanterns still glows. An old man sits beneath them on an upturned crate, drinking tea from a tin cup. He watches the emptying square with the calm of someone who has seen this scene played out every evening of his working life. When I pass, he nods - not at me, exactly, but at the whole soft closing of the day.
By the time the last bulbs are switched off, the square is only outlines. A cat slips across the cobbles and disappears beneath a stall. Somewhere, a shutter falls. And the market, which all day has been a roar and a bustle and a hundred small bargains, becomes what it must have been before any of it began: a silent space, waiting for the morning.