More sweetness with honey

Responding to the provocation of whether Saturday revision should be mandated

The provocation this week, courtesy of X, is whether Saturday revision should be mandated. The trigger was a letter from Michaela Community School to Year 11 families, dated 30th April 2026, setting out the run-in to GCSEs.

The detail matters, so here it is. From Tuesday 5th May, every Year 11 pupil sits an additional Period 7 every single day, finishing at 4:15pm Monday to Thursday and 3:15pm on Friday. Pupils in Compulsory Homework Club finish at 5:30pm. On top of this, teachers have arranged extra revision sessions across weekends and holidays, beginning with Saturday 9th May and Saturday 16th May. Attendance is compulsory. Pupils must be in full school uniform. If they are absent, they spend time in Referral when they return.

Referral, at Michaela, is the sanction space. Pupils there start at 8.20am and finish at 5.30pm. So the consequence for missing a Saturday revision session is, in effect, a day in seclusion. Here is what my mum says; You get more sweetness with honey.

I am drawn to that saying because it captures something my whole professional life has been about. Relational practice does not mean low expectations. It does not mean doing less. It means understanding that the way you ask matters as much as what you ask for.

Let me be clear. I have no issue with revision sessions on a Saturday. None. If a school wants to lay on additional teaching time before high stakes exams, that is a generous use of staff capacity and a meaningful offer to families who cannot easily provide tutoring at home. There is a strong equity argument for it. Done well, it is a gift.

Notice the language Michaela themselves use. Teachers have kindly arranged. That is the language of an offer, of generosity, of something done for the children. And then in the next breath, must attend, full uniform, referral if absent. The two tones don’t sit comfortably together. A gift cannot be coerced into being received. The moment you mandate it and add a sanction, it stops being a gift and metamorphoses into something else.

There is also the question of who Saturday belongs to. Saturday is the Sabbath for observant Jewish families. Wembley, where Michaela sits, is one of the most religiously diverse places in the country. A mandated Saturday session, with no flexibility visible in the letter, asks some children to choose between their faith and the threat of seclusion. That is a serious ask, and it ought to be addressed in the architecture of the policy itself, not left to families to navigate in private.

However, the noise online is not the Saturday, but the fact it is mandated, it is the threat of referral. What does that approach actually teach? It teaches that learning is something done to you, not something that that you choose, and even, perhaps, enjoy. It teaches that your relationship with your school is contractual, enforceable through sanction. It teaches that the adults around you do not quite trust you to want your own future enough to turn up for it.