Grammar schools / NWSSEE English (continuous writing) / Mock 3
Nonsuch and Wallington Second Stage Entrance Examination · Second Stage
NWSSEE English Mock Paper 3
Preparation for the Nonsuch and Wallington Second Stage Entrance Examination, sat for admission to Nonsuch High School for Girls and Wallington High School for Girls. This is an original mock paper written by Revision Library. It is not a past paper and it is not an official specimen.
Print the paper (PDF)Paper and mark scheme (PDF)
- Time allowed
- 45 minutes
- Total marks
- 25
- Questions
- 1
- Level
- Selective standard
- You have 45 minutes for this paper. There is one task and it is worth 25 marks.
- Spend about five minutes planning and checking your work, and about forty minutes writing.
- Write your answer on the lined pages of this booklet. There is no rough paper, so make your plan in the space beneath the task.
- Read the whole task, including the planning box, before you start. Marks are given for covering everything you are asked to cover.
- Marks are given for how well your writing matches the form, the audience and the purpose you are given, and for your spelling, punctuation and grammar.
Continuous Writing
Answer this one task. Write in sentences and paragraphs.
- 125 marks
"The panel will hear three young speakers. Each has three minutes. The vote is taken at the end of the evening and the money is spent before April."
Your town council has 20,000 pounds left this year and cannot carry it into next year. It will spend all of it on exactly one of three things: repairing the skate park, keeping the swimming pool open on Sunday afternoons, or planting trees along the ring road. You have been chosen to speak for the one you believe in.
Write the speech you will give to the panel to persuade its members to choose your option and to advise them how to make it work.
Planning: your speech must begin with this sentence, exactly as it is written here.
"I am not going to pretend the other two ideas are bad ones."
An answer that has been prepared before the examination, and that does not deal with the form or the task set out above, will be awarded nothing.
Spend about 40 minutes on this task.
Answers, mark scheme and worked explanations
- 125 marks
Gate: form and task (pass or fail)
- The answer is a speech. It addresses the panel directly, is written to be heard rather than read, and closes in a way a speaker could actually stop on. An essay about council spending fails here.
- It begins with the given sentence, word for word, at the very start.
- One of the three options is chosen and argued for. A speech that sits on the fence, or that argues for a fourth idea of the writer's own, fails the task.
- It both persuades and advises: the panel is told what to choose and then told something practical about how to do it.
- A pre-learnt persuasive piece bolted onto this scenario, which does not address the form or the task set, scores no marks overall.
Content and audience (10 marks)
- 9-10: The opening concession is genuinely meant and is then turned into an argument, rather than being said once and forgotten. Reasons are developed with specific consequences for named kinds of people in the town. The advice is concrete enough that a councillor could act on it. The register respects an adult audience without becoming stiff.
- 6-8: A clear case with two or three developed reasons and some practical advice. The concession is handled adequately. Some points are asserted rather than supported.
- 3-5: One reason repeated in different words, or advice that amounts to saying the council should just do it. The panel is barely acknowledged after the opening.
- 0-2: No sustained case, or an answer that never settles on one of the three options.
Structure and style (8 marks)
- 7-8: Shaped for the ear: direct address, a clear line of argument, and rhetorical devices such as a rule of three, a rhetorical question or a repeated phrase used sparingly and on purpose. The ending lands.
- 5-6: Well ordered with clear paragraphs and some spoken quality. Devices are present but occasionally piled up.
- 3-4: Reads as written prose rather than as speech. Ideas are ordered but the listener is never really addressed.
- 0-2: Disordered, or so heavily loaded with rhetorical questions that the argument disappears.
Technical accuracy (7 marks)
- 6-7: Accurate sentence demarcation, including in short emphatic sentences. Commas, dashes and question marks are used correctly. Spelling is secure. Any numbers or facts from the task are quoted correctly.
- 4-5: Mostly accurate, with occasional errors in punctuation or in harder spellings.
- 2-3: Repeated sentence errors, particularly comma splices between two statements that each deserve a full stop.
- 0-1: Frequent errors that interfere with the argument.
This is a persuasive task with a hard edge to it, because the opening sentence you are given makes you fair before you are allowed to be forceful. That is deliberate. The best speakers concede something real and then explain why their option still wins, and that is exactly what the examiner is watching for here.
So do not treat the first line as something to get past. Name the other two ideas, say what is genuinely good about one of them, and then give the reason your choice matters more: it reaches more people, or it fixes something that will cost far more to fix later, or it is the only one that cannot be done for free by volunteers. That single turn is worth more than a page of enthusiasm.
Remember that you are also asked to advise. Persuading is telling the panel what to choose. Advising is telling them how to make it work: when to do it, who to involve, what to check first, what to do about the objection they will raise the moment you sit down. A speech with no advice in it cannot reach the top band, however stirring it is.
Three things cost marks most often. Rhetorical questions used one after another until the speech is nothing but questions. Made-up statistics, which an adult audience will not believe and which you do not need. And forgetting that you are speaking: no address to the panel, no signal that you are coming to an end, just a page of writing that stops.
Plan for five minutes. Choose your option in the first thirty seconds and do not change your mind, then note the concession, two developed reasons and one piece of practical advice. Write for about thirty-three minutes, aiming for five or six paragraphs. Leave five minutes at the end to read it back as if aloud, which is the quickest way to hear a missing full stop.
Nonsuch and Wallington Second Stage Entrance Examination, Second Stage, English (continuous writing). Written by Revision Library on 2026-08-28, independent check pending.
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