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How to write AQA A-level history questions?

Happy new year tsr, how do I write these questions? Our teachers are useless.

How do I write the 25 marker especially, I can't get my head around it. Any advice is appreciated (and needed desperately).

Reply 1

IvyEl8

Original post

by doodaagrimes

Happy new year tsr, how do I write these questions? Our teachers are useless.
How do I write the 25 marker especially, I can't get my head around it. Any advice is appreciated (and needed desperately).

Hi! I posted this on another thread a couple of months ago and thought it might be helpful (for context I sat my A-levels in 2024):

I would say there are 2 main kind of essay questions that tend to come up in AQA A-level history

For those that read (for example) "The Treaty of Versailles was more damaging politically than economically, to what extent do you agree", these questions provide you with 2 factors and kind of guide you towards comparing the impact, if that makes sense?
So for me, I would do maybe 4 main body paragraphs:

•

Intro

•

Politically damaging (as the first paragraph should always agree with the question - the other three won't necessarily go in the order below)

•

Economically damaging

•

Politically less damaging/positive impact

•

Economically less damaging/positive impact

•

Conclusion

or alternatively

•

Agree with the question (political more damaging)

•

Disagree (economic more damaging)

•

Agree (political)

•

Disagree (economic)

(this specific structure can work really well for questions such as this 'By 1964, British society was as unequal as it had been in the 1930s. Assess the validity of this view’ which can seem complicated to untangle and structure, by giving you a basic outline of how to answer it)

Either can work fine honestly but I preferred the first structure because I found that it gave me more scope to create nuanced arguments to get into higher bands of the mark scheme.

Other questions may be something like "the main reason for the creation of a welfare state by 1951 was due to the social legacy of the 1930s". Questions like this will give you one factor to speak about but leave it very open to you how to approach it. I know some people would structure these essays in a similar way as the ones comparing factors i.e. Agree, disagree, agree, disagree but I structured them in a style more similar to the 16 markers in GCSE AQA history (i.e. factors). For these type of questions I would usually write 3 larger main body paragraphs rather than 4, which I preferred because it allowed me to go into greater depth exploring the arguments for and against the importance of each factor, but you can definitely write 4 if you can, I just struggled to fit it into 45 minutes haha!!

So for example for the above question I would structure my argument like this:

•

Intro

•

Para 1: Social legacy of 1930s

•

Para 2: Other factor (WW2)

•

Para 3: Other factor (Labour Party principles)

•

Conclusion

These were my fav type of question because they allow you to go into a lot of depth, and this structure can make it easier to link factors together in your argument to create unique points.

And this may sound quite obvious but be sure to outline your main line of argument throughout, from the intro, through your paragraphs and into your conclusion. I only say this because my a-level geography teachers kept telling me off for doing this as in geog we were supposed to save our main argument to the end - this is not the case in history where your response needs to have a clear line of argument throughout.

Sorry if the example questions were very unrelated to your topics but I just used questions I remembered writing before haha

Hope this helps somewhat (and sorry if some of it doesn't make sense) and please ask if you have any other questions!!! :smile: