Years 11–12 · Applications
Applications is the senior stage of WritePath. Each week is built around one substantial article — on how we think, decide and live well. Students read it closely, write an extended essay in response, and learn to weigh a claim rather than simply take it on.
Not the same program, further along
By Year 11 the machinery of strong writing is in place. So the senior program changes shape. It runs three tracks, not five — Reading, Writing and Vocabulary — fused tightly around a single article each week. Grammar and Peer Assessment step back: senior students are managing competing subject loads, and grammar now does its work inside essay feedback, where it matters most.
The result is a student who leaves school not only exam-ready but intellectually furnished — carrying a working knowledge of cognitive science, behavioural economics, ethics and civics that most adults never assemble. The senior program is best understood as two things developed in parallel.
01 Emphasis one
The senior program does not promise wisdom — nothing honest could. What it does, deliberately, every week, is build the conditions wisdom develops in: through what students read, how they are taught to read it, and what they are then asked to write.
The 92 articles are not comprehension filler. They are the ideas a thoughtful adult would want a young person to have met before leaving school.
How intuitive and deliberate thinking divide the work — and mislead us.
What the research really shows, and where the popular “21 days” story came from.
A famous study, and what later evidence quietly walked back.
How a plausible idea spread widely without the evidence to support it.
Examining our own moral certainty — analytically, not confessionally.
The research on regret, action and inaction — and what a life worth living asks.
Six of 92, across 15 categories — psychology, decision-making, economics, persuasion, technology, ethics, civics, leadership, character and more.
Every article presents the credible critique of its own central claim, alongside the claim. The student never meets a tidy, one-sided idea — they meet a claim and its strongest objection, and are asked to hold both.
The popular claim
A child’s ability to delay gratification — to wait for a second marshmallow — strongly predicts their success in later life.
from “What the marshmallow test really predicted”The honest counter-thread
Later replication work found the effect is much smaller than the popular story suggests, and largely reflects a child’s family circumstances rather than willpower itself.
presented in the same module, beside the claimOver two years, this trains the single habit most central to wisdom: not believing too quickly — and being able to say where an idea stops being reliable. The senior writing tasks then turn that same honesty inward: students examine their own thinking and choices, with the explicit discipline of being analytical, not confessional — aiming at calibration, not self-punishment. And the two-year sequence is built to arrive somewhere — it ends by asking a seventeen-year-old to write, with evidence and care, what they think living well requires.
02 Emphasis two
Every senior Writing module is a full extended response — and it is built as an explicit apprenticeship in essay craft, not a prompt left to the student to interpret alone. The invisible process of essay planning is made visible.
Inside the task deconstruction for “The two systems in your head”:
My claim — a defensible position between two poles.
Evidence from the article — at least one specific example.
The strongest counter — stated fairly, not strawmanned.
My response — how the claim holds, qualified.
A senior writer should be able to do more than one kind of essay. Across the two years, students practise the full range — each a distinct intellectual move:
Take and defend a position, with counterargument and evidence.
Examine the research — or your own thinking through it.
Separate what research robustly supports from what was oversold.
Turn research into a specific, defensible policy or intervention.
Combine ideas across several articles into a larger position.
Across two years that is 92 extended essays — planned, written and revised — each one assessed against a rubric, with personalised feedback returned to both student and parent. Grammar is not dropped at this level; it surfaces inside that writing feedback, where it does the most good.
The two-year arc
The senior curriculum tells a deliberate two-year story — from understanding the self, to applying judgement in the world, to a closing question worth a lifetime.
Year 11
How people think, learn, feel, decide and relate — intuition versus deliberation, the gap between confidence and competence, attention, memory, risk, trust, grit and identity. A year of metacognition and evidence-aware reflection.
Year 12
The articles turn outward and practical — habits and environment, decisions under uncertainty, persuasion, AI and information quality, democracy, economics, ethics and leadership. A year of designing, deciding and synthesising.
The close
The course ends, deliberately, on research about what people most regret at the end of life — and a final task asking the student to weave threads from at least four articles into their own considered picture of living well.
See it for yourself
The three tracks are not separate subjects; they are fused. Here is one real Year 11 week, built around the article The two systems in your head.
01 · Read
A research-informed article on intuitive thinking (System 1) and deliberate thinking (System 2). The student reads for the mechanism — not to memorise a term — carrying one guiding question through the text.
Then they meet the honest counter-thread: where the two-systems model is itself contested and oversimplified.
02 · Build the vocabulary
Vocabulary drawn straight from the article: sophisticated words to master, named concepts — dual-process theory, the Dunning–Kruger effect — figurative phrases that do real work, and advanced confusing-word pairs.
Each entry carries an in the article quote, so the word is learned in use.
03 · Write the essay
An ARGUE task built from the article: take a defensible position between two poles, support it with a specific example from the reading, and answer the strongest counter.
The task is deconstructed and planned first — then the finished essay receives personalised feedback.
The article, vocabulary and task above are genuine Year 11 curriculum content. Screenshots of the real module pages will slot into this band once exported — the free week opens the full versions.
The first week is free
Most senior families are already investing heavily — specialist tutoring at full senior intensity runs into the thousands each year. Before you weigh WritePath against another term of that, see exactly what a senior week does: one article, its vocabulary, and a full extended essay with real feedback.
We’ll email a sign-in link — no password to remember. Your email is also how we send your child’s feedback, so it is worth getting right.
Start free
One real article, its vocabulary, and an extended essay with feedback in your inbox — no card. Or see the full program: what is included, and what it costs.