Linking causes to the event
The link is the thing being marked
- Read the grade descriptors side by side and only one thing changes.
- Achieved: two causes, and the link may be limited.
- Merit: two causes, with direct links made.
- Excellence: two causes, with well-defined links made and insight.
- The causes themselves are not what separates the grades. Two candidates can name the same two causes and be three grades apart on how they connect them.
- A link is a sentence, not an implication. If the connection is obvious to you and unwritten, it has not been marked.
The four-part paragraph that makes a link direct
- Claim — name the cause and assert its role in one sentence. The event was made possible by X.
- Evidence — the specific, checkable facts. Dates, figures, names, legislation, quotations. Three or four items, not one.
- Link — the explicit mechanism: this mattered because it meant that... This is the sentence markers are looking for and the one candidates leave out.
- Significance — how much weight this cause carries relative to the other one.
- Run this four times in the essay — twice for the first cause and consequence, twice for the second — and the structural requirement is met without thinking about it.
Making the sequence visible
- The standard requires a meaningful narrative showing historical sequence. Sequence means the reader can see the order and the joins.
- Date your steps. In the year before, ... By the following spring, ... Within eighteen months, ... Dates are the cheapest evidence there is and they do the sequencing for free.
- Do not narrate the whole event to get to the sequence. The contextual paragraph is where the story goes, and it is one paragraph.
- Use the sequence to distinguish your two causes. If one operated for years and the other for weeks, say so — that difference is the argument that they are two different causes.
Weighing your two causes against each other
- The comparative judgement is the highest-value paragraph in the essay, and the 2025 report singles it out: Merit candidates often included a separate analytical paragraph evaluating which was more historically significant.
- Name your criterion. Judged by necessity — remove it and the event does not happen — the answer is usually the long-term cause. Judged by proximity — what actually set things moving — it is usually the short-term one.
- Stating the criterion is what converts an opinion into an argument. Without it, the first cause was more important is a preference.
- Acknowledge what follows on the other criterion, in one clause. That is evaluation, and it is what the Excellence descriptor calls insight.
Six ways a link fails, and how each is fixed
- Assertion. This caused the event. → Add the mechanism: because it meant that...
- Coincidence. Two things happened near each other in time. → Show the dependency, or drop it.
- Too many steps. The cause reaches the event through three intermediaries. → Move to a nearer cause, or make one intermediary the cause.
- Background as cause. A condition present for decades. → Keep it, but say what changed about it, or pair it with a short-term cause.
- Hindsight. Treating the outcome as inevitable because you know it happened. → Ask what contemporaries thought was going to happen.
- Narrative. A page of story with the cause never named. → Cut to the claim, and use the story as evidence beneath it.
Worked Example
Worked example
A student's paragraph reads:
Rewrite it as a Merit paragraph using the four parts.
Answer:
Step 1 — diagnose. The paragraph names a cause and gives context. It contains no dates, no figures and no mechanism. The last sentence asserts importance without arguing it. This is the assertion failure, and it is the commonest one in the standard.
Step 2 — Claim. State the role, not just the existence: the economic conditions were a long-term cause, because they turned a specific grievance into one shared widely enough to sustain organised action.
Step 3 — Evidence. Replace "several years" and "prices had risen" with checkable items: the number of years the condition persisted, an unemployment figure with its date, a price index or wage figure, and one contemporary statement showing people connected the two. Three or four specific items.
Step 4 — Link, and this is the sentence the original lacked entirely. This mattered because the hardship was long enough and wide enough that people who had no other reason to be involved had a reason to be — which is what turned a dispute among the directly affected into a movement large enough to force a response.
Step 5 — Significance, with a named criterion. Judged by necessity, this cause outweighs the trigger: remove the years of hardship and the trigger would have produced a local complaint rather than a national one. Judged by proximity, the trigger matters more, since the hardship was equally present in each of the preceding years without producing the event.
Step 6 — check the sequence is visible. The paragraph now contains a duration ("for X years"), a dated figure, and a comparison with the preceding years. A reader can see where this cause sits in time relative to the trigger, which is what "historical sequence" means.