The passive, superlatives and en + present participle

FrenchAQAGCSEUnit: Core Grammar Toolkit
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The basics

The Best of Everything — Passive Voice and Superlatives

🏆 The Best of Everything — Passive Voice and Superlatives

You're writing a formal letter about your school for AQA. You want to say "The exams are taken in May" without mentioning who takes them — that's the passive. Or you want to describe something as "the most interesting subject" or "the worst day of my life" — that's the superlative. Both structures signal grammatical sophistication on AQA Higher writing and translation tasks, and both have rules precise enough to make or lose marks.
Spotlight
The Passive Voice

The passive voice is used when the subject of the sentence is acted upon rather than performing the action. English: "The cake is eaten" rather than "Someone eats the cake."

Exam tip

Earn the mark scheme marks

💡 Exam Tips & Common Errors

  • AQA Higher writing mark schemes reward "a variety of tenses and grammatical structures." Using both a passive and a superlative in your essay will directly contribute to AO3 marks for grammatical complexity.
  • The passive is particularly useful in AQA writing tasks about society, environment, or school — e.g., Des progrĂšs ont Ă©tĂ© faits (Progress has been made), La dĂ©cision sera prise (The decision will be made).
  • For superlatives in speaking tasks, meilleur and pire are high-frequency and mark-worthy — practise C'est le meilleur / la pire chose que

  • In the AQA translation into French, passive sentences are a common test of grammatical knowledge — know the structure cold.
  • Watch for past participle agreement in passive sentences — examiners specifically look for this at Higher.

❌ Common error: C'est le film le plus intĂ©ressant que tous.

✓ Correct: C'est le film le plus intĂ©ressant de tous.

Why it costs marks: After a superlative, French uses de (not que, not dans, not parmi) to mean "in/of" the group. que is used for comparatives ("more 
 than"), not superlatives. Writing le plus intéressant que tous confuses the two structures and is an AO3 grammatical accuracy error. Examiners note this as one of the most frequent Higher-tier mistakes in the AQA French writing component.

❌ Common error (passive): Le gĂąteau est mangĂ© — past participle left as mangĂ© even when the subject is feminine: La tarte est mangĂ©.

✓ Correct: La tarte est mangĂ©e. (feminine subject → mangĂ©e)

Why it costs marks: The past participle in a passive construction is an adjective — it must agree with the subject in gender and number. Forgetting agreement is a direct AO3 mark penalty, and it is especially easy to forget when the structure looks like a perfect tense.

Now try it yourself

Quiz · Question 1 of 15

Which sentence correctly uses the passive voice in French?

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