GCSE reduced subjects advice needed

If you get an educational psychologist to do an assessment, you can just describe the issues the child is facing, e.g. slow in exams, bright but struggles to keep up, low achieving despite seeming intelligence.

Their job is to look for underlying reasons/diagnose.

Example, student of mine referred to ed psych for dyslexia. Also picked up slow processing, ASD, ADHD, dysgraphia. Parents had no idea about anything other than the dyslexia.

From what I know about kids with learning challenges, bright kids can often mask up to a point but then the demands get too much, usually at some point in secondary, and they begin to fail without knowing why - because their coping strategies don't work anymore.

I agree with other posters that worth getting him assessed, especially for working memory and processing speed. If you show his processing speed is very low, he should get extra time in exams.

I actually thought the Ebacc was sensible for all round intelligent dc who should be able to do a broad portfolio of subjects. If the universities had openly said they wanted it, more would have done the subjects. At my local grammars, the vast majority did anyway. The range of subjects prevented early specialism and that was good. Once no one was prepared to require it, all hope of maintaining a broad education was lost. Not sure if elite universities don’t care about breadth - I’ve no evidence at all - but some look at GCSEs.

Creative subjects are hard work and would be a slog for your son if he isn’t interested. He would do better studying something he enjoys.

Going into GCSEs feeling like you have chosen them makes a difference. I hope you can find someone willing to listen to you and your DS.

Hope someone from the school responds to you soon op. Sounds like quite a big thing to be sprung on you at this stage. Is there anything on the schools website about GCSE choices that explains about science and English for example?

I have a DC who is being offered 8 GCSEs and support in the 9th slot. I can definitely see the advantages. They don’t need more than 8 and getting good grades in those 8 is more important than doing 9.

The choosing is hard though and it does feel narrow.

My DC is thinking of all three sciences (separately - dual award is not an option but dropping one is), Maths, 2 English, Art and Drama.

They have already dropped languages. The alternative is history instead of physics (or both but no support). They won’t consider dropping Art or Drama.

I really don’t think only doing 8 GCSE’s matters that much. Preferable imo, the kids are under too much pressure with 10. I think the reason they have done it is to allow him extra time for maths to get it up to a pass. If he gets 8 GCSE’s inc Maths & English he’ll be able to go onto college or a levels. The best state sixth form in the country is in my city and they just calculate a score from your best 8 GCSE’s including maths and English for admissions purposes.

You make a really important point. Schools are a little ‘damned if they do, damned if they don’t’ on this. If they praise/encourage/provide positive feedback for a child who is meeting their low target, the parents are potentially getting the wrong impression. But this is so obviously better than constantly telling a kid who is doing as well as they can, that they’re not doing enough and are ‘failing’ because they are getting 3s not 7s. Clear targets help - i.e. ‘Your child’s target is a 4’, so when you say they’re on target and ‘doing well’ this is not likely to be misinterpreted. On the other hand, sharing targets with kids has been criticised as ‘giving a ceiling’ and being a ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’. It’s a minefield.

OP, I am a secondary school teacher and these are my thoughts:

1. Your son’s school has communicated this very poorly and you and your son are right to feel you have been let down
2. Fewer GCSEs is not going to prevent your child from accessing A Level or university. Low grades will.
3. The EBacc is made-up government nonsense for holding schools accountable (ironically, to stop too many schools doing what they’ve done to your son but doing it to make their results look good rather than for the interests of the child). No college or university is going to care if he’s done a certain set of subjects. My school is a grammar school and while most of our students do the EBacc, we have plenty of students who don’t and it’s not a problem - they do what they enjoy.
4. ‘Non-academic’ subjects don’t really exist at GCSE - they’re all difficult and often the coursework heavy ones are very challenging. However, if your son doesn’t want to do them then he’s likely to do a lot worse anyway, so there’s no point.
5. Don’t rush to make a decision because of their deadline. They created this problem by failing to communicate effectively with you in advance. (We haven’t even started talking about options with our Year 8s yet - they start GCSEs in Year 9 - and we haven’t even started children changing options until well into the autumn term. I seriously doubt that your son’s school will have a genuine hard deadline.)

School communication has obviously been very poor here, but I do want to reassure you on a few points (I am a teacher and spent several years teaching in mainstream and also at a sixth form college):

1. the Ebacc is an arbitrary notion that Michael Gove had of what kids should be studying. No more than that. It doesn’t serve every child well and very few people think it should be held up as the ‘standard’.
2. Choosing A levels you need a decent grade in those subjects or related ones- so 6 or over. That’s because the evidence suggests that students who don’t get a 6 will struggle to pass at A level. I think at my college we needed them to have 5 passes, with grade 6 or higher in their chosen subjects, and if they were doing STEM they also had to have good passes in those subjects. Humanities wanted the decent grade in English. (The skills needed in subjects like politics or sociology aren’t really tested at GCSE so they use English plus whatever essay-type subjects had been studied, like history.) Anyone who arrived without a 4 in maths or English language had to retake them alongside a levels, but those kids were rare.
3. They’ve told all the parents that the deadline for options forms is non-negotiable because they don’t want everyone arguing and forgetting and trickling them in- they want to start sorting out numbers for sets and so on. But for individual cases like your son’s where there is clearly a discrepancy between what you and he thought would happen, and what has happened, it isn’t set in stone.
4. I would be very surprised if some senior staff are not in next week, and lots of classroom teachers too. Keep emailing them all, particularly the HT and those subject teachers who wanted him to choose their subject, and ask them why this has happened.

I hope you get this sorted out! But if he does do fewer subjects it won’t hold him back- it’s the grades he needs and if he does benefit from fewer different topics, then great. I work with ND learners now and lots of ours do best when they can focus on a narrower range of subjects- not because they aren’t bright and intelligent, but because that’s how they are best able to work.

I’d be interested in sats y6. Plus assessment data from y7 to now. Schools are all over this and op needs to ask for it. This might make the decision make sense.

What were his scores in year 9?

Ok so dc high school have 4 pathways for gcse years. Depending on students strengths.

They range from very academic to 8 gcses, mixed acadamic - 6 gcse, mixed vocational - 5 gcse, vocational 1 or 2 gcse, maths cert and apprenticeship.

They can also pick a choice of btecs to replace some.gcse subjects
Imo your approaching this all wrong. The school trying to make the most of your son so he can get best results possible.

No school puts a child in extra maths and English if they don't need it

1 maths
combined science = 2
eng lang
eng lit
humanity
2 others
All adds up to 8.
Perfectly respectable.
You do need to speak to school asap. BUT be realistic about what’s possible. If he’s really struggling now (even if your didn’t know about it) it’s will be a tough couple of years. Trust me.

I have mentioned previously about my eldest dc (who has dyslexia, and in primary school we were told that school didnt think he had dyslexia, he was just ‘in the lower reaches of the ‘average’ band’). My dh has dyslexia, so we got a private ed psych assessment for my dc - who turned out to have a very spiky profile, with very low processing speed and working memory, but extremely high everything else. The Ed Psych identified it as dyslexia. He was always underestimated by teachers, especially in maths, throughout secondary school.

We had a long conversation about his difficulties in maths, when he was in early year 11. I also spoke to his maths teacher. I thought it might be useful for me to outline here, for @Arizona29 (and other pp’s who are interested) what difficulties my son’s dyslexia gave him in maths, as it is not obvious - and his teacher had no clue about it. And this is dyslexia, not dyscalculia. My son also has very messy / large handwriting (another signal for dyslexia), and this gives a certain impression, especially when seen in tandem with spelling mistakes!

1. Dyslexia can give problems with processing long and involved sequences of information - so when maths questions start to look like comprehension questions (where you actually need to read a paragraph of text to unpick what the question is, and there are lots of different things going on, and lots of different parts to the question, this can cause massive problems for students with dyslexia, even if they are completely secure in the actual maths concepts. This can take a long time to work out what the question is asking, and working memory issues might mean that intermediate steps of manipulating data, and retaining that data to manipulate another way can be very problematic. (So making sure to clearly note down intermediate steps can really help).
2. My son used to find that if he came across a really difficult question early on in a maths test / exam (or physics), then he would really struggle and would not be able to work it out, and would waste lots of time trying (meaning he would often not finish the test). As he went into year 12 &13, he started using a different strategy - if he couldn’t see how to attempt an early question he would just leave it, and come back to it at the end. By which time his brain would have ‘warmed up’ and he would be able to see how to do it straight away. Not sure if this is just a dyslexia thing (needing the brain to ‘warm up’), or if it is a universal thing?
3. His working memory issues mean that he struggles to retain abstract symbols in his head, even for short periods - so this would mean that during calculations, something that was a ‘+’ in one line may be transposed as a ‘-‘ on the line below. This means that unless he has time to go back and check through all of his work at the end then he is likely to lose a lot of marks from faulty transposing. His secondary school didn’t typically allow him to have extra time during class assessments, so he didn’t tend to have time to check for errors. His teacher thought he was really struggling with maths, and suggested he didn’t do it at A level. My son moved schools for sixth form, did maths A level, and his new teachers thought he was great (they had an established culture of allowing extra time for dyslexia). He did really well at A level, and is now on track for a really good degree in a stem subject (and will be doing a stem MSc next year).

A further tip (this time for Eng Lit and the like); my son used to find that when having to memorise lots of quotes for the various texts, he would forget the quotes when he would start reading / answering the questions (again, it is a working memory thing - very like a sieve when there is something else that your mind is busy with), so the solution he found was to quickly identify what theme the essay question was about, then before starting to answer it, write down all the relevant quotes (before they disappeared). Then you can structure / plan the essay, and you have a ready bank of quotes at the top of the page.

The obvious next step is to have a meeting with the head of year. They should have his assessment data and know what his profile looks like and why they have recommended what they have. The HOY should respond to this request.

The GCSE limitations will be because of fitting in the maths and English intervention classes on the timetable. It sounds like they are timetabled in the slots reserved for humanities subjects, presumably because most of the students who need the intervention are only taking one humanities subject. I don’t think he can be forced to do practical subjects if he doesn’t enjoy them. But if you and he insist on choosing two humanities subjects, then he presumably won’t be able to do the intervention lessons. If not having the intervention lessons means he fails his maths and English GCSEs, then his opportunities for further education will be limited far more than if he’d dropped to one humanities subject and passed English and maths. Also, A levels are hard and certainly not for everyone. Most A level courses don’t just ask a pass in that subject as well as passes in English & Maths but typically a grade 6 or above in the subject being studied in order to cope with the more rigorous A-level syllabus. So it may be that they’re trying to steer him now towards a more practical pathway rather than academic as they’ve predicted he’ll struggle.

I think you need to talk with his form tutor or head of year 9 and explain that he really doesn’t want to do those subjects. Would private tutoring in maths and English be an option if he wants to continue with more than one humanities subject?

Going on my experience with my kids. Firstly at their schools they did not encourage two humanities due to the amount of content involved. Mine both had to get permission first. However it was up to them which route they wanted to choose. Both wanted to choose the ebacc pathway.

I would make an appointment to see the head teacher and explain his interest in languages and you want him to choose subjects that interest him. We were always told that the most important thing is the kids are interested in their subjects. I can't understand why he can't choose what he prefers. What are his grades like in the foreign language? Does he generally pass maths and English when he sits exams?

You ask about A levels too. This alternative pathway will not stop him doing A levels.

OP, I think there is general agreement that you and your son have been badly served in terms of communication from the school, both now and historically. Your frustration and anger on behalf of DS is clear, but it’s important to clarify what the next steps will be in a way that will benefit him and satisfy you.

You are concerned about how DS will feel if he is on a different pathway from his friends and peers and that he will feel left out and perhaps teased. On the other hand, how will he feel if he is unable to manage the workload of the higher number of subjects effectively and all the subjects suffer because of it. That might be challenging for his self esteem.

Whether or not he is high ability, it seems that he is having some difficulty with finishing assessments. That might need some further exploration and testing to ascertain whether he will need additional arrangements for exams, which may include extra time, rest breaks, word processing, a scribe etc.

In the end, would you rather he took more exams and compromised his grades, or fewer with good outcomes. As PP have said, there are plenty of options and opportunities other than a wholly academic route and they don’t rule out university ultimately, if appropriate. He may be suited to more vocational pathways and what is important is that he is as successful as he can be in whichever pathway he is suited to and enjoys.

In many years of teaching, I’ve seen students who are very successful doing vocational courses, including my own. Sometimes, it takes a little longer, but that doesn’t matter ultimately.

DS scored about 5 years ahead on verbal reasoning! It was his working memory that was the issue.

They can have spiky profiles! Way ahead in some areas and behind in others

DS was diagnosed with dyslexia. He was always good at reading. Passed the phonics test. Dyslexia isn’t what you think - get him tested!

And you need to advocate for him.

@Arizona29 I have tried to read all of your updates so I do apologise if I have missed anything important.

From what I can tell, you have stated that there has been no indication of academic challenges before now and that no issues have been raised. Your DS is articulate and verbally bright but seem to be struggling with getting this on paper, is that right?

Firstly, I need to challenge that just a little (sorry, it's in my nature). Has your DS been telling you everything that's been going on? As much as the assessments that have just gone on might be the first formalised tests for the year, what about the in class tests? End of topic tests? Has he been telling you what has been going on with these? My daughter went to independent school with small class sizes but it was still more efficient to get information out of her than the school.

My understanding would be that unless there was a significant change in performance, it wouldn't be chased up by school to you - they would assume that you already know. And, in all honesty, a parent's evening at a small school is like a free for all. They may feel is attitude is good but his attainment might not be. Added to this that he had been dropped down a maths set, that's another indication that everything isn't hunkydory academically speaking. When my daughter was dropped from set 1 to set 2, I asked her about it as to what the problems were. You can't say you haven't had ANY indication, because it seems like you have.

That being said, this really isn't the end of the world at all. It would be much better for your DS to get 8 decent passes than10 fails - most colleges want 5 grade 5s to get into college with more specific requirements for certain A levels, but that gives him scope to focus. It does sound that this is actually about what is in his best interest, rather than trying to exclude or punish him. If he can't finish these in school assessments, he isn't going to cope well with thirty odd GCSE exams in two years time. That's the purpose of the 'practical' subjects - to spread the load across the time period

That is the other element that needs addressing though - he sounds bright but struggling. There is obviously something that needs pinning down.

Best of luck to you both x
Edited for typo

Don’t assume that your son couldn’t have dyslexia just because he is a good reader!

When my daughter’s school suggested we had her tested for dyslexia, our initial reaction was that she couldn’t possibly have dyslexia because she had always been a good reader.

We had not understood that dyslexia covers a much wider range of difficulties. My daughter’s difficulties were with processing and working memory, not with reading, and it sounds like a number of other posters have similar experiences.

Get him tested! Tell the school you are doing that and until the results are in you would like him to be able to select whatever GCSEs he wants.

If dyslexia is not found to be a problem you may need to rethink.

Ex teacher here.
There are a lot of myths regarding EBacc
EBacc is mainly a box tick regarding the schools performance. I have never known a 6th form or university deny a student a course based on them not having the EBacc range of subjects at GCSE.
So the priority at this stage is for your son to get Level 4+ in Maths and English so that he doesn't have to resit in year 12.
Given his below average performance in his assessments I can see why his school might think his best chance of doing this is to have the reduced number of options.
Only your son knows whether he revised properly for his assessments. I noticed you have not responded to other posters on whether or not he does his homework.
This might be key here regardless of whether there are any other SEN issues. Remember having a SEN diagnosis will only give him on average 25% extra time. It won't change the difficulty of the questions, the quality of answer required or the amount of memorized factual information that will be needed.
You need a very honest conversation with your son before you can evaluate if the reduced timetable is the best option for your him.
If he is not prepared to work hard outside of normal lessons, he would probably be better with the reduced timetable which will have more revision time and exam technique practice and opportunities built in.
At this stage he should be leading the conversation on these choices with your support.

It is quite unusual for schools to be able to access an Ed psych assessment these days. Was this in the private sector?

I was diagnosed with dyslexia in 2021 (aged 31) and it came as a complete shock. I learned to read quickly and was a voracious reader well into adulthood, and I have always been told that I write well. I have actually just submitted my PhD thesis and my supervisor frequently compliments my writing. She was equally shocked by the diagnosis!

The Ed Psych report says that my scores for verbal reasoning, pattern recognition and reading* are all above average but I have "marked and unexpected difficulty" with processing and working memory. So, when reading, I can read the words accurately but it takes a bit of time for me to digest what it actually means. I also struggle with parallel processing, for example trying to complete a task while following instructions. Tasks take me a lot longer than most people to complete but they tend to be of a very high quality straight off the bat (I pore over it line by line as I'm writing rather than bashing out a rough draft and going back in to edit it).

I don't know if that's helpful but I just wanted to (re)assure you that your son may be dyslexic despite being able to read well.

*I may have misremembered the category names but they are along those lines!