Help me to get over the fact that year 11 dd is failing to put the work in at GCSE

Sometimes kids do worse by over studying and trying to remember far more than they can manage and end up failing from getting information muddled up, if She's a bright sensible girl don't worry main thing is you not stressing her out just tell her to do her best and leave her to it. Tbh getting all A's in gsces doesn't automatically mean she will get a brilliant job in ten years time anyway the same as her failing all her GSCES doesn't mean she will be sat I'm the job centre in ten years time. Relax and she will too and she will do the best she can.

Is this lack of reality linked to the school though?
If you are at a top school where (it seems) that most pupils will receive A/A* grades at GCSE and where most pupils who take A levels go to the "top" universities perhaps you are more likely to make this type of assumption than if you at a school with a wider ability range.
My thinking is to take it a step at a time. My Y11 dd knows what grades she needs for sixth form and is concentrating on that stage. Plenty of time to worry about A levels and university later on.
Some sixth forms are still entering pupils for AS levels though. The exams still exist, they just won't count towards the final grades at the end of Y13 anymore.

Worst case scenario though, she can take a year out after A-Levels and then apply to uni. So although I agree that Oxbridge may be out without amazing GCSEs, she'd be fine for the vast majority of the others.

As someone else has said, it's better that she gets the wake up call now rather than in two years time. The danger is not that she has a taste of failure now but that she meets her own expectations. If she surprises you now with good results for no effort and then attempts to coast through A levels you'll be in this position again in two years.

Her A level predictions will be based on her GCSE grades and that is the point where she might find that she's not on track for the grades to get into the university she aspires to.

I wouldn't worry too much about the French. Atm all they have to do is learn stuff off by heart. Ds got an A and he was crap at French. He wasn't taught any grammar at all. He did his set pieces with the help of Google Translate. The grade boundary for A must have been 22% !

I also think you find that you can lead a horse to water, but even if you shove their faces in it, they may not drink. I was like this. Wish I'd worked harder, but there you are. Ds learnt his lesson in Yr 10 when they had to take a few early GCSEs (grrr, ds was 14 at the time...) when he believed his friends who were all blathering on about their not having done any work at all. Yeah, right. Ds went to bed for the day when he got his results and all his friends who had supposedly made no effort got A*s.

I don't agree with the posters saying a wake up call will be good and she can still do fine, not if she's thinking of a top uni and not now that ASs have gone and the GCSE grades will be that much more important even than they were before (in that all unis will have to rely on them as the chief indicator of suitability for a course and institution, not just the ones that do now).

fidelix ah that's a bit different. I've had a DC very similar with a lot of exasperation on the part of the school. I think at it's height I intervened on a couple of occasions with some very plain talking about how he would waste the chances that he could have if he applied himself even occasionally. It turned out ok in the end but it was a fairly painful couple of years watching him play around, although he was enjoying himself and I do think DC can't work sensibly and solidly all of the time without letting off steam. I definitely believe you can't make DC work unless they want to, so in Y11 I did suggest he visited a couple of really good unis which I knew he'd like, pointed him in the direction of the sports fields and then explained what kind of grades they'd need to see as a standard minimum. Maybe one conversation now before it really is too late and then down nagging tools for the duration of the current exams?

I can understand it must be so frustrating. Hard as it is, I think you just have to back off a little at this late stage. By all means help her revise, do what you can, but so close to the exams there's little point in getting overly worked up about it.

She sounds bright enough to get through the GCSEs and on to A-Level courses. Yes, it must be frustrating to watch her end up with B and Cs rather than a string of A stars, but it may well be the wake up call she needs. She'll still have he chance to get great A-Levels, so probably better this way round than stellar GCSEs and mediocre A-Levels.

Perhaps when she sees friends getting GCSE results on results day, she might realise wny you and her teacher have been nagging her so much!

Marking place. My DS is sitting iGCSEs this month at his selective secondary, and has done precisely zilch revision that I'm aware of at home.

I would be very happy if he got Bs in the subjects he wants to do for A level, so perhaps I have lower expectations than others on this thread.

At the moment, he seems to have such little interest in schoolwork I can't imagine him putting in the work for A levels, although like the OP's DD he thinks he will be going to University at some distant point in the future when everything magically turns out the way it should. (This is me projecting, as he doesn't actually say what he thinks..)

goodbye; linear/modular, so sorry , am clearly thick as mince, ignore me. Maybe it's just been that way where we live. Twin DDs start the new GCSE grading this Sept and DS doing linear As with AS only in Maths when /if he moves to 6th form. Clearly getting too old to keep up. Dont know how teachers manage the changes every year ( though as a doctor should be only too familiar with constantly changing goalposts from on high..!)

Sorry again, that should have read the new 'harder' IGCSEs.

Not sure what's happening this morning!

Sorry, that should have read always go up.

No it's easier at the top end as well, which is why those results always go when a school adopts the new 'harder' GCSEs. It doesn't really matter since unis treat them in the same way so it's a pretty inconsequential argument, I just threw it in :)

She just doesn't seem to get that you can't wing it at GCSE. That GCSEs measure work, not brilliance.
Sometimes OP very bright children can get top grades at GCSE in this way.
I also have a dd in Y11 and the whole process seems very different to when we took exams in that far more revision is being carried out actually in school. Practice paper questions have been set for homework all year so she has already done most of them (even if not as a complete paper). Most schools actually mark mocks strictly rather than generously so mocks could be an underestimate of final grades.
The argument over whether iGCSEs are harder than GCSEs is an interesting one. My understanding is that it can be easier for pupils to obtain a grade C on the iGCSE whereas it is harder to obtain an A/A*.

DS1 is doing iGCSE sciences with CIE board. There is much more to learn than there is for AQA triple science GCSE and many of the topics are ones that I didn't study until A-level. Not all iGCSEs are easier than GCSEs.

Quite apart from the new general linear system, plenty of DC have taken linear GCSE exams in the past decade because that's the way their schools did it, in the belief that modular exams were disruptive and not in the best interests of their particular constituency of DC. None of my DC have ever taken the exams as modular and the first GCSEs in this house were 2006.

Also, I doubt any DC taking exams as linear is in any way influenced or affected by the fact that some other DC used to take them as modular. It's probably not massively confidence building if people tell them these GCSEs are harder than previously - they're judged against their peers so it really doesn't matter that much.

Coursework is a help for some DC and a hindrance for others - not a universal good by any means.

OP I'd be very careful not just about being rattled but about a sudden access of nerves at this very late stage. Your DD is well placed to do well and the school (which is evidently high achieving) hasn't flagged any concerns. If I were you I'd just feed her decent meals, limit noise in the house to a tolerable level, suggest she gets to bed at a reasonable time and then lay off completely.

I like the distinction you draw between her merely Russell Group dad and your Oxbridge self :) (leaving aside the semantics of that one!).

She may be one of these people who reads the notes once and then get straight As. I think if there were concerns about her, the school would have flagged it by now.

In all honesty, there's not a lot you can do now. Stressing won't make any difference (easier said then done!). If she fails her GCSEs, then that's a life lesson, and she can always retake. That may be a little disappointing or embaress ing, but it's not the end of the world.

Red wine and chocolate helps in these situations. Also, the long running thread for Year 11 parents.

It's her life, let her decide. For what it's worth, I didn't make much effort and achieved As/Bs which my DM wasn't expecting and she verbally shared her shock at my grades on results day

Exams were linear last year too. Weird that they would sit a mock that wasn't actually a mock.