The DfE needs to stop the farce of compulsory Maths and English GCSE resits

IME pre-warning kids that the test will be hard and they should expect to get less than 50% and that this will represent a good score for them is still pretty dispiriting. What other choice do they have - they are lambs to the slaughter, they are asked to face this without being adequately prepared either mentally or practically, it’s an incredibly harsh lesson.

I don't know if ds will do Foundation or Higher Science. At the start of the year he was predicted a borderline Grade 3/4 but has now gone up to predicted Grade 5.

I think mine might be the only one taking foundation, she did say that her teacher said that she will probably do higher with the others, not sure if maths or Science.
If they think she is borderline 4/5 should I argue for the foundation paper?
I could be ill informed though as not heard this from the horses mouth, just dd. Who has been known to get it wrong.

do doo do doo do doo

(ds has been on a performing arts summer school the last 2 weeks and they do a warm up to it!)

My dad (sn) has finally passed maths with a 4 on the 3rd attempt. He got a U in English and college were trying to put him on the gcse again for the 4th time. I had to go in on my day off to make sure they put him on the functional skills level instead.

she said she taught to the middle of the class and wouldn’t be changing that
Then that needs raising with the head of department in my opinion.

I did speak to the teacher - she said she taught to the middle of the class and wouldn’t be changing that and referred dd to the internet if she wanted access to the more challenging parts of the course.
Dd is not over confident - the opposite I would say. If she was confident she might have the courage to work out the more advanced stuff for herself, without teacher support but I think that’s asking too much of her. Her tutor helps her stretch herself a little and so she feels better prepared for the exam. She did better in her end of year exam than many in the top set - mind you they were missing their teacher for half the year!
I think the worst of all worlds Noble is to set an exam that covers material you haven’t taught and not pre-warn the student that this is the case, they eventually figure is out with repeated failures - which is what dd and her friends did, no one realises different material was being taught - there must be a better way to get the message across.

that just sounds like either poor teaching, or overconfidence on your DD’s part.

I would agree.
It's worth a chat with school about it, whilst being open to the fact it could be either.

She is doing higher - but she found the course being taught to be easy - when did we stop encouraging kids to extend themselves? Was that just a primary school thing?

At DD's school pupils are encouraged to ask for extension work.

If my DD was consistently finding maths too easy, I would be contacting the teacher to ask their view and ask for extension questions or whatever.

She is doing higher - but she found the course being taught to be easy - when did we stop encouraging kids to extend themselves? Was that just a primary school thing?

noblegiraffe has it spot on.
I taught the whole course to all students (we don't had tiers any more and I think we should).
When it came to revision I emphasised different topics with different students.
E.g. A is a grade 5/6 student who needs to work on keeping calm and remembering to do language analysis in exam conditions or they're not hitting a whole assessment objective so they'll get more revision on that until it's secure because otherwise They'll scrape a 4 if they are lucky. (and giving them a level literary criticism probably isn't in their interests)

B is flying through and whilst they're only targeted a 6, they've been working at 7s/8s. They'll get some revision material on literary criticsm to push their interpetations to secure the 8.

C struggles to write enough in the time and frequently doesn't complete papers. They're capable of getting a 4 and their understanding is more of a 5, so I need to drill them in which order to answer questions and how best to structure their answers to get maximum marks given they can't write enough.

Each child has a different approach and focus. cakes seems to think that staff should be catering to learning styles (which don't exist), meeting the needs of individual students, whilst at the same time not having different work for different students (because everyone should have the same chance to get a 9 even though a basic bell curve tells you that isn't how it works).

I do think there is a problem is pupils (and thus parents) don't realise there will be things on a test they haven't been taught, it is somewhat counter-intuitive until you understand why this happens.

I think if dd’s teacher had even told us she wasn’t planning to cover the whole course, we would have at least have understood what was going wrong - instead we found out by default by dd continuing to be floored by every end of topic exam.

I agree Noble but you are talking about kids who are taught all of the foundation paper - or did you leave bits of the foundation curriculum out too?

Yes DD2 is lucky she has me to help her. It hopefully means she will manage to make faster than expected progress whilst at secondary.

But schools can only do so much in the time they have with the resources they have.

I wandered onto the Michaela website the other day. Although some of it is OTT I can see where they are coming from. They really are trying to make every minute of the school day count, and using homework to reinforce skills.

Yesterday I sat DD2 down to start to refresh basic maths before the start of term. She is going in to y9. And isn’t your dd lucky she has you to help her - the kids whose parents can’t provide support are totally reliant on the school and the system that frequently fails kids from uneducated backgrounds.