Year 13/11 how do you feel about the 3 extra weeks...

Steppemum I think you’re being harsh saying kids today are fragile. DD1 in 2019 took 23 exams for 10 subjects, most were 1.5hrs. Not sure how you’d fit those into 2 weeks. Lots were back to back and several day’s in a row. Of course, it depends on which subjects as to how a kid’s timetable works out. Some will be a little spaced, some quite condensed. No complaints from her because that’s what it is. And the kids will suck it up and do them, but in the meantime we’re the adults and should at least try to make it as fair as possible.

Just checked my O and A level papers. O level papers were between 1.5 and 2.5 hours, A level were 2-3 hours.

The thing is, testing stamina isn't what GCSEs are meant to test. They are meant to test attainment in particular subjects. Turning the GCSEs back into a test of stamina does our young people a disservice.

This academic year of all years is not the time for heaping extra stress on y11s when they have already had extra due to the pandemic.

That said, it is what it is. Parents, schools & pupils will need to get their head round it and manage best they can.

If my DD sits them at all it will be 4 or 5 at most now instead of the full 8 she was expected to pass prior to the pandemic.

steppe Everyone did not do this, as only the top ~35% even took O levels.

look, I'm not saying it is ideal, or the best thing, but 30 years ago, when we did O levels, we did exactly this.
Everyone, did exactly this.

Why ar ekids today so much more fragile? yes it was a stamina test. yes it was hard work.
On the other hand, it was LESS of a stamina trip as the whole exam period was more condensed, so 2 tough weeks, rather than dragged out for 4-5 weeks.

Pros and cons, as with everything.

steppe I think it is doable for some. But for a sizeable minority doing 18-20 exams over 4 weeks solid will become more a test of stamina than a test of knowledge / ability / attainment.

I think they should have kept the one week gap.

(ps I don't think that O levels were 3hr papers. I looked back at mine recently and they weren't. I only had 3 hr papers for my university maths exams.)

When I did O levels, we had 2 papers per day, and usually 2-3 hour papers too.
We did that most days from start to finish.

When Ds did his GCSEs last year, I was amazed that they were so spread out.

Really, it is doable.

How long has it been that exams started before half term? I am sure when I did O-levels (so a long time ago!), we started them after half term and had many papers.

I think it will just make things worse, not having the half term "break" in the middle is completely shit planning. It will just condense the amount of exams they have to do putting them closer together.

Ds1 took his GCSEs in 2019, this was how his timetable worked out

Week 1 - 5 exams
Week 2 - 3 exams
Half term which allowed him to revise for the following
Week 3 - 6 exams
Week 4 - 6 exams
week 5 - 2 exams, his last exam was Tuesday 18th June.

This, I feel, worked well and obviously does work well which is why it has been this way for a long time. It meant that lots of paper 1s were done by half term or some entire subjects such as English Lit and Computer Science.

I think it would have been better to allow them to have the half term in the middle of the exams.

Its awful.

@sweetchillijam it was very similar in our house. In the end we didn't bother sending it back but kept it all so he could take it back with him. He hasn't been asked for one piece of work yet and I'm not sure he had any feedback for anything he submitted online either.

@Todaythiscouldbe I think our two maybe attend the same school. We have printers and scanners and offered to help DD take photos or scan the work she had completed. But she is proud and wouldn’t entertain the idea of any help or interference from ourselves. She refused to talk school work at all and we had shouting and arguments from her anytime we mentioned anything about school work. It took ages for her to photograph and upload each page of each piece of work on the school system and it wasn’t clear whether to send it back to her usual teacher, the teacher who had set the work or a different teacher. So after having to repeat this exercise with the same piece of work several times she stopped bothering to do this.

@steppemum so why should the poor kids suffer any more because of covid, bad decisions taken by their schools which neither they the poor scared kids or we as parents have had any control over?

@justchecking1 some schools provided work in the summer term, some didn’t. Even where schools provided work not all students were able to access it, for a variety of reasons. Depending where you are in the country your child may have had at least one round of 2 week of self isolation, some more. Other areas where the rate is low are being able to carry on as normal. There is never a completely level playing field but this year it is even worse.

I don't understand how kids will all do badly though? Surely the exams are marked on a curve so roughly the same proportion get As, Bs, etc every year? It'll just mean that if they all do badly you'll only need 60% (or whatever) for an A rather than 70%. You won't end up with a whole year group where no one gets an A that year, will you?

Other schools continued to teach content all through.

I have one in year 11 and one in year 13. Overall, I don't think they are particularly behind. They have done assessments this term and are happy with where kids are and with the predicted grades.

As well as 3 weeks there is some content being removed.
Don't forget that if the whole cohort does slightly worse, then the grade boundaries will be lower.

I think there are 2 things that we really need to remember.

1. That there are no easy solutions and nothing that is going to please everyone, or that will work for. The normal exam schedule doesn't work for everyone either, so there is always a group who will benefit and a group who won't. It is easy to complain, but what alternatives are there? And no, I don't think teacher assessment is a viable alternative.
2. We need to change the message to our yong people. I was horrified last year at the amount of "My life is ruined" comments on the news. Life is not over if you don't do as well on your GCSE as you thought. Life continues, you have different choices, maybe not the same as before but there are still choices. And if that means resitting, well for most kids, that is also not the end of the world. teach our kids ot be flexible and adaptable and resilient.

Sorry, I know that doesn't fit with the hate the government and my kid's lives are ending mantra of mn, but really. Imagine what is was like for kids during the war, or the 1930s depression, or 1980s England where there were zero jobs. Not only did we survive, but we made a good life.

Pathetic. It also puts results day too close to the start of the autumn term, where's the time to think through a level choices if results are not as expected.

It is in most ways a gimmick. 3 weeks will make no difference to the learning, but remember that all children have been in similar positions and all children have lost some time and grades will reflect that-it's done by percentages not comparing with other years.

My suspicion is that the 3 weeks are to move it more into summer to give us more time to get covid-19 under control. In that 3 weeks may make a difference if cases are dropping in the summer.

Whereas DD current year 11 had a dreadful time during lockdown no let up with schoolwork but it was all consolidation work, dished out messily, erratically and in a time consuming way for the kids to find the work on a range of different platforms including email, teams, class charts and subject specific platforms and at DD’s school in many cases it wasn’t issued by the class teacher but their class teachers were still emailing them so they were bombarded.

This was exactly the experience we had. It took around an hour each day to work out exactly what had been set. Plus 100s of pages had to be printed, completed, scanned and emailed back. I'm lucky I have a work printer/scanner at home but that was impossible for so many. A lot of kids were having to copy out all the sheets to complete, take a photo of them and send them back, even more time consuming.
They did nothing new and are now rushing through what they missed before they sit mocks next week. My usually chilled out son isn't eating, sleeping or doing his usual activities.

The whole thing is a complete mess and the toll on their mental health will affect many of them for years.

Its just awful I have a DS in yr12 yes they missed the opportunity to sit their GCSE’s, school prom, leavers assembly etc but at least they got to chill out at home March to September knowing their was absolutely nothing they could do regarding their GCSE results. He has gone back to school rested.

Whereas DD current year 11 had a dreadful time during lockdown no let up with schoolwork but it was all consolidation work, dished out messily, erratically and in a time consuming way for the kids to find the work on a range of different platforms including email, teams, class charts and subject specific platforms and at DD’s school in many cases it wasn’t issued by the class teacher but their class teachers were still emailing them so they were bombarded.

@Sweetchillijam I totally understand where you are coming from, especially losing GP to Covid and falling out trying to get them to complete work towards the end like they did at the start. My own profession is as far from ‘teacher’ as it could be
I really hope your DD is ok, her mental health has to come first no matter what
I’m normally a ‘there is a solution for everything’ person but in this instance there isn’t and I feel strongly they’re not going to be given a fair chance! I have family members who are SLT of 15/20yrs and they say the same for their Yr11s
I feel it has affected this yr11 more than any other year. I am praying for fairer assessment nearer the time of their actual capability or just a better solution as 3 weeks extra is a joke, let alone the pressure of no respite in between
I’m not giving up but I am resigned that it just has to be nothing but support and help with revision
I chose DS school because of its sixth form which has always been oversubscribed and lots of the Yr11 kids who are very capable of staying on, they may now not be able to

@TheFridayFeeling DD yr 11 set off with good intentions during lockdown with her school work but then one of her grandparents died of covid during lockdown. So in the end understandably her mental health and her schoolwork suffered. Our relationship also broke down and is still extremely strained as we still tried to motivate her with her school work. School seem to be trying to make up for their lockdown holiday (her schools efforts were appalling) but now the pressure on the kids is immense with many subjects running revision sessions most nights after school yet their are only 5 nights in the week and maths and english are both running twice a week so work that out!! DD isn’t eating properly and is coming home from school absolutely freezing as she is extremely quiet she is sat next to a wide open window in most of her lessons too. She is dyslexic and her school decided to run mock exams two weeks into the term. They set a 1 hr 45 paper in 1 hour and DD is dyslexic so she should have received 25% extra time. They were given certificates with these meaningless grades on and needless to say most most kids grades were appalling and DD came out with a 4 in maths and a 3 in English. It just gets worse for this year group.

I’m livid and could cry for my DS
Like a pp although he did 4/5 hrs a day in lockdown, most of it was recapping rather than new topics and towards the end he was struggling to motivate himself as he’s an only child and very sociable
I now feel awful about pushing him into all GCSEs that are 100% exam (school pushed also for the EBACC) most of his friends seem to be doing GCSEs that involve coursework or a BTEC so they’ve got that done already in Yr10
He’s worked hard but I fear he’ll not get anywhere near the grade he is capable of and all those kids that were likely to get high passes may potentially scrape it or fail
The school aren’t totally blameless either as when he went back, over a third had done little or no work in lockdown (by choice, not because kids didn’t have the equipment) and yet the teachers have repeated most of it instead of moving on a little (he didn’t have to do the homework part) but it makes me so so angry
I can see the worry in him already
After losing nearly six months of GCSE schooling and THEN another 2 weeks at home due to 3 positives in Yr, I’m so angry at how they will have been failed

For information where we live the half term is different, the students effectively take exams during their half term break, and they’ve never had one. They work 10 weeks straight.

DD2 is pleased because she thinks she'll do better in exams than teachers assessment but I feel very concerned about the pressure on her to sit c.25 exams in 4 weeks with no half term breather / revision catch-up.

so it is a competitive year, plus masses of University deferrals by last year’s cohort (understandably)

Universities have increased the grades on popular degrees. This will reduce the number of students able to take a place. It’s happening already.

DDs ‘coarse’ has gone from ABB to AAB for September coming.