GCSE Options

Is the RS a short course or full GCSE? Not many schools (including selective) do 11 GCSEs now that they’re linear unless additional maths is the 11th. There’s a lot of content.
Mine did 10, including both Geog & history. Lots of kids take both as they’re very different and use differing skills. If she fancies both then that’ll be fine.
It’s a shame she has no preference whatsoever as that’s the obvious way to go. Whatever she prefers/fancies the most will be the ‘best’ choice. She needs to know a bit more about what the courses entail. As others have suggested ask if she can talk to a yr10/11 about them. Can she sit in a couple of the lessons even over zoom?

Drama relies on group work. If the others don't pull their weight it will affect your daughter's final grade. This happened with DD's Citizenship GCSE because the other girl she worked with did no work. DD failed her coursework, but aced her exam, so did manage to pull her marks up to pass, thank goodness.

11 GCSEs is a lot of work. I don't understand why schools do this.

The only trouble is clearly she doesn't fancy any of those subjects, or else the choice would be easy.
For a very bright child, they'll thrive and get high grades in everything.
Drama is fun and a good subject. Don't forget she'll need a lighter option. She's not doing any lighter subjects from her list.
Geography is the most academic presumably.
Business is a great subject. Many students link it to economics and maths at Alevel with a view to accountancy.

I encouraged my DC to take one creative subject- my DSs chose product design and DD chose drama. DD has absolutely loved her drama GCSE course, which came as a total surprise to me.

She needs to be aware that quite a significant portion of the marks for the divisive piece which you work with others for and the log that goes with this. So that mark is quite heavily reliant on working with others.
There is also a scripted piece and the exam with a set script piece.
For AQA the devised piece is 40%, scripted piece 20% and exam 40%.

For the exam there are 44 marks for the set play and 32 marks for discussing a production you have seen within certain for example costumes. For this you need to know your set play inside out ( just like English lit) and the production really well.

Drama for sure and hopefully no further dusruptions! 11 is quite a load though! My daughter is os doing 9 plus an individual project and dropped D of E this year as it was too time consuming (plus hard to fulfil the obligations in lockdown).
Our school it's ususlly history or geography,.

I don't think there is such as thing as an easy GCSE, but DS2 did say he reckoned he could have passed the GCSE in business as a lot of his pals did it and it looked "like common sense". I am pretty sure there is a lot more to it than that tho!

Can she talk to someone doing business (no studies any more btw) in year 9 or 10 and see what they say? She will know I would imagine if she likes geography or not. All of mine had strong feelings on that by the end of year 7 tbh (tho I do appreciate this has been an unusual 12 months - this must be a tough decision).

Whatever happens, she has a good range of subjects there.

I'd be worried about drama not running as normal due to covid. Maybe irrational, but a lot seems crazy still.

My DD is in year 10 and doing virtually those subjects - she’s doing Spanish rather than French but everything else is the same.

She seems to be fine with it all - about half of them at her school do 11 GCSEs as they do single sciences, whereas the rest do dual award science.

Personally I think Business at GCSE may be less interesting than she’d hoped, although the trips sound good!

Why are you concerned that Bus St isn't academic enough for her? She's got plenty of academic subjects to do - an easy one might be a bit of light relief. I'm guessing she isn't bothered about Geo if she's picked History as her humanity. So I'd say Drama and Bus.

I did drama GCSE, it was fun. There was an essay element as well as the practical side.

I also did history and geography GCSE.

I learnt more in terms of information from the history and geography.

I learnt more in terms of confidence and how to get noticed from drama. One thing that has stayed with me is 'they can't give you points if you don't say it' that simple lesson has served me very well in interviews / group assessments over the years.

If she enjoys Drama, then absolutely she should do it.

In fact a rule of thumb would be that she should choose the subjects she enjoys. The main thing at GCSE is to keep options open - the only options she would be closing by not taking Geography/Business is probably that she won't be able to take these at A Level. But even that might not be the case everywhere.

You've listed 11 GCSEs (which is a huge number). Other than Drama (and even that has a lot of writing) they are all quite "heavy" subjects. Obviously it might not be her thing, but are there no less solidly academic subjects she could choose to make her workload a bit easier? I'd guess she would be looking at taking 25+ exams in the summer of 2024