Asking my Sons school to host a GCSE exam in a subject they dont teach (sons native language)

To answer the safeguarding/DBS question: many organisations which require examiners to go to lots of different schools have their staff use the portable DBS and they contact the young person's school in advance. I teach Music and we never have issues with the ABRSM examiners or Music Hub staff. We have 3 different coloured lanyards for adults. One is the school's colour with the name of the school on it, one is green which means the wearer's DBS status is known & verified. The other is red which means unverified. Adults wearing school or green lanyards can work unsupervised, red-lanyarded people must be accompanied by a school/green one at all times.

There are lots of online gcse courses just ask one of them about enrolling in the exams.

OP, you need to look into past papers/study prep books and make sure he is prepared for the exam. A lot of native speakers have poor literacy if they have never actually studied. Don’t assume he can just walk through this.

Yes OP you will need to download the specification from the exam board website and go through some past papers to help prepare.

This is really common op. Schools love it because usually the kids do really well! We didn't have to pay ourselves for the extra room

DS is bilingual and did GCSE in his 'other' language
Yes to old papers, but also see if there is a tutor in the language locally. He did about ten classes with a tutor focused on exam structure which also helped tighten up the more formal grammar needed for the written part of the exams. He did say he found the exam different to being fluent in the language.

Are you sure he’d do well in an exam? I’ve known native/semi-native speakers not do well, because they can’t write or spell well in the language, or know any grammar. Sometimes they’ve completely failed that section - they might have used the wrong script altogether, for example.

Failing support from the school see if you can enter for it elsewhere as a private/external candidate. You could try Tutors & Exams to start with.

Most external assessors are not DBS checked for that particular school. Technically you need a dbs check for the school you are in (but some may turn a blind eye to that).

Don't be too sure, my inner city English school had a teacher of Urdu, Panjabi, Hindi, Gujarati, Italian, Spanish, French, German, Welsh and Icelandic, and possibly more that I don't know/remember they didn't offer GCSEs in all of those languages. We had access to teachers of Japanese too.

Hopefully you will get sorted but I wouldn’t worry if not- if your dc is fluent in their language they don’t need a gcse to “prove” it. I can see it might be helpful though.

My school loves students who do this!

I've worked in schools who have arranged for GCSE exams in children's first languages. Usually it's the head of MFL who can arrange as long as senior leadership are on board. Parental support was beneficial for some languages though in terms of finding assessors who speaks the language.

Not if they are DBS checked. Ours were permitted to be alone with the oral assessor.

If the oral assessor is NOT a teacher at the school then there must be an invigilator there to act as a chaperone - for safeguarding purposes.

Go straight to the Head of the languages dept. He/she will make it happen as they recognise the importance of having a qualification. My former languages teacher did this for several pupils - Italian, mandarin and Serbian.

I did GCSE and A level in my mother tongue and tbh it didn’t really add anything to my opportunities or qualifications. People generally believe you if you say you are fluent or bilingual in a language -
and can easily see if it’s true if it’s relevant for the job. Otherwise they look for a certain number of GCSEs or Alevels. The extra one I guess may help if your DC will struggle to get good grades in the other subjects.

there's a big gap between speaking a language as a bilingual child and being able to get a top grade in the gcse subject. gcse languages have a rigid mark scheme and it's possible to answer the questions accurately and without any actual mistakes but still not get a good mark because e.g. you didn't demonstrate a particular kind of subject-object-adjective agreement or use a kind of phrasing that they are looking out for. schools that say no to this have probably been burned in the past by speakers of other languages signing up to do a gcse, doing badly due to not having done any formal study, and dragging the school's performance averages down.

Former exams officer here. My old school happily did this every year. Usually 1 or 2 polish speakers for us but other random languages popped up too each year. Head of languages organised it all and simply booked an external assessors to come in for the spoken part. Then exam papers all simply sat as normal (in a small room if only one or two pupils).

In my day (a while ago now!) GCSE orals were done with a teacher from the school and A level orals were done with an outside examiner who came to the school.

Our school said no to acting as exam centre. Hope you have more luck. Another local school agreed though.

I have invigilated Oral A level Spanish exams with an outside examiner so I know it happens (I had to correct him when he got the Centre Number wrong so its a good job I was there). I didn't supervise any GCSE orals so I won't argue with you there.

No harm in asking

but also look at the option doing it later when he leave at college or remote learning