Year 11 2023-24

Heartfelt thanks to all the teachers from me too. DD has got her results back, did much better in physics & maths than she was expecting & is delighted with that. I think it's proved to her revision works.

Just hugs to everyone who's struggling. I really hope there is proper thought out reform of exams for future cohorts. Children taking up to 27 papers is beyond ridiculous.
There has to be a better way that serves highly academic kids & those who struggle with the pressure of 'all or nothing' exams.

Merry Christmas to you all.

Had parents evening today, DD did better in maths than I expected her to as she's always struggled with it, but 3's and 4's across most other subjects, her teachers are confident she can achieve 7's if she applies herself and the school does a lot of extra guided revision classes which helps, I think much easier to have the teachers guide them through it and make sure everything gets covered, it's a bit overwhelming otherwise. The issue is going to be how much she engages though, with the extra class each day it extends her school day to 5pm which is tiring and she's not one of the super motivated students.

They have more mocks in February hoping to see slightly higher grades then.

And also, thank you to the teachers, I really admire you teachers for what you up with and feel grateful to you for wanting the kids to do well. Lockdown and school closures confirmed that I couldn't be a teacher 😂

I second this thank you.

Got parents evening next week noticed that you can ask teachers questions prior to the meeting so I asked a couple of teachers for a copy of the mock papers see if we can spend time working where he can improve ! Really hoping next week goes by fast as my kids are shattered!

Can I also just take this opportunity to give a huge shout out to the teachers on this thread - thank you for everything you do , o think you are bloody marvellous ❤️

Yes, I think we'll do similar. I've also accepted and am trying to embrace the absolute fact that in order to keep momentum going until summer I am going to have to prepare to probably be seen as The Bad Guy for the foreseeable

I may have slid down the wall in dramatic fashion when one of y10 asked me the same thing which had been asked and answered several times in the lesson.

I love my job :)

DS has said that he is going to have the first week of holidays to relax and have fun with his friends (and also complete the rest of his sixth form applications). The second week will be starting on revision again. This seems like a reasonable plan to me. Would something like that suit your daughter tellmewhenthespaceshiplandscoz?

MrsHamlet - excellent! I have so much respect for teachers; I genuinely have no idea how you put up with it. I would either be a gibbering wreck or on remand for multiple counts of GBH before the end of September.

My year 11 are too tired to fight me. They did an 18 minute question in silence this morning. Poor broken things.

He has nothing in his life to feel sorry about Hopefully he's just tired and the home truths I told him yesterday, coupled with the school break, will filter through his stubborn skull and improve his mood and outlook. Fingers crossed.

Waspie I think you could be right, they are all so knackered at this time of year anyway so throw mocks in and it's compounded.

I'm currently pondering how to get the balance over Christmas of a break which she absolutely needs and starting some revision too as I don't think she's comprehended just how quickly February will come round.

A positive parent's evening is always a welcome lift gingercat02, I'm glad your son is engaging. We have parent's evening immediately after return to school. I'm hoping DS might have had time to think and be a little more positive about things.

We had another discussion about his negativity yesterday. Frankly it's wearing me down. I'm poorly with (I suspect) Covid and he's in this little self-centred world of "poor me, if only the school were better I'd be getting 9 x 9's" which is really hard to take. Particularly as some of the advice he's been given is that he needs to revise more effectively, but he has ignored all of the advice on how to revise given by the school. The school is so crap that it's even set up a micro-site on it's website with loads of revision guides, advice, videos etc. I mean can you imagine going to such a shit school?!

He has nothing in his life to feel sorry about Hopefully he's just tired and the home truths I told him yesterday, coupled with the school break, will filter through his stubborn skull and improve his mood and outlook. Fingers crossed.

School 6th Form evening last night. It was quite positive. DS actually engaged more than I expected. He had a plan of which subjects he wanted to see and did ask questions.
Grade wise 🤞 we should be OK if he continues to improve.
It was also nice to see parents we don't see as much of as we did and hear them all have the same concerns

Oh yes probably. Sorry!

Think you mixed me up. My son is struggling with English the rest he will pass except for Spanish.

🤣 Easy after the first 100.
Thought he was AQA but will double check when he is home.
Edited as I cant spell 😂

I'm no expert of course but DS has found having some model answers for the English language questions really helpful to identify what the examiners are looking for.

@Tebheag I'm sure you've already done this but the BBC have some good links GCSE English Language - Edexcel - BBC Bitesize including model answers.

I would love for him to drop some but I suppose the issue is what would he do while the other students are in the ones he's dropped? If he's by himself doing self study then he probably just wouldn't do it.

He did have a couple of subjects taken off him at the end of Year 9, but then the BTecs were added so that didn't make much sense to me.

It was parents evening recently and I nodded and agreed that he needs to keep revising for RE etc but really at home I'm going to strip it back to English language, maths and science. I know other subjects are important but I think at this stage of his education he really needs to focus on the ones that jobs will look for in his future.

@Tebheag word processing needs to be a normal way of working, and my experience tells me that many students find that much slower than writing. It's not always an advantage, hence suggesting looking at handwriting first.

If he's running out of time, he needs to know how long he should spend on each question and stick to it.

Marking is easy - after the first 100 or so, anyway!!! Are you AQA?

@Spacecowboys DS hand writing has always been really bad ever teacher since yr11 has commented on it. I tried everything at the start but he was not interested. It got worse over lock down as he was using a laptop. To be honest I never even knew you could request they used a laptop for typing instead of English.

@MrsHamlet thank you for your time. Think he said it was question 5 something about a short story! By sounds of it he may have ran out of time. Got parents evening next week so going to ask teacher for his paper. Got Christmas off so going to do a couple of practice papers. Hoping the marking is straight forward !! Any tips for marketing?

Personally, at this late stage if I had a 16 year old who’s teachers couldn’t read his exam papers ( and he was reasonable at typing) id absolutely be speaking to the school about this provision. My eldest dc was marked as grade 3 for his year 10 English mock papers ( due to handwriting) and with a laptop got grade 6’s for actual gcse. I made the suggestion to the poster based on my own personal experience as something worth exploring with school.

And in other schools, handwriting intervention hasn't taken place and is therefore a starting point. Word processing is an expensive provision, and isn't always the solution.

By year 11, many years of handwriting intervention should have taken place already - these issues do not present themselves at 15-16 years old. At our school, laptop provision had already been identified in year 10.

That only helps if they can type quickly. Many many teenagers can't.

We always start with handwriting intervention, then look at access to word processing after that.

If his writing is an issue, ask for a laptop which he can also use in exams.