Year 11 2023-24

Yes had a good read and the content level 3, I can see why the ‘matched to purpose’ might be questionable but the rest of content seems ok as does the level 3 organisation. DM you x

Hard to say without seeing the work, but I'd say it might well struggle to get much into "clear" which is level 3.

Are you familiar with the mark scheme?

Huge thanks!
So in terms of question 5, the creative writing. If the prompt was to write a story involving an encounter with an animal, how much of the story needs to be about an encounter with an animal. If for example, in the time given, the student haven’t quite got on to the ‘encounter’, perhaps because they were zooming out or writing a build up, how problematic is that in terms of the mark scheme?

@TeenDivided polishing my "helpful" badge ;)

Shudder. Paper 1 writing gives me the heebie jeebies. But the mark scheme for my far superior paper is identical. Ask away, @Panic71

huge thanks
AQA paper 1 question 5. I’d be super grateful @mrshamlet

@Panic71 which board, which paper? Creative writing or writing for purpose? MrsHamlet is a helpful English teacher who frequents this board.

Is anyone an English teacher amongst us? Would love to pick your brains on Language paper, question 5

DS is off sick today. He's been under the weather all weekend, and when we were talking this morning, he just burst into tears and said he is so stressed about school that he doesn't know what to do.
This is not the life I wanted for him at 15!

Ah OK, so all is not lost by the sounds of it. But I also wonder whether there are academies and/or colleges in your own borough which don’t apply the borough-wide rules you’ve identified?

Yes, thankfully the neighbouring borough has grammar schools who recruit on average GCSE point score, so we probably have a solution. Bit annoying though, as we expected her to stay local.

@newmum1976 Are there good schools and colleges in neighbouring boroughs you could look at, which might have more flexible admissions arrangements?

Ours give priority to students all ready at the school if it’s a school with 6th form. The colleges I’m less sure

That make sense, but the admissions for the schools in our borough are 1 - current pupils; 2- external state pupils in borough; 3 - out of borough and private pupils.

All the school sixth forms we visited prioritised their own pupils ( not London though) so by default that will be state school over private. But in my DS's school there are always several kids who have moved over from the Private school to State 6th form.

My DD is trying to move from a private school to state for sixth form. The local schools in our London Borough prioritise state school pupils in their admissions, so she’ll only get a place if there are any left after all state pupils. Is this a common admission policy elsewhere?

For some of dcs subjects, they covered 100% of the content in the trial exams but haven’t covered all the topics in class yet. So for that reason I don’t think the mock grade can be a real reflection for those subjects. For other subjects, they only did paper 1 , so 50% of the content. Perhaps the February mocks will give a better idea for the real things? My older child was also covid years so first time for us too.

Mock results out tomorrow for us, I think ds did revise and work quite hard for them. So fingers crossed he's not too disappointed.

Anyone got any thought on mock results in relation to the real things? My older kids were covid years so this is actually the first time we'll be seeing GCSEs through to the end.

I hope it works out for your son. My DDs predictions were lower than her Mocks for the reasons you mention. It’s very frustrating as she wants to leave her current private school, but this will make it difficult.

@Panic71 my son's friend is the same - they have opted to do foundation and get the solid pass rather than risk higher.

My son gets his mock results next Friday. These are important because they are the predicted grades he has to use in his sixth form applications. But we've had a letter from the assistant head which says that the predicted grades would be based on the mocks, other classroom assessments and subject teacher.

My son is now worried that if he gets good results in his mocks the school will predict a lower grade. His reasoning for this is that we get a report each term with a predicted grade on it for each subject and these grades don't reflect the marks he gets in assessments and for home and class work.

We have raised this at open evenings and the teachers replies are always "ignore these predictions they're based on yr 6 SATS and yr 7 CATS, we're expecting him to get two grades higher than that". It seems mad to me that they are sending out reports in years 10 and 11 based on KS2 data. Anyway DS is worried that his predictions are going to be similarly low like his reports.

I assume it's just down to the school/academy trust to use their own judgement on predicted grades? I'm hoping they'll give mock results and predicted grades so that we could potentially ask for the predictions to be reviewed if they are vastly different to the results.

My eldest did GCSEs in one of the final years pre reform. Her first controlled assessment was iirc in October of y10.

So much time was spent prepping and doing CAs in English, they failed to notice until mocks that she couldn't actually do the English Language exam paper at all.

It also made y10&y11 a hard slog as there was always a CA in something to be prepped for (did 2 MFLs so 8 CAs for them to be written and learned).

Fewer exams at the end was good, but that system didn't help less mature students as you had to hit the ground running right from the start.

I wish it was like that in England!!Spreading things out seems much more sensible to me.

T2 actually went in for her mocks today 🎉. Maths and biology. It will be v interesting to see how she does after no revision whatsoever!

Panic - I would go for Foundation. Gives more time to revise the other subjects.

It’s bonkers how we differently we do things here in Wales.

ds did all of his English lit, science practicals and 1 paper in each of the sciences and some Welsh lit last year in year 10. They also did half of their maths, and did the rest at the beginning of this month and have now started the additonal maths curriculum. They did their individual music recital in October. This week they did some geography controlled assessments using their field trips coursework and they will do more Welsh Lit in January and their music composition is due in at the end of January.

Mocks for what’s left will be after February half term!

Here’s the WJEC exam timetable for next summer https://www.wjec.co.uk/media/fgrjsjxz/summer-2024-wales-and-eduqas-gcse-final-exam-timetable-22-06-23.pdf

@Panic71 No idea!

Thanks @TeenDivided
Would you stick with higher?