To expect the school to complete the syllabus

[user1456882310]

Dds School haven't managed to cover half the Physics GCSE topics and have whole chapters left to do in Chemistry and Biology. School recognise its"not ideal" but have no contingency other than to cram lessons together and pick areas the kids just do themselves.
Dd very worried as these are her chosen A levels.
Advice pls

There is also that. We COULD move one of our actual maths teachers to teach physics, but then we'd have to find someone to teach maths, and we already don't have enough maths teachers teaching maths.

Get the CGP books. I went to a very rough school where 12% of pupils got 5 a-c, they covered a fraction of the content and I got A*s in sciences using them.

I'm a primary school teacher.

Since the current curriculum was introduced in 2014, it has been impossible to fit in the crazy amount of curriculum content into the time we have with the children. We have a choice between racing through everything at the speed of light so that only the brightest kids get it, or 'teaching for mastery' which means going at the pace the children need so that they learn everything properly and no one gets left behind but missing out 50% of what's on the curriculum.

It's pretty much a no-win situation and frankly I am sick of it.

I wouldn't expect them to be finished yet. Loads of subjects will still be teaching up until Easter. As pp have commented its a combination of focus on mastery, possible factors out of their control and the content requirements frankly being unrealistic.

Having said that the amount you describe seems too much and I don't think teaching themselves whole topics sounds good at all.

started out teaching the old O level courses so I have been teaching GCSE's since they were introduced. The first courses worked very well by, for example, allowing students not intending to follow Science courses later on to study Single Combined Science (3 50 minute lessons per week). There were tweaks to remove unlimited resits of the multiple choice modular exams which were available 3 times a year to reduce the pressure in the summer and the introduction of internally assessed experiment based exams. The along came Michael Gove. ALL students, no matter their interest or ability have to sit a minimum of Double Combined Science (6 lessons per week). When we first met to look at the new Physics specification (AQA) and decide how many lessons were needed for each topic we found we were a whole term short of teaching time, especially for Separate Physics (9 lessons per week). The only solution we could come up with was to start teaching the GCSE course in Year 9, tackling topics which we thought students with Y9 reading age and maths ability could access. Most schools seemed to arrive at the same conclusion. Even with this early start we always have to emphasise to the students that teaching of new topics goes up to nearly the last available lesson and they must get into the habit of revising as they go along and learn new work. The only way I can see to fit the huge amount of content into Years 10 and 11 (5 terms less mock exam weeks trips, extra bank holidays etc) would be to cut out nearly all of the student practical work except for the 10 required practicals which feature heavily in the terminal exams and teach the course at a 'devil take the hindmost' pace. ie to put even the best students off continuing with Physics at A level. And don't get me started on the stupidly huge amount of factual recall which Mr Gove decided should be in all of the GCSE Sciences - in 2016 we laughed in despair when we saw the number of formulae students have to learn for both Combined and Separate GCSE Physics.

My foster son had this due to Covid. We just got him a Science tutor twice a week for about 4 months. Expensive but foster child already had such a poor start in life we tried to balance his life chances up for him.

My daughter is in the same situation for one of her GCSEs. Unfortunately school just can’t get the teachers - there is a national shortage.

That is utterly bollocks.

Yawn, yawn, yawn

mumsetter posts about situation in school, teacher with many decades experience explains likely real situation in school, somebody with different experience or no experience at all claims whatever they have just been told happens, doesn't happen, when they clearly don't have the first clue.

Learn, and understand, or carry on being ignorant, I don't care

You are making no sense whatever and not one poster on this thread finds your fake data credible. You sound like a sloppy, bigoted teacher and a great advertisement for why parents wouldn't be keen to have their children in full time schooling. We do at least cover the course and don't respond with puerile comments when challenged. It wouldn't surprise me if you actively target home educated students as there is no way 90 percent of them would go out of their way to disrupt your classroom.