GCSE reduced subjects advice needed

[Arizona29]

I started a different thread about this yesterday but am starting a new one here because I've got a new question and I know many readers never read OP updates on a thread!
DS year 9 had been put onto a GCSE pathway for additional support.
He has no SEN diagnosed.
He has never had any intervention classes at school.
School have never made me aware at any point since year 7 that they feel DS needs additional support.
I have not received any communication whatsoever about him being put on to an additional support GCSE pathway. It has been like a bolt out of the blue and I only found out on Monday.
Parents evening last week made no mention of it.
So I spoke to a member of staff about it today.
It is not a mistake, as suggested by posters on my other thread.
The member of staff has told me the following:
That DS has been put on a pathway for year 10 & 11 where he will study
Maths
English
Science
1 humanity OR 1 language (his choice but only 1 of these)
2 practical based subjects of his choice such as DT, art, music, cookery, dance, photography, etc.
3 extra Maths intervention sessions a fortnight
3 extra English intervention sessions a fortnight
He cannot choose 2 humanities.
He cannot choose 1 humanity & 1 language.
He cannot choose 2 humanities & 1 language.
it is 1 humanity only.
He is only 1 of 16 students who has been put on this pathway out of the whole of year 9.
The 'standard' Ebacc pathway is
English, maths, science, 1 humanity, 1 language, then 2 further options which can include a second humanity, even a third one, but DS had not been given this pathway as an option.
I was confused when I posted on my other thread yesterday, and I remain confused.
I still don't understand how DS has been put on this additional support pathway with no communication whatsoever about any learning delay or concerns whatsoever from school in the 2.5 years he's been there.
I asked this question directly today, and it wasn't answered. It was glossed over.
DS is really upset.
A. He doesn't want to do only 1 humanity and no language. He feels he's had all his choices removed from him.
B. He says nobody at school has talked to him about this.
C. He feels excluded from the standard pathway that all his friends are doing.
D. He is asking me do his school think he's stupid and incapable
E. He fears stigma about this amongst his peers, and feels he is going to get comments and 'jokes' about not being able to do what everyone else is doing.
He has never had a conversation with, or any input from, the SenCo.
I have never had a conversation with the SenCo about DS.
The SenCo has never contacted me about DS to discuss him.
Again, he has no SEN.
So.
My questions to people here who have knowledge and experience:

1. What the hell is going on here?
2. Can they enforce this? Does DS have any choice or any say in the matter??
3. What right do school have to remove his choice to do 2 humanities, or 1 humanity + 1 language? Without any prior conversation with him or with me?
4. AIBU to feel they are 'dumbing down' his options?
5. Why does DS have to choose 2 options from a list of practical subjects? This isn't the pathway he wants to follow - cookery, or DT, or dance, or drama, etc. But he's now got to pick 2 of these subjects.

The list of the 2 extra choices on the standard Ebacc pathway contains additional academic choices.
Whereas the list of 2 extra choices on the additional support pathway DS has been placed on contains no academic choice whatsoever.
If he only does Maths, English, Science + 1 humanity, plus 2 practical non academic subjects, is this going to exclude him from doing A levels and a degree??
DS most definitely wants a career that will require A levels and degree. Will this additional needs pathway block him from going on to do A levels & degree because he won't have enough GCSE subjects?
DS is an intelligent boy. I can't believe the school are restricting his GCSE choices like this and putting him on this pathway, having never once put him into any additional intervention measures since starting in year 7.
His year 9 assessment scores were all below the year group average. Not way below. But they were below. His results do not reflect his intelligence or capability. He said he knew all the answers but didn't get to complete the assessments as ran out of time. So the unanswered questions that he hadn't got to pulled his total score down, even though all the questions he did answer were correct.
Basically I feel like I've got an intelligent boy who hasn't performed well in the year 9 assessments and as a result has been placed on an intervention GCSE pathway that enforces a reduced number of GCSEs and being forced to take 2 practical subjects instead, yet with no consent from or discussion with DS or myself about this.
I have tried really hard to speak to the SenCo since Monday when I found this out, but I am not receiving any replies to the emails I have sent her requesting for her to contact me to discuss this. I've been told this has all been based on her recommendation, yet she's never even had a conversation with me or with DS.
I am really worried aboug the impact this will have on DS's options, choices, future success and I'm worried about this affecting his self esteem.
Only 16 kids out of an entire huge year 9 cohort have been assessed as unable to do the Ebacc route and my intelligent DS is one of them? He's in the bottom 10% of kids who isn't allowed to do the standard Ebacc pathway that the other 90% of kids are following and yet he has no SEN and has never been given additional interventions at school and who is really bright?
From what I know of his blunt and highly insensitive and never-endingly mocking peers, he is not wrong when he says he is going to get put downs and negative comments from peers about this.
He has such hopes for his future career and these restricted and limited GCSEs are going to block that, because his career hopes require A levels & degree.
Help😞

I really don’t think the urgency matters. What the school want is time to ensure all of the kids options can be timetabled. They’re not entering people for GCSE exams more than 2 years away in 10 days time. They just need the forms back so they can start working out if everyone gets their choices, how many classes they need and whether it all works. That’s the urgency. Getting one form back a week late (when they have messed that child around hugely) is fairly inconsequential.

Fair enough maybe not the C of G
But in the OP's shoes I would be emailing anyone who would listen

Hi OP. I'm sorry you're going through all this.

You need to demand an urgent meeting with the Head of Year today. Don't take no for an answer.

If what he's saying is true - ie. his weaker exam performance is a timing issue, rather than an ability issue - he needs a full Ed Psych Assessment now.

For instance, teachers at DS' school noticed that although the answers he was giving were very good, he often wasn't finishing papers. He was assessed - processing issues were identified - and he was given 25% extra time.

I'm amazed tour son has never been referred for an Ed Psych assessment if his profile is as you claim. Especially if his performance has deteriorated in key subjects since the start of Year 9 (this is when children who have previously been 'ok' ish or under the radar often start to struggle, as exams become longer GCSE-style papers and the content they are required to learn increases).

If the school is adamant about this pathway they have put him on, they need to show you very clear evidence - ie:

CAT scores since entering the school
Other assessment results of concern throughout the school
NOT JUST ONE ASSESSMENT.

If they are unable to produce more rigorous evidence than just this recent test result, you could suggest he does the test again (or a similar paper).

Ask them to specify why he was never assessed for SLD. Usually this would be the first port of call when a student is slipping behind. It's very odd.

Get answers today, Just go into the school if your emails are being ignored. Good luck!

What an awful shocking situation for you to be in. One thing I would suggest doing is checking the entry criteria for whichever college your child is likely to want to go to. That may reduce some of the pressure on you both right now. My child was diagnosed with inattentive ADHD only a few months before GCSEs. They weren't expected to pass anything, but actually did pass 6 in the end and has been able to start A-levels. I thought it would be game over when school suggested dropping a GCSE but actually turned out to be a blessing. Good luck.

it could be all types of things but it will be something, my daughter has dyspraxia which affects her fine and gross motor skills - she would frequently only get a few lines down on paper as she was so slow and torturous writing. Once we knew this and she was allowed to use a word processor for written answers she flew . do seek a review ASAP

So they have then. It was last week. Just busy and you didn't speak to all the teachers.

My DD did even though she haa dyslexia and extra support for English Language.

English Lit is so much more like geography or history rather than English Language . You are learning a subject (Scrouge for example) and answering questions on the book.

My DD did so much better in Lit than Language. We learnt Scrouge by watching the play and watching the Muppets version on TV.

You get SPAG points same as geography but most of the marks are for answering with the correct quote or answer.

Struggling with exams can also be exam technique. GCSEs are half subject knowledge and half exam technique unfortunately.

Are you able to see the marking in his exercise books for homework where he presumably isn’t at a time limit?

That sounds like a GCSE options evening rather than what I'd consider to be a parents' evening (where the teacher would give you individual feedback about your child).

For reference, DC's school does both - it has a parents' evening where you can make appointments to meet with individual teachers to understand your child's progress (and recommendations for GCSE), and then a few weeks later a GCSE options evening which is for the students to find out more about courses offered.

I think this is pretty poor from your school. Any chance of moving your DC :) ?

Can you email your child’s teachers? You know his maths ability but it sounds like you need to at least ask about his English ability and whether the teacher feels that your son is at risk of not passing atm. I would assume that any problems in English might translate to other essay subjects too.

Does your school provide targets and attainment grades? My kids had expected GCSE grades based on year 6 SATS as well. Remember that if they use jargon like meeting his target, it means the grade generated by his year 6 SATS grade and not necessarily achieving a GCSE pass.

I was diagnosed with dyslexia in 2021 (aged 31) and it came as a complete shock. I learned to read quickly and was a voracious reader well into adulthood, and I have always been told that I write well. I have actually just submitted my PhD thesis and my supervisor frequently compliments my writing. She was equally shocked by the diagnosis!

The Ed Psych report says that my scores for verbal reasoning, pattern recognition and reading* are all above average but I have "marked and unexpected difficulty" with processing and working memory. So, when reading, I can read the words accurately but it takes a bit of time for me to digest what it actually means. I also struggle with parallel processing, for example trying to complete a task while following instructions. Tasks take me a lot longer than most people to complete but they tend to be of a very high quality straight off the bat (I pore over it line by line as I'm writing rather than bashing out a rough draft and going back in to edit it).

I don't know if that's helpful but I just wanted to (re)assure you that your son may be dyslexic despite being able to read well.

*I may have misremembered the category names but they are along those lines!

It is quite unusual for schools to be able to access an Ed psych assessment these days. Was this in the private sector?

Ex teacher here.
There are a lot of myths regarding EBacc
EBacc is mainly a box tick regarding the schools performance. I have never known a 6th form or university deny a student a course based on them not having the EBacc range of subjects at GCSE.
So the priority at this stage is for your son to get Level 4+ in Maths and English so that he doesn't have to resit in year 12.
Given his below average performance in his assessments I can see why his school might think his best chance of doing this is to have the reduced number of options.
Only your son knows whether he revised properly for his assessments. I noticed you have not responded to other posters on whether or not he does his homework.
This might be key here regardless of whether there are any other SEN issues. Remember having a SEN diagnosis will only give him on average 25% extra time. It won't change the difficulty of the questions, the quality of answer required or the amount of memorized factual information that will be needed.
You need a very honest conversation with your son before you can evaluate if the reduced timetable is the best option for your him.
If he is not prepared to work hard outside of normal lessons, he would probably be better with the reduced timetable which will have more revision time and exam technique practice and opportunities built in.
At this stage he should be leading the conversation on these choices with your support.

Don’t assume that your son couldn’t have dyslexia just because he is a good reader!

When my daughter’s school suggested we had her tested for dyslexia, our initial reaction was that she couldn’t possibly have dyslexia because she had always been a good reader.

We had not understood that dyslexia covers a much wider range of difficulties. My daughter’s difficulties were with processing and working memory, not with reading, and it sounds like a number of other posters have similar experiences.

Get him tested! Tell the school you are doing that and until the results are in you would like him to be able to select whatever GCSEs he wants.

If dyslexia is not found to be a problem you may need to rethink.

@Arizona29 I have tried to read all of your updates so I do apologise if I have missed anything important.

From what I can tell, you have stated that there has been no indication of academic challenges before now and that no issues have been raised. Your DS is articulate and verbally bright but seem to be struggling with getting this on paper, is that right?

Firstly, I need to challenge that just a little (sorry, it's in my nature). Has your DS been telling you everything that's been going on? As much as the assessments that have just gone on might be the first formalised tests for the year, what about the in class tests? End of topic tests? Has he been telling you what has been going on with these? My daughter went to independent school with small class sizes but it was still more efficient to get information out of her than the school.

My understanding would be that unless there was a significant change in performance, it wouldn't be chased up by school to you - they would assume that you already know. And, in all honesty, a parent's evening at a small school is like a free for all. They may feel is attitude is good but his attainment might not be. Added to this that he had been dropped down a maths set, that's another indication that everything isn't hunkydory academically speaking. When my daughter was dropped from set 1 to set 2, I asked her about it as to what the problems were. You can't say you haven't had ANY indication, because it seems like you have.

That being said, this really isn't the end of the world at all. It would be much better for your DS to get 8 decent passes than10 fails - most colleges want 5 grade 5s to get into college with more specific requirements for certain A levels, but that gives him scope to focus. It does sound that this is actually about what is in his best interest, rather than trying to exclude or punish him. If he can't finish these in school assessments, he isn't going to cope well with thirty odd GCSE exams in two years time. That's the purpose of the 'practical' subjects - to spread the load across the time period

That is the other element that needs addressing though - he sounds bright but struggling. There is obviously something that needs pinning down.

Best of luck to you both x
Edited for typo

DS was diagnosed with dyslexia. He was always good at reading. Passed the phonics test. Dyslexia isn’t what you think - get him tested!

And you need to advocate for him.

DS scored about 5 years ahead on verbal reasoning! It was his working memory that was the issue.

They can have spiky profiles! Way ahead in some areas and behind in others

OP, I think there is general agreement that you and your son have been badly served in terms of communication from the school, both now and historically. Your frustration and anger on behalf of DS is clear, but it’s important to clarify what the next steps will be in a way that will benefit him and satisfy you.

You are concerned about how DS will feel if he is on a different pathway from his friends and peers and that he will feel left out and perhaps teased. On the other hand, how will he feel if he is unable to manage the workload of the higher number of subjects effectively and all the subjects suffer because of it. That might be challenging for his self esteem.

Whether or not he is high ability, it seems that he is having some difficulty with finishing assessments. That might need some further exploration and testing to ascertain whether he will need additional arrangements for exams, which may include extra time, rest breaks, word processing, a scribe etc.

In the end, would you rather he took more exams and compromised his grades, or fewer with good outcomes. As PP have said, there are plenty of options and opportunities other than a wholly academic route and they don’t rule out university ultimately, if appropriate. He may be suited to more vocational pathways and what is important is that he is as successful as he can be in whichever pathway he is suited to and enjoys.

In many years of teaching, I’ve seen students who are very successful doing vocational courses, including my own. Sometimes, it takes a little longer, but that doesn’t matter ultimately.

Going on my experience with my kids. Firstly at their schools they did not encourage two humanities due to the amount of content involved. Mine both had to get permission first. However it was up to them which route they wanted to choose. Both wanted to choose the ebacc pathway.

I would make an appointment to see the head teacher and explain his interest in languages and you want him to choose subjects that interest him. We were always told that the most important thing is the kids are interested in their subjects. I can't understand why he can't choose what he prefers. What are his grades like in the foreign language? Does he generally pass maths and English when he sits exams?

You ask about A levels too. This alternative pathway will not stop him doing A levels.

The GCSE limitations will be because of fitting in the maths and English intervention classes on the timetable. It sounds like they are timetabled in the slots reserved for humanities subjects, presumably because most of the students who need the intervention are only taking one humanities subject. I don’t think he can be forced to do practical subjects if he doesn’t enjoy them. But if you and he insist on choosing two humanities subjects, then he presumably won’t be able to do the intervention lessons. If not having the intervention lessons means he fails his maths and English GCSEs, then his opportunities for further education will be limited far more than if he’d dropped to one humanities subject and passed English and maths. Also, A levels are hard and certainly not for everyone. Most A level courses don’t just ask a pass in that subject as well as passes in English & Maths but typically a grade 6 or above in the subject being studied in order to cope with the more rigorous A-level syllabus. So it may be that they’re trying to steer him now towards a more practical pathway rather than academic as they’ve predicted he’ll struggle.

I think you need to talk with his form tutor or head of year 9 and explain that he really doesn’t want to do those subjects. Would private tutoring in maths and English be an option if he wants to continue with more than one humanities subject?

The obvious next step is to have a meeting with the head of year. They should have his assessment data and know what his profile looks like and why they have recommended what they have. The HOY should respond to this request.

I have mentioned previously about my eldest dc (who has dyslexia, and in primary school we were told that school didnt think he had dyslexia, he was just ‘in the lower reaches of the ‘average’ band’). My dh has dyslexia, so we got a private ed psych assessment for my dc - who turned out to have a very spiky profile, with very low processing speed and working memory, but extremely high everything else. The Ed Psych identified it as dyslexia. He was always underestimated by teachers, especially in maths, throughout secondary school.

We had a long conversation about his difficulties in maths, when he was in early year 11. I also spoke to his maths teacher. I thought it might be useful for me to outline here, for @Arizona29 (and other pp’s who are interested) what difficulties my son’s dyslexia gave him in maths, as it is not obvious - and his teacher had no clue about it. And this is dyslexia, not dyscalculia. My son also has very messy / large handwriting (another signal for dyslexia), and this gives a certain impression, especially when seen in tandem with spelling mistakes!

1. Dyslexia can give problems with processing long and involved sequences of information - so when maths questions start to look like comprehension questions (where you actually need to read a paragraph of text to unpick what the question is, and there are lots of different things going on, and lots of different parts to the question, this can cause massive problems for students with dyslexia, even if they are completely secure in the actual maths concepts. This can take a long time to work out what the question is asking, and working memory issues might mean that intermediate steps of manipulating data, and retaining that data to manipulate another way can be very problematic. (So making sure to clearly note down intermediate steps can really help).
2. My son used to find that if he came across a really difficult question early on in a maths test / exam (or physics), then he would really struggle and would not be able to work it out, and would waste lots of time trying (meaning he would often not finish the test). As he went into year 12 &13, he started using a different strategy - if he couldn’t see how to attempt an early question he would just leave it, and come back to it at the end. By which time his brain would have ‘warmed up’ and he would be able to see how to do it straight away. Not sure if this is just a dyslexia thing (needing the brain to ‘warm up’), or if it is a universal thing?
3. His working memory issues mean that he struggles to retain abstract symbols in his head, even for short periods - so this would mean that during calculations, something that was a ‘+’ in one line may be transposed as a ‘-‘ on the line below. This means that unless he has time to go back and check through all of his work at the end then he is likely to lose a lot of marks from faulty transposing. His secondary school didn’t typically allow him to have extra time during class assessments, so he didn’t tend to have time to check for errors. His teacher thought he was really struggling with maths, and suggested he didn’t do it at A level. My son moved schools for sixth form, did maths A level, and his new teachers thought he was great (they had an established culture of allowing extra time for dyslexia). He did really well at A level, and is now on track for a really good degree in a stem subject (and will be doing a stem MSc next year).

A further tip (this time for Eng Lit and the like); my son used to find that when having to memorise lots of quotes for the various texts, he would forget the quotes when he would start reading / answering the questions (again, it is a working memory thing - very like a sieve when there is something else that your mind is busy with), so the solution he found was to quickly identify what theme the essay question was about, then before starting to answer it, write down all the relevant quotes (before they disappeared). Then you can structure / plan the essay, and you have a ready bank of quotes at the top of the page.

1 maths
combined science = 2
eng lang
eng lit
humanity
2 others
All adds up to 8.
Perfectly respectable.
You do need to speak to school asap. BUT be realistic about what’s possible. If he’s really struggling now (even if your didn’t know about it) it’s will be a tough couple of years. Trust me.

Ok so dc high school have 4 pathways for gcse years. Depending on students strengths.

They range from very academic to 8 gcses, mixed acadamic - 6 gcse, mixed vocational - 5 gcse, vocational 1 or 2 gcse, maths cert and apprenticeship.

They can also pick a choice of btecs to replace some.gcse subjects
Imo your approaching this all wrong. The school trying to make the most of your son so he can get best results possible.

No school puts a child in extra maths and English if they don't need it

What were his scores in year 9?