Exam question

[fivecandles]

If your child wanted to sit an exam which was not on their school curriculum or wouldn't fit into their options or if your child wanted to sit an exam early e.g. French in Yr 9 how would you go about that? I.e. could you contact a local school or college? I understand it would be easier with the IGCSE since you could then avoid the problem of getting coursework/controlled assessment supervised and marked. I imagien Home edders have experience of this? Thanks, in advance.

Work out the board you prefer, find an exam centre willing to take external candidates, that's it.

Registration deadlines sometimes surprise, they can be very early. One to one home ed can be much faster and more effective than school teaching, you can imagine a fully prepared and hormonal DC with another 6 months to go before the exam, so maintaining interest is also something to think about.

Yes to it being much simpler to stick with exam only subjects. I'd choose iGCSE for the sciences and MFLs.

We're doing distance learning through the NEC.

£300 for distance learning of one GCSE course. We've only been with them for a month now, but so far I'm pleased enough with them........

If you child is older there's quite a lot of choice with distance learning courses, but if you child is younger NEC was the only place I could find that would enrol DS.....

Ask the school to enter your child for the exam. They might ask you to pay the exam entry fee, I suppose. My daughter did a subject that wasn't on her school curriculum but it was a GCSE offered by an exam board the school was using for other subjects. Maybe that makes it easier.

That's interesting LondonM. Do you mind me asking why and how you went about preparing your daughter for a subject that wasn't offered by the school?

Not at all, 5C! My daughter was lucky enough to be able to do Latin at school from year 9 and loved it. It happens that both my husband and I did Classics degrees so she asked if there was any way we could teach her some Classical Greek. I bought some textbooks and my husband (not a teacher, just a good communicator) started teaching her some basic stuff over the summer holidays between years 9 and 10. (Daughter and I are very close but it would have been disastrous if I'd tried to teach her anything so I kept out of it by mutual agreement.) She worked really hard at it, so much so that by the end of the autumn term she'd dropped RE on the understanding that she would use the time that freed up to get on with her Greek. They used to have one long 'lesson' of about an hour on Sunday mornings and once or twice a week they'd rendezvous for 20 minutes or so to look at grammar or vocabulary or a background topic. She did a lot of work independently. Her dad had made it very clear that he would only put the time and effort in if she did too, and that was never a problem, fortunately.

You can get hold of lots of stuff online now so he downloaded the GCSE Greek syllabus and went to see her Latin teacher to discuss whether it was workable to put her in for Greek GCSE. They concluded that it was, so she took that alongside her other GCSEs at the end of year 11. It helped a lot that there was no coursework involved, it was all assessed by the final exams. She got an A, which I thought was a huge achievement for both of them, and switched schools so that she could do A level Greek and Latin. She starts a Classics degree in the autumn.

Good luck to you with your plans!

That's a lovely story LondonM and quite inspiring. Well done to all of you and it's great your dd's school were flexible about it.

I've known students who've been entered by their school for other subjects particularly languages (Urdu etc). The school will sometimes ask you to pay the costs of the entry but actually entering them is not a problem. Most schools would be supportive of this.
I teach science and we have supported ex - students who came back to repeat their science GCSE (needed it for college as training to be primary school teacher). We always helped them with their coursework and offered a bit of revision in the run up to the exam where possible.