express/grammar streams

[Peapodlovescuddles]

Just wondering if anyone has any experiance of these? In our area they're reorganising secondary education and while it won't effect DS1 (15) or dd1 (13) my younger 3 will almost certainly be affected by it, I have been told that the middle two would probably qualify for an 'express' stream (youngest is too young to tell) where they take some GCSEs in y9 and move onto as levels in y10, can anyone enlighten me as to what they'll do in sixth form? what are the advantages to this? What questions should I be asking?

They will probably only be doing certain subjects not the core ones (especially by doing maths and english early will "damage" the schools league table position) At DD's school there was the option to do things like psychology and astronomy in year 9 with some ESL children doing their own language in year 9 or 10

I did maths early and the plan was to do double math ( pure and applied as 2 seperate subjects) along side my regular A levels in the 6th form. So they might expect to fit more A levels in. I would want to know if they expected that definitley or just as an option, and whether having more A level subjects would be helpful. These days, students do seem to come with quite a mixture of subjects at A level and I suppose a lot would depend on the kind of subject the dc wants to study later. Some might benefit more than others from a really broad base of A level subjects.

I did maths, english lang. & french 1 year early. We were expected to do additional maths and additional french O levels the following year, which were harder and supposed to bridge the gap between O & A level (I don't think they do these any more - maybe AS is equivalent, but it might well be rather more work). Most people wriggled out of doing at least one of these extras so it really mean't just a bit less pressure that year.

thank you for all your advice/experiance, I don't think I will send dcs to the school, I just thought there may be some huge advantage me and dh were missing! Think they'll do better following the Normal curriculum