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Secondary education

Connect with other parents whose children are starting secondary school on this forum.

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Original poster

Study leave before Christmas in Year 11-is this normal?

14 replies

bramleyappole · 18/11/2011 14:11

I was aware there would be study leave before the summer term for Year 11 but have been shocked to learn that dc will also be on study leave starting 5 dec. Why do educators with experience of 15 year olds expect them to be self-motivated? Pulling them out of school to 'revise' feels more to me like setting them up for failure. Is this the norm for schools in England?

OP posts:

scaryteacher · 18/11/2011 14:18

Depends when the mocks are. Ds has study leave after Christmas for his mocks, which irritates me no end, as they won't have finished all the courses. When I was teaching, we didn't give study leave for mocks, we ran classes and revision classes. If they had no exam after my lesson then we worked, if they did, they could revise for the exam, but they had to be in school.

Kez100 · 18/11/2011 14:18

Not normal at our school. They break up about the 15th December at the same time as all the other years.

Kez100 · 18/11/2011 14:18

Re: Mocks. My daughter has hers in December - no study leave for them

cat64 · 18/11/2011 14:19

This reply has been deleted

Message withdrawn

bruffin · 18/11/2011 14:30

DS has his mocks in December as well - no study leave.

SecretSquirrels · 18/11/2011 15:13

Not here.
They did stop study leave in the summer for a couple of years but last summer the Y11s finished in May I think. They have to go in most days for revision/intervention but don't have to stay full time.

goinggetstough · 18/11/2011 15:30

Why would you have study leave for mocks? Surely revision for mocks would be done in lesson time. Neither of my DC's schools give study leave for mocks or modules at Christmas.

Original poster

bramleyappole · 18/11/2011 15:47

Just mocks in Dec. for my DS. I do think it is wrong to give them study leave in December, but what can i do about this? I suspect I need to rally other Year 11 parents, but I don't know that many. It won't change this year I realise, but I have DD in Year 7. Don't want this to happen twice! Any suggestions?

OP posts:

PotteringAlong · 18/11/2011 15:49

Never heard of this...!

mnistooaddictive · 18/11/2011 15:56

It is quite normal. It frees up classrooms to be used for exams. Even If most are in the hall, there are always those who need extra time, or readers or scribes who have to be in a room on their own. Frees uk teZ gets to supervise all this too! Otherwise you end up with lots if teachers with 1 or 3 students in their class. Not a good use of time and you can't teach anything. If they have done your exam then they don't want to revise and gives them a more realistic experience.

cricketballs · 18/11/2011 17:43

no!

In my LA, study leave in the summer was stopped about 5 years ago following a study which found that no revision was done. Schools are not allowed to mark study leave and are penalised as the LA change the attendance code to unauthorised. We all have to keep them in school until after the exams have started

upatdawn · 18/11/2011 18:52

DTSs have their mocks after christmas and do get study leave. All the exams are over the course of two weeks though so two or three exams most days. Tbh I'm pretty glad that they will be at home because, as this will be the arrangement in june, I would rather they got an idea of the amount of work they need to put in to do well and if they don't it will give them the kick up the backside they need to revise more for the real things. At their school we do have an option to sent them in to school, but it is unsupervised revision in the library so would be much the same as being at home (still have laptops, facebook etc as well as others to distract them.

Tortu · 18/11/2011 18:58

We have a compromise. Their mocks only last one week but we give them 1 day of study leave before this and they don't have to come in if they don't have exams.

Two reasons:

It shows them that they don't do any work. We do spend a fair bit of time getting them to reflect on this as a learning experience and they do benefit from it in the half an hour or so we give them for study leave in the summer.
It is a logistical nightmare to keep them at school during the exams.

cardibach · 19/11/2011 00:22

SUmmer study leave at our school starts when the exams start. In the mocks they have 'study leave' of a sort in that in the week of the actual exams they don't have to be in if they don't have an exam. However, most have exams all the time anyway - it's only odd sessions where one opyion needs more time than others where they might not have.

Are you sure you aren't worrying about nothing, OP?

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