English gcse controlled assessments help,

[Jayne131]

DS came home from school before half term in a terrible mood after a row with his English teacher. He's in year 11 and has had a lot of time off sick due to sickness and anxiety issues. In year 10 he was in foundation and worked hard so was pushed up to higher where he is now struggling basically he's not finished his controlled assessments as one he had no idea what to do as he's was off for the planning class and one he was doing in the ACE room as a catchup but do to some issue he was made to cut the lesson short by 15mins. He's now been told ( or so he tells me) too bad they have all now been marked and you have an E. His teacher knows he's been struggling and has been thinking of moving back to foundation. Surely then he has to re do the assessments or use the ones he did in year 10. Or is that it and he has an E and basically no chance of obtaining an overall c grade come August. He shouldnt be in higher as the pressure is too much and the school are aware as he is seeing the counsuler. Iam sure I have been given a DSL version of the story but I am really really concerned. Anyone know the rules on controlled assessments???

He should be allowed to redo them to try to improve the marks.

Phone or email head of english tomorrow!

If you can manage it, try to give him a bit of help preparing for them. Talk him through the plan.

What is the CA? What does he have to produce?

CA is controlled assessment. They do 4 pieces for English GCSE counting
40 % of their mark and one piece for English Literature counting 25% of that grade. It is prepared during class time and at home but then has to be reproduced in class in a controlled environment. It can be done multiple times to improve the marks but obviously this is very time consuming. Currently most of Y10 English classes are taken up producing it. I believe next year is the last year in which it will be done. Thereafter it will all be exam based to stop all the cheating that goes on, sorry, that should have said parental help!

I think he is probably not giving you the full picture. Not one English teacher I know does only one planning lesson for any CA piece and some of the tasks have an allowed time of 4 hours, so I can't imagine that 15 minutes being taken off could have had quite such a detrimental effect. If he had no idea what to do he should have gone to see his English teacher to find out! But as Callooh says, the tier of entry isn't relevant, so there is no reason why he can't use whichever of his assessments are strongest.

A conciliatory call to the teacher might be a good idea - it is a big ask for him to have another go at any of them - he has to do a different task, time will have to be found (outside of lesson time and supervised) the whole thing marked, annotated and cross-moderated again. He will have to prepare the work himself, but this will probably be good revision - many centres use a novel from the Literature paper as the focus for the extended reading piece, for example.

Schools are under huge pressure to get pupils to get C grades so I would be surprised if they said he couldn't redo any.

Our school seems to have a 'redo 1' policy, whereby you get to redo your worst one, especially if it is clearly lower than the others. It also ran a CA catch up session over the recent half term.

I suggest you email the school and ask the teacher to ring you so you get a clear picture.