Sixth Form Teaching Hours

[BDonna]

How many face-to-face teaching hours does your DC's sixth form provide?

At DD's school (Academy) each lesson is 1 hour.

She is doing 3 A levels and gets 3 hours teaching a day on Mon to Thurs and 2 hours on Fri, so 14 hours a week.

The rest of the time is self-study.

It seems that teachers are often absent too, so actual hours with a teacher are less than this.

I'm worried that this isn't enough.

1 hour lessons, 5 hours per subject. 3 hours for an A Level subject is not enough at all in my opinion

DD in in year 13 and has 2 x doubles and 1 x single hour long lessons for each subject, so 15 hours in total. She also has around 3 hours each week this term for her EPQ. That leaves her around 15 hours each week for self study. She can come & go as she pleases, but tends to get in at around 8.30 each morning and leave at 3.30 unless she has a later lesson.

As a retired sixth form tutor and teacher, I have to ask, why are you asking this question? What are you worried about?

Sorry, just reread your first post. why are you worried this isn't enough?

In most schools or colleges you'll find the staff teach each subject about 9 hrs per fortnight. On top of that they should be setting 9 hours per fortnight of homework.

Provided the teaching is up to scratch and your child does all they are asked to do then they should get adequate grades.

If they are not using their study periods for study then you should be worried. It matters not where they do the studying, provided they have access to all materials needed for it, but they should be using this time constructively.

I have written a book aimed at 6th formers which is based on my time as a teacher and tutor. I managed to get students to achieve their best and get to the uni of their choice most of the time, including Russell Group unis, even though I was working in a state school. When I retired my ex-students and colleagues, including my Head of Sixth, urged me to write a book on this as they didn't know anyone else who had such success. I do not know how to pm on this forum , and I don't expect the powers that be want me to advertise on it, but if you find a way to pm me, I'll show you how to preview the book on Amazon. It covers everything a sixth-former needs to do and how to thinkand work SMART, not harder, to achieve well.

Ds1 has 5 hours per subject and does 4 A levels, he also has assembly for 1 hour, a guidance tutorial and several hours of free periods in which he does work so it is done in school time rather than at home.

They work in lesson and then are given "homework" to cement what they have learned, plus they have wider assessment stuff too. As Ds1 got 9s in all his A level subjects he is finding classwork easy at this stage and is working through tasks and projects that are on Moodle. This I believe comes under the wider assessment stuff.

But Ds1 is motivated and engaged, some of his friends aren't but luckily he has never bowed to peer pressure (his mates were gaming whilst he was revising for GCSEs and it showed in their results).

Captured that sounds like a good start. At least one of DD's high flying chums at GCSE has had to transfer to another 6th form & start again after getting UUE as his predicted grades in the summer. Quite a few took the approach that sailing through GCSEs had set them up for life & were sadly mistaken.

Dd gets 4 double (90 minute) periods per A level so 6 hours per subject in total.

However she has less teaching weeks per year than most schools. (Sept - mid June)

At ds' college it appears to be 5 hours per subject which is slightly more than I had at my school (I think it was 4.40 with an extra 35 mins oral lesson for German). So he has plenty of free time for study as he's not currently doing an EPQ or any enrichment courses. I am hoping that, having coasted his GCSEs, he won't think he can coast his A levels too! But he really does have plenty of time in his timetable to get his homework and wider reading done so I am not hassling him at home if he's playing on the xbox.

Hoghgyni, and others, it is unfortunate that too many bright students sail through GCSEs and get great grades and then think this is all they have to do at A-level.
The jump from one to the other is in fact a quantum leap and many suffer from this.
Old fashioned O-levels were much harder and a far better preparation for A-level.
They CAN do it, proof is that French Students study 9 subjects to the equivalent of A-level, so any normal hardworking student should manage 3 or 4. Whenever I had French or German or almost any other European students in my tutor group, and I had lots come over for a year or two, they all felt they were on holiday! They got better grades than the Brits even though it was all in a foreign language and could not understand the wingeing, Brit snowflakes who felt it was all too much for them!

Berlinbabylon, I hope you are right. Your DS maybe very gifted and organised, thinking and working smart, which is exactly the right thing to do. And the amount of work he has to do outside of the classroom may well depend on the mix of A-levels he is doing.
Hopefully the mocks will show he is a straight A student, in which case he can look to ensuring his UCAS personal statement is full of all the placements he has done and the responsible positions he has had in his extra-curricular activities, etc, etc. Indeed he needs to plan downtime into his schedule so he can be relaxed and ready for every class before it starts. Knowing what each lesson is going to be about before it starts is the key to being able to use the teacher as a resource, rather than metaphorically sitting in the classroom with a hatch open in the top of his head hoping the teacher will pour knowledge into his brain. Proactive rather than reactive, is the ticket.