Advice on preparing for an assessment for a Y10 place

[HomeEdtoSchool]

Hi, I’m hoping I can tap into some of the expertise on this board.

My son who will be Y10 age in September has been home educated all his life. We were planning for him to do his GCSEs from home, then 6th form college for A-levels.

However Covid has disrupted the rhythm of his home ed life, and with that and his younger brother starting secondary school (in Y7) in September, he’s really keen to attend school for his GCSEs.

There is a local independent school which some friends of his attend. They have spaces, but he would need to pass an assessment in English and Maths to gain a place.

My question is, what will they be looking for? He’s done informal English along the way, and is working through the GCP KS3 English book, will this suffice?

Maths-wise, he was due to take the IGCSE next year, so has covered much of the syllabus for this. However I believe GCSE Maths is different in that it has a non-calculator paper and thus requires a deeper grasp of mental arithmetic and long multiplication. I was thinking it would be worth spending time working at this, but are there any other areas he should focus on?

Thanks

Do his friends at the school have Y9 books you can look at? That might give you an idea of the standard they expect.

Please check with the school what exam board they will be doing and work from that. If edexcel Pearson has some excellent ks3 revision books for maths and science. It is the revise series. You might want to look at those.

They have spaces in Y10. Unless he has two heads and is unlikely to pass GCSE maths & Eng, and that doesn't seem to be the case, they will take him. Explain about the maths and ensure that they only give him a calc paper because he has plenty of time to work on the non-calc. My eldest is incredibly bad at non-calc maths, he A*d A level maths but his weakest paper by a long way even after a resit was the C1 non-calc paper which is meant to be the easiest.

I hope your DS is very happy at school.

Agree with cake, I do hope he enjoys school.

Yes I agree, I am sure they will welcome him if they gave spaces.

Can you still speak to anyone at the school? Maybe ask them what the expectation is - will he be asked to do a piece of creative writing or Eng comprehension?

If you want to, look up some past papers for GCSE plus mark schemes to see what sort of thing. Lots of school do AQA if you can't find out which board.

I’ve just come back to this thread after work, and I’m really grateful for the replies. Thanks for the positivity everyone, you make it all seem doable.

Ok, I will ask his friend’s mum what they’ve been working on in maths and English, and call the nice admissions lady back for a bit more information on the assessment and which exam boards they use. He has almost 4 weeks so a reasonable amount of time, especially as all his other activities have finished.

They’ve offered him a place, but in Y9 rather than Y10. He’s still keen to go, but dreadfully disappointed that he won’t meet the milestones of GCSEs 6th form etc at the same time as his friends. Ironically as he’s a late August birthday, one of the reasons that we home edded from the start was that he was so young for the year and at that time we were unable to defer due to being summer born. I think it’s an opportunity, as he’s clearly not as mature as some of his friends who are the same school year but up to 12 months older than him.

Am I missing anything here? Apart doing everything a year later, are there any other large negatives that I’ve overlooked?

Hopeful bump