GCSE Year 11: drop Double award science to focus on Biology as a single subject?

[loomer]

My DD is halfway through her GCSEs (finishing Yr 10) with an online school. She is currently working on the double award Science iGCSE, but is working to a Grade 7/6 in Biology and only Grade 3 in Physics and Chemistry (she is not a strong mathematician and is finding those aspects very hard). We are worried that she will struggle to pass the double award overall, and my husband thinks that she would be better off focusing her energies on Biology solely - but this means she would have to spend her summer holidays catching-up on the topics she has 'missed' through Year 10, and she would basically be teaching herself which doesn't fill me with confidence...
I'm struggling to get any really incisive advice from the school who have basically said "she'd have to catch up, let us know what you'd like to do". Have any of your kids done this? How hard would it be for a kid that's not very academically inclined? I realise that she'll end up with one less GCSE overall but we're not too worried about that, and she isn't going to want to pursue any science subjects at A-level.

Do they have tiered papers for iGCSE science?
In theory the biology could help pull the grade up to a pass?

If she dropped to foundation tier (would have to be all 3 subjects) then she may find the maths gets easy enough to cope with.

Would she have access to full biology teaching next year, and all revision classes?

I'm not sure what tiered papers are but yes, in theory the overall grade will be taken as an average across all three subjects, and my thinking is that she needs to put the extra effort into pulling her physics and chemistry up to a STRONG three, preferably a four to be safe. She's only doing the foundation tier as it is (hence double not triple science) so the maths can't get any easier.
She would be able to access the single subject teaching for Year 11, and the revision classes, but I wonder if that's just too much of a stretch even so...

You are confusing 2 things in your post above.
Triple science = 3 separate GCSEs, Combined = double award
Both can usually be done with either Higher tier or Foundation tier papers, ie Foundation tier has more straightforward questions and you can't get above a grade 5.

If she is doing Foundation then she can't actually be getting grade 6/7 in Biology as Foundation tier means no grade above a 5.

What she can't do with Combined is do Higher tier Biology and Foundation tier Chemistry and Physics.

Many schools only permit stronger scientists to do Triple, which means they tend to do Higher tier by default, but it isn't a given. Combined will be done by some at Higher and some at Foundation.

Can you get a list of topics that have been covered by the Y10 biologists? Remember even if the unit is "Organisation" there will be extra in there for the Biology that isn't covered in combined, and it's usually the harder bits. See quite how much she would need to catch up.

In theory, she is doing two-thirds of a Biology GCSE already, so half as much again to catch up on.

My DD actually officially dropped Combined to do Biology (foundation) instead. But she was at home at the time. The Biology in triple isn't really harder, just 'more'. Whereas if you drop from Higher tier to Foundation tier you are imo opinion definitely dropping harder content across all 3 subjects.

Okay, that makes sense - thanks for clarifying as I had no idea about the tiers. I'll ask the Biology teacher about which tier she's on. Her workbooks and revision guides from EdExcel all say "for the Grade 9-1 course' so I don't think that's Foundation Tier.
They were given the list of topics for revision at the end of Year 10 and the ones which were bolded they were told to cross off "as they would only appear on Paper 2". I took this to mean that these are the triple Biology topics that they were 'missing' in Combined Science. But it looks like less than a third of the full list to me - more like a quarter, or less... so maybe I've got it wrong.

This is all assuming that iGCSE has tiered papers like the normal GCSE.

Grade 9-1 course just means that it is up to date, and not for the old A*-E grade course.
Doing Higher tier Combined, the grades go from 3-3 all the way to 9-9. If you drop below 3-3 you end up with a U. Which is why unless aiming for a 6 many schools are putting more borderline pupils in for foundation where the grades start at 1-1 but are capped at 5-5.

Again for normal GCSE there are 2 papers per subject even for combined, so if they were doing a 'real' paper for end y10 it would only have a subset of the topics anyway.

But who knows!

Edexcel iGCSE Double Award Science does not have any tiers and neither does Biology.
[https://qualifications.pearson.com/en/forms/international-gcse-9-1-biology-chemistry-physics.html]
page 7 of the Double award document clearly states that the exams are untiered and suitable for all abilities.

I clearly need to ask the Biology teacher whether she thinks my DD is capable of 'catching up' on the missing topics, and how many of those there are. I guess it'll be a "if she puts in the hours she will get there" answer, particularly as it looks like the topics she HAS covered already will have been taught at the 'standard' level, so she wasn't learning at a 'lower' level which is somewhat reassuring.
Not sure that she's capable of teaching herself those 'missing ' topics though!

Page 8 of the specification shows that for iGCSE Double award science you only take one paper for each Science subject i.e. Biology, Chemistry and Physics. This is the same paper 1 that is taken by students doing separate Sciences in Biology, Chemistry and Physics.
If you take Biology iGCSE there are 2 papers. Paper 2 is only taken by pupils taking Biology.
This may mean that there is more than 1/3rd extra content.

Thank you @catndogslife for clarifying that iGCSE is indeed set up differently.
OP sorry for adding to your confusion by talking about things that aren't relevant for iGCSE.
Hope you get some good advice from your school.