Year 11 2023-24

[Maxus]

Anyone else got kids starting year 11 in September?

Will it still be available in 2025 if she has to start at level 2?
If she wants to do it herself then i suggest you consider the following strategy:
You - what are you revising this morning?
T2 - biology
You - what topics
T2 - oh I don't know .....
You - OK lets look at the guide and pick one, Circulatory system

<lunch time>
You - OK let's test you on the circulatory system ...

Good point regarding Level 2/Level 3. I really hope she gets her 5 passes though. Her coursework is good which is a start!

Thanks for your suggestion re revising. That seems like a good strategy. I have said I will do a revision plan for her to start after her Child Development exam which will cover everything she needs to do between then and May. But that might take me weeks to work out!

Revision plan suggestion.

Work out how many hours she can reasonably do after school / at the weekend.
From when you start until say end of Spring term, work out how many hours that equates to, allowing for days off etc.
Look at the topics for each subject (from revision guide contents) and estimate revision time needed.

Compare hours available v revision hours needed. Adjust as needed (and even consider eg abandoning the humanity if she doesn't like and its hard to learn).

Then looking 2-4 weeks ahead put subjects into the revision timeslots, but be flexible. Looking a week ahead put topics into the slots. We found a variety helped and thinking about which subjects needed the 'best' slots. If school set revision style homework that counts as revision time too.

(Also think about using some of xmas holidays, 2 hrs a day from 28th onwards would push things forward.)

Teen I'm finding your practical with emphasis on "specifically what are you looking at this morning " for example, suggestions, really helpful.

Question to the room generally - if we use our exam boars study guides as a template will it give us all the topics DD needs to look at in the case of maths and science? I think if we have a framework we know what we need to structure time around.

Yes it will for maths and science.

However for maths you need to do questions as picking out what maths is needed from the question is important.

For science everything is in the guides and nothing is unnecessary. Even throw away one line examples can appear in a multi choice question. Also practice identifying the more complex things for 6 marker questions,

Eng Lang can be revised for. They have to know what they have to do for each question type as it is very regimented.

I found the RE revision guides generally good too.

Thanks again Teen. That gives me something to start with! Maths in particular, there seems to be sooo many different things they have to learn it seems impossible to fit them all in!

Oh no. At least it (a) it was a mock and (b) she was caught. Do you think she has learned her lesson? What on earth was she thinking!?

Oh no @bluetackaddict what a silly thing for her to do, was she panicking and worried about poor performance or was it more like stupid teenage behaviour (I know internal exam papers have been shared within our own school with the perpetrators egging each other on to use it) . I think you need to speak to the school and see what they propose to do about it and how seriously they take it, also how they think you should deal with it at home. It is probably more common than you think.

Having seen your other thread blue it isn't so bad as I thought at first. It isn't like she took crib notes in, she found the paper they would be using which is semi-public anyway and learned the answers. The main person she cheated was herself, as she now won't know what she could have scored in a fair test.

What have you said to her about it?

So DS result for his maths came back as 2 marks off a 5.
I am baffled how they reached this grade though as they only did two papers?!
Im also baffled where that leaves him with regards to if to move to the foundation paper or not?

My guess is pro rata . So e.g. His marks totalled 80 - pro rata that would be 120, and then look up the grade boundaries based on that mark.

It could be ore clever though if the school know the grade profile per paper (eg if the missed one was harder or easier than the others).

Thanks @TeenDivided
Would you stick with higher?

@Panic71 No idea!

It’s bonkers how we differently we do things here in Wales.

ds did all of his English lit, science practicals and 1 paper in each of the sciences and some Welsh lit last year in year 10. They also did half of their maths, and did the rest at the beginning of this month and have now started the additonal maths curriculum. They did their individual music recital in October. This week they did some geography controlled assessments using their field trips coursework and they will do more Welsh Lit in January and their music composition is due in at the end of January.

Mocks for what’s left will be after February half term!

Here’s the WJEC exam timetable for next summer https://www.wjec.co.uk/media/fgrjsjxz/summer-2024-wales-and-eduqas-gcse-final-exam-timetable-22-06-23.pdf

I wish it was like that in England!!Spreading things out seems much more sensible to me.

T2 actually went in for her mocks today 🎉. Maths and biology. It will be v interesting to see how she does after no revision whatsoever!

Panic - I would go for Foundation. Gives more time to revise the other subjects.

My eldest did GCSEs in one of the final years pre reform. Her first controlled assessment was iirc in October of y10.

So much time was spent prepping and doing CAs in English, they failed to notice until mocks that she couldn't actually do the English Language exam paper at all.

It also made y10&y11 a hard slog as there was always a CA in something to be prepped for (did 2 MFLs so 8 CAs for them to be written and learned).

Fewer exams at the end was good, but that system didn't help less mature students as you had to hit the ground running right from the start.

@Panic71 my son's friend is the same - they have opted to do foundation and get the solid pass rather than risk higher.

My son gets his mock results next Friday. These are important because they are the predicted grades he has to use in his sixth form applications. But we've had a letter from the assistant head which says that the predicted grades would be based on the mocks, other classroom assessments and subject teacher.

My son is now worried that if he gets good results in his mocks the school will predict a lower grade. His reasoning for this is that we get a report each term with a predicted grade on it for each subject and these grades don't reflect the marks he gets in assessments and for home and class work.

We have raised this at open evenings and the teachers replies are always "ignore these predictions they're based on yr 6 SATS and yr 7 CATS, we're expecting him to get two grades higher than that". It seems mad to me that they are sending out reports in years 10 and 11 based on KS2 data. Anyway DS is worried that his predictions are going to be similarly low like his reports.

I assume it's just down to the school/academy trust to use their own judgement on predicted grades? I'm hoping they'll give mock results and predicted grades so that we could potentially ask for the predictions to be reviewed if they are vastly different to the results.

I hope it works out for your son. My DDs predictions were lower than her Mocks for the reasons you mention. It’s very frustrating as she wants to leave her current private school, but this will make it difficult.

Mock results out tomorrow for us, I think ds did revise and work quite hard for them. So fingers crossed he's not too disappointed.

Anyone got any thought on mock results in relation to the real things? My older kids were covid years so this is actually the first time we'll be seeing GCSEs through to the end.

For some of dcs subjects, they covered 100% of the content in the trial exams but haven’t covered all the topics in class yet. So for that reason I don’t think the mock grade can be a real reflection for those subjects. For other subjects, they only did paper 1 , so 50% of the content. Perhaps the February mocks will give a better idea for the real things? My older child was also covid years so first time for us too.

My DD is trying to move from a private school to state for sixth form. The local schools in our London Borough prioritise state school pupils in their admissions, so she’ll only get a place if there are any left after all state pupils. Is this a common admission policy elsewhere?