Year 11 - 2024-2025 Support Thread

[QueenMabby]

Hi
A continuation for those of us with DCs going into year 11 - GCSEs are looming!

Ugh that’s sounds all rather bizarre @DataColour fingers crossed your DS has misunderstood.
With regard to 8 GCSEs - all the colleges and 6th forms near us ask for 5/6/7 GCSEs at grades 5-9 for A levels and 4-9 for BTecs. Then specific grades for certain subjects. I’ve not seen ANYWHERE even asking for 8, let alone 9 or 10. On uni applications it is very much about predicted A levels although they sometimes stipulate gcse grades for maths & English. Some may look at the gcse profile to gauge how likely those predictions are.

DD came home quite upset today. She got a 26/40 on the English Language Paper 1 first half which was a Grade 6 apparently and she did 4 of those in Year 10 and got 9s in all of them so it is a big drop 😕She feels a bit down because mocks are in less than 2 weeks. The teacher was really awful and when giving back DD's paper, said loudly "Oh not as good as your last ones clearly!!" while laughing a little (not like she found it funny, more sarcastic) making the whole class look around and see. It's really unusual for DD's school as well because literally all the time the teachers will try to be discreet and if mentioning the test scores will do it privately. It was just so out of the blue apparently and really made her feel bad and negative about English which is something she wants to do for A Level.

Some sad stories on here re music and English- I sometimes wonder whether teachers remember their pupils are human … there really is no need!

re 8 GCSEs @aliceinanwonderland , dd2 is hoping for oxbridge if not conservatoire- she’s at specialist music school which is why only eight but it shouldn’t matter apparently- it’s standard for their music specialists.Good luck with your decisions on that.

@minisnowballs - is dd wanting to do music at Oxbridge? I'll probably join you on the Oxbridge threads then in due course!

@theorangecounty - it's a shame your DD's teacher drew attention to her paper like that. It's just one paper though. Her score won't be a problem if she learns from it. Encourage her to review her answers against the mark scheme to see where she dropped marks and to ask her teacher to take her through it - I would think that's the least the teacher could do.

@QueenMabby it's a possibility - although also possibly English lit (with instrumental award and choral scholarship is her somewhat ambitious target!).

She's currently trying to get her keyboard skills up as apparently some colleges ask. Of course, it very much depends on how her GCSEs actually go, and she's a total wildcard as far as I can see so who knows!

Your DD sounds like an excellent candidate for it.

Hello, may I join?

DD is in Y11. She's stressed out of her head, doing several hours' revision a day but does not seem to be retaining much. She is exausted and I'm worried she's fast approaching burnout (she has ASD).

School are being useless and I am at the end of my tether. We have been pushing and pushing for extra time at least, not that that would make a huge difference the way things are going, sadly, but it may put DD at less of a disadvantage.

She is (was) very academic but she now hates school. She works very hard but her predicted grates are not great. She's terrified she'll be downgraded to the Foundation paper in a couple of subjects after the November mocks. And I am very worried what that would do to her fragile self-esteem.

We are considering a tutor for her worse subject (which was her best by Y7, go figure) but she simply does not have the energy for anything after school 🙁.

@stickygotstuck
Sorry to hear this. I agree that there's so much volume and some schools are better than others in helping pupils to manage this.
She might actually find a tutor is helpful at explaining something which then means she isn't struggling to make sense of it and therefore she might have more energy.
Does she have friends she can let off steam with? A good moan is often very cathartic

Thank you @aliceinanwonderland .

DD struggles socially, although she does have a couple of friends at school. However, asking for help and unburdening with them is not something she would do. I wish she did! That's typical of autistic kids, they don't want to put off the few people who seem to like them.

We'll wait until after this first lot of mocks, then assess whether tutoring would be the best option. I've emailed her teacher, see what they think.

I'm really hoping not because she'd have to stop her one after school activity, which is the only thing that gets her out and stops her ruminating once a week at least.

There's no such thing as a grade on half a paper. There's no such thing as a grade on a whole paper.
Does she know where the marks were dropped?

@stickygotstuck does your DD have a diagnosis? If so, contact the school’s senco for a thorough chat. Have you spoken with her teachers directly in understanding where the issues are? Some ASD kids ‘get it’ in class, so it’s not an issue of understanding the subject content but more of remembering and recall etc. So she may not need a tutor for a specific subject but some learning support about ‘how’ to learn, retain & recall. If she knows her stuff she doesn’t need a tutor for the ‘what’ to learn. Maybe some advice around note taking, highlighting etc. My eldest (adhd/asd) takes extensive notes & then highlights; never got on with flashcards despite school insisting on mind maps & flashcards. She’s now in final year of degree apprenticeship and has definitely honed her skills over the years. I think if she’d have been helped with ‘how’ to learn rather than the ‘what’ at gcse stage it’d have saved a lot of angst. I think learning support teachers may help your DD find which methods work best for her.

Are teachers doing a best guess then? DDs work is graded too and percentages no longer given. The rationale is that the same percentage for one subject can be a very different grade outcome than another subject. EG 70% in an MFL maybe a 6, Whereas 70% in Chemistry could be an 8. So they give grades. These aren’t past papers with known grade boundaries, but end of topic tests, homework etc.

Thank you @NotDonna .

Yes, she does have a diagnosis. The school's SENCO has been extremely unresponsive (that's a different story, but it's nearly finished me off!) but there is a new team this year. This is good in that they seem more on the ball, but bad because they don't know her. Individual teachers are much better and they do get back to me if we have any queries. However, DD masks, is well behaved and is bright enough that she just about gets by in class, mostly.

That's exactly it, she understands well enough but cannot recall when necessary (sensory/emotional dysregulation makes memory problems worse on a bad day, which you cannot predict).

She has been revising with the text books, which we bought her so she can highlight, and has been making mind maps & flashcards. She is doing hours of work most days and we thought she'd cracked it. But then we saw the cards and they are too detailed, not a quick summary. It turns out she is making up the questions (rather than use the workbooks) because she thinks it's cheating to copy them! That's ASD honesty for you...

So we plan to spend the half term helping her going through one lesson, then highlight, then take notes/do mindmaps, then use the workbooks to answer questions. I personally think she's got enough just going through the workbooks, where all is in one place. Too many sources is a nightmare for her. Which I get!

@stickygotstuck sounds like you’re doing a lot to help. Interestingly my eldest NEVER got on with mind maps or flashcards as she needs the detail. The usual prompts weren't/aren’t enough to study from. She would only be able to recall the info on the card so not enough for an essay or experiment. That info would not remind her of the detail, as it would with NT ppl. She now makes extensive notes all in her own words containing all the details. Later she’ll highlight (on the notes) the key points. But the detail is still there. If that makes sense. It’s INCREDIBLY time consuming but it works, at least for her. She’s never had any learning support so I’m not sure what guidance they’d have given. She did get extra time though. She’s now doing professional exams and using this method plus lots of past papers.
If your DD already has detailed notes maybe use them rather than starting afresh with flashcards. I’m not an expert - purely a suggestion!

@NotDonna , yes I agree, flashcards don't work very well for DD either.
The school really pushes them but they are not the best option for her. She is great a analysing, rubbish at synthesising. Her 'mindmaps' are really all the information copied on one page and arranged around the title in the centre, rather than the top, really 😄.

This is the first time we get involved in her revision, as she doens't like asking for or receiving help.
She has had a couple of panics in the past, where we gave her some advice and sat down to work out where all the material was (class notes, Google Classroom, handouts, a stupid amount!) and to make a revision plan/time table. She never follows them tough as she finds them too constictive, and trigger demand avoidance.

Essentially, we thought she was at least on top of the revision, since she's spending so long on it. But she fooled even us! I should feel like a terrible mother, but I try to reserve that for special occasions 😬. It does look as if she will get extra time, fingers crossed, but that's cutting it very fine, bearing in mind she's been diagnosed for over 2 years!

If it’s any consolation I had no clue how DD1 was studying/revising until more recently. I assumed she’d been successfully using mindmaps & index cards all this time. She showed me one of her ‘files’ recently. The writing is so incredibly tiny too so she can squeeze in all the detail. I was 😱 then she explained that since GCSEs she’s studied this way. Tbf she gets great results so I’m not dissing her method. But she’d say herself that it’s incredibly time consuming and others in the class are always on the next topic, way ahead etc etc. Yet she gets better results than most and she enters the exam rooms feeling relatively confident so. 🤷‍♀️

Well, it obviously works for your DD, even if it's more labour intensive. Good for her! 💪

I'm seriously considering withdrawing my DD from the closest mocks 🙈. I think she may have a coronary otherwise. Good job it's half term next week, she needs all the R&R she can get (in between all the revision).

Interesting how others revise. Ds2 writes a few flash cards, I don't think he can be bothered (ie too lazy) to do mind maps etc.

DD's school doesn't preach flashcards at all, they say it's good for memorising and recommend mindmaps and blurting for all of that too. But their main incentive is practise questions and applying the knowledge which is very true to be honest.

DD likes doing mind maps and blurting the most. Honestly most of the time she is cramming so blurting is the only thing she can actually use!

I could mark a question and say that is 6/16 - but even if I added up all of the marks for the paper and got a mark out of 80, I still don't know what grade that is.

It's all guesswork.

The important thing is what went awry - where were marks lost and does she know how to address it

@MrsHamlet thank you. I thought it’d be guesswork. Educated guesswork but still largely guesswork.

@aliceinanwonderland bit behind on keeping up with this thread but thought I’d still add for DS it’s a mandatory 11 GCSEs. Had to do a language, either history or geography then basically only 2 free choices.

@ThisPerkySloth
Is this an independent/grammar school? I'm just wondering what the "norm" is, particularly with iGCSEs which seem half way to A level compared with ordinary GCSEs especially in History!

@aliceinanwonderland yes it’s a grammar, if DS could he’d drop business studies and religion / philosophy albiet the latter is mandatory. It’s a lot. But I’m getting no complaints from school and he’s doing his homework so maybe he can cope. 🤞

Hello

only two weeks to go to mocks! 😱

in the end (after I tried to timetable what he needed to cover but it was too much / difficult to achieve and have a life, have time to eat and have time to relax) we settled on cram mode questions on Seneca for each subject plus a CGP book for maths and quiz let Spanish vocab plus the revision homework per school which is only on a few subjects. Spending about 2 maybe 2.5 hours. No practice papers but he assures me they are doing this at school.

time will tell if this approach worked 🤞🤞🤞

At least it's mocks and not the real things. Once results are out you can use those to review the effectiveness / quantity of revision and revise accordingly.

It's better not to peak too early and then end up with actual results lower than the mocks.... (ask me how I know 🤦🏼‍♀️)