Workload of GCSEs - how much time roughly

[Morsien]

Wondering if anyone can help us here.
DD is 15, in Y11, she’s doing her GCSEs in English Lang&Lit, Maths, Triple Science, History, French, Music & PE.
For A-Levels she wants to Maths, English Lit, French & Economics or PE (they start with 4 and then drop one if it’s too much).

The issue is DD does 2 sports and both come with so much training, she has tennis which she trains for 3 mornings a week 6.30-7.30, 2 nights a week 7-9, Sundays 3 hours. Then Track & Field/Athletics/Cross country which is 1.5 hours 2 times a week 7.30-9.
She also has a hour long piano lesson every week and tries to fit in practice daily.
Then we have competitions, at least one Saturday a month competing in Athletics (not including the inevitable school based competitions which end up on Saturdays). Then tennis again about once a month competing.

DD is unlikely to be pro in either sport, she’s good and has competed regionally in both (nationally in athletics but that’s through school). She has no idea what she wants to do going forward, she’s more focused on wanting to go to Loughborough than what she’d actually study. Her best subjects are PE, Maths and French (Predicted 9s) English, Music and Science are predicted 7/8s and History 6.

So I’m just wondering, what is the work load really going to be like in the next few months, right now she spends maybe 6/7 hours a week outside school on homework and studying. School have said this should be 15 hours but I’m not sure DD can actually fit in 15 hours without dropping a training session which she refuses to do. She doesn’t do any school work after school on Friday as she goes out with her friends (movie, friends house, house party etc.)
She also is working towards her Grade 7 in piano so she really ought to be practicing that everyday.

Can any teachers or parents of older kids help me out her?
Also DD claims she doesn’t really need to study for PE and Music, is that true?

However, generally speaking, quite often the highest achievers at GCSE doing 10 subjects plus also manage to fit in a ton of extra curricular to balance it all out, so I would not be going no sport at all. I would just cut it down a bit to fit in a few more hours of revision. But see how she does in her mocks.

The issue with history isn’t the content being too hard it’s that she hates it with a passion. She picked Geography but was told there were 3 too many in the geography class and they picked the names at random to do history instead.
She doesn’t try very hard as she really doesn’t like it, finds the content dull.

Yes I'd definitely defer optional things like music exams to the looooong summer between GCSEs and A-levels.

Honestly, I'd let her make her own decisions. No one dies if she gets a 5 in History and 9s elsewhere.
If she doesn't want to drop sports that's OK too.

DS2 did a similar amount of extra curricular activities, he also did Welsh lit and lang and additional maths on top of the GCSEs that your dd is studying.

There are exams in PE and music so your dd is wrong that she doesn’t need to study for those, but they don’t count for 100% of the course.

If she is extremely well organised it is doable, especially if she sees her sports as her fun time and doesn’t need much more. DS chose to miss some sports competitions in the run up to his exams. He also worked very hard for his mocks, and attended all of the extra revision sessions that school offered.

In year 11 he came away with 9 A stars and a distinction in additional maths (they did some in year 10 too and he got A stars for those as well). I was amazed at his focus and organisation. If your dd is able and willing to do the same I wouldn’t force her to stop anything, that’s likely to breed resentment and backfire imo.

edited to change * to star as it made some text bold!!

I agree with what others have said about seeing how she does in mocks, and also thinking about how much study leave she gets.

My dd did about 12 hours a week (sometimes more) of music and sport right through Y11. But she balanced it up by hard and focused work at school, and every holiday, and on study leave. She spent a lot more time on her weaker subjects, and did relatively little on her strongest ones, and I think that strategy helped a lot.