Resources for citizenship GCSE

[Miloarmadillo2]

My son is taking OCR citizenship this year (single GCSE in Y10) and scored a 3 in his mock exam in December. The teacher has been largely absent and he’s also a lazy git and did zero revision. I have bought the textbook so we’ve covered the content together (in 12 hour long sessions not sure how they have not covered it in nearly 2 years!) but struggling to find any workbooks/apps etc to practise now I know what he’s supposed to know, other than very limited past papers available online. Any ideas?

There may not be a whole lot of resource out there as this is not a super-common GCSE to take tbf. Not to say it’s not worth taking – I think the course looks interesting – but I don’t know of many schools that offer it, hence there may not be much demand.

TES may have resources (designed for teachers but usable by anyone) tho they sometimes come with a fee. These may include sample exam-style questions which may help.

Other than that, usual revision techniques to help embed the knowledge – flash cards, mind maps, 1-1 testing, facts on Post-it notes, he explains it to you (or a friend), that kind of thing?

You think you have a covered a 2 year gcse syllabus in 12 hours? Then are smugly unsure of how the teacher hasn’t covered it in 2 years?

There are many times posts of Mumsnet are ridiculous but if you seriously believe this, you are delusional.

I just had a quick look on quizlet which is a flash card and quiz website/app and there are some sets in there for ocr citizenship gcse you could try

Are you certain you covered the GCSE syllabus and not core citizenship modules? I can’t believe 12 hours is enough!

This is the outline just for year 10 at our school if this helps with things he should know.

Yes btw i agree with others, 12 hours is not enough time to cover a GCSE syllabus. Did you just read through the text book?

I’m not especially familiar with the GCSE spec for citizenship, but to take a spec I do know, AQA GCSE German, 12 hours would give you an hour on each sub-topic which wouldn’t even come close to covering the work presented in the textbook. Never mind any revision or learning needed. I reckon as a 1-1 tutor with a good student I could cover it (maybe) in a year of one-two hours a week of lesson plus one hour a week of independent HW. Maybe.

12 hours to have read through the OCR textbook together - which is the only resource we have currently, and I had no prior knowledge of the course content. They are not being taught the syllabus properly at school as the teacher has been off long term sick so they have various substitutes. There is a whole section where they are meant to have decided on and run a citizenship action project that they have not even started. The exam is in May - just hoping we can cobble together enough information to pass.
Thanks @Supersoakersand @clary for other places to look.

DD took this in Y10.

Amazon sell this, which she used:

Pearson REVISE Edexcel GCSE Citizenship Revision Guide and Workbook Incl. online revision - for 2025 and 2026 exams

Otherwise, a general understanding of how elections and democracy works in the UK is a really big one.

Make sure he can explain different voting systems - First Past The Post etc, and a lot of it seemed to be reading articles and being able to formulate arguments around them so a broad view of major news stories and contentious issues - should 16 year olds vote, is immigration a positive or negative, is 'Right to Die' a positive or negative, is social media a good thing etc. And focus on being able to see both sides of an argument and show that while taking a position.

Making flash cards is probably the other most useful strategy - all the different voting system, things like who can vote in different election and who can't (Members of the House of Lords can't vote in general elections for example, EU citizens in UK can vote in locals but not generals, Maltese citizens can vote in generals though. All those weird combos).

It's a really interesting GCSE.

DD is very SEN and her revision skills are distinctly ropey and she came out with a high 6 with only 1 lesson a week in Y9 and 2 a week in Y10, so don't panic.

Re the project - that is a faff, but you only have to write about what you did and where there were problems and where it worked in terms of setting up the project.

You could cobble it together in a weekend if you needed to. Iirc DD and her friend did one on the effects of graffiti in some area of London. They took a few photos, made anti graffiti posters and then did a survey of people's views on graffiti in the area and put them in a spreadsheet. Then thought up all the things that they could have planned or done better and used those for that part of the exam. So make sure you plan in a few 'if only we'd thought of this' things.