how many gcses do most children do ?

[Piffle]

am a little anxious as ds1 -although very gifted in all subjects, seems to on the face of it have mega courseload

They are doing some this school year- maths stats, IT and ds1 is doing mandarin as twilight (after school course 1hr per week only)
But his are all academic subjects listen to this fgs
Double English lit and lang(2 gcses)
Triple science(3)
Now bumped up to dbl tech course (2gcses worth)
Geography
Half RE
Engineering
Art
Plus silver arts award extra quals
French

It seems a hefty load even for bright children?
Anyone any experience of this kind of load?

tbh piffle i would leave it if he is coping ok. if he starts struggling and having no time to do anything else then think about dropping one. he is only doing 11 and a half. it's not massively more than normal i don't think.

I think 10-11 is fairly normal, 9 on the low side of average. All but the very unacademic are expected to do at least 9 at my children's comprehensive.

Nearly 30 years ago it was normal for the top 2 streams at my very very bog standard comp to do 11 O levels.

I would also echo someone else - sciences do NOT have to be separate in order to do science at A level or beyond. We regularly get people going on to do medicine or other scientific degrees at top universities who did double science then science A levels.

It's way more that 11.5 though nappyaddict - I made it 15.5 (including the 4 done a year early)! And if he's doing both maths and stats a year early, they'll probably want him to do some AS maths in year 11 too.

I guess that some individual schools might make separate sciences a pre-requisite for A level science courses, but I've only heard of it being 'preferred' rather than rigidly required.

oh i didn't see the ones he is doing this year.