Year 10 Parent Information Evening If you did not attend the Year 10 Parent Information Evening, I have tried to present here the information that was relayed to parents. Even if you did attend, there was rather a lot of information to take in and as promised here are the main points. The language of GCSE In order to support your child through their GCSE years, it will be good to have a better understanding of the language you will hear at parents’ evenings, read in the Subject Information Booklet or hear from your child. Exam boards There is not just one exam board which runs GCSE exams. Your child will potentially sit exams with four different exam boards: AQA, OCR, Edexcel and WJEC. You will find details of which exam board is used in each subject in the Year 10 Subject Information Booklet (each student has been given a copy of the booklet and it is available on the school website). Heads of Department will have chosen the exam board that they feel best suits our students in their subject. Types of Assessment External assessment – if a unit of work is externally assessed, this means an exam will be taken in the summer exam period at the end of year 11. Internal assessment – this assessment counts towards the GCSE but the assessment is carried out in class at a time decided by the school between the start of year 10 and the May of year 11. The name given to internal assessments is ‘Controlled Assessment’ Controlled Assessment (referred to as CA) CA can be low, medium or high control. At the low control phase teachers can have an input and support students. It is vital, therefore, that students take full advantage of the support that can be given before the CA moves into higher control and no support can be given by the teacher. This may mean that students will need to attend lunchtime or after school sessions to catch up on any work that has been missed due to absence or has not been completed as required in class. Students must ask for help at the low control phase with anything they need support with. All CA involves preparation at home, especially at the time when the topic covered in the CA is being taught in school. Completing homework to the best level possible will be vital. Students must not think that only the end preparation is the important bit. Only with consistent effort and commitment over a period of time, will a CA reach the highest grade a student is capable of. 1|Page There are two ways in which marks are awarded for a CA: Internally assessed and externally marked – the CA will be completed in school and will be stored safely until the May of Year 11, when it will be sent to the exam board for marking. Internally assessed and externally moderated – the CA will be completed in school and will be marked by the teachers in the department. In the May of Year 11 the exam board will ask the department to submit the marks it has awarded for the assessment. The exam board will then request a sample of the work, specifying the names of about twenty students whose assessments they wish to mark. If the exam board is satisfied that the assessments have been marked to their specification, the marks of all students will stand. If the exam board feels that the marking of the work for the twenty students is too generous, the marks of ALL students taking that subject will go down. This explains why when teachers report the grade they would award to a piece of CA, they will say ‘subject to exam board moderation’ as they cannot guarantee 100% that the mark will stay. Departments spend a lot of time marking CAs and they are not just marked by one person in the department. Heads of Department will organise their own moderation process, to ensure that there is consistency of marking across the department and that marking is in line with exam board guidance. In our experience, it is rare that CA grades are changed. Where CA is externally marked, the department will mark the work when it is completed and before it is stored. This is in order to determine whether a student is on track to achieve their target grade. The grade awarded, however, will be by the exam board. Success in Controlled Assessments Encourage your child to take advantage of the help that can be offered by teachers in the low control period Know which subjects are preparing for a CA and the date of the actual assessment and help your child prioritise their workload (these dates will be on the Year 10 parent area of the website) If you know that your child is not putting in the effort required at home, let the teacher know. The teacher will find out when they mark the assessment but this is too obviously too late. End of module tests Not all assessments will contribute to the GCSE final grade. Students will sit end of module assessments which are designed to assess student understanding of a recent topic and inform the teacher if any aspect of the work covered needs to be revisited. These assessments give students practice in how to revise. In order to cope with the amount of information they will need to revise for their exams at the end of year 11, students will need to find out which revision techniques work best for them. 2|Page What can you do as a parent? Year 10 and 11 can be stressful times for some students and getting your child to commit to working at home can cause stress for everyone in the household. One tip for taking the stress out of continually nagging your child is to agree how time will be spent. Your child will need to accept that they will have to work at weekends. A grid like the one below can be useful. With your child, first write in all the things they have to do eg a football match or judo class etc. Then write in any family activities they will be taking part in eg visiting grandparents, a family trip to the cinema. Next write in any of their own social arrangements eg meeting friends. Then, looking at what time is left, write in what home study will be done and when. Encourage your child to put exact start times for when they will start homework. Students who use this kind of planning effectively also plan in things like TV viewing, XBOX time. Having the weekend planned in this way can also stop your child feeling that they have spent all weekend working, as it will be very clear that they have not. Saturday Sunday Morning Afternoon Early Evening Evening Organisation is key Losing work can be stressful, especially if it contributes to a bigger piece of work or a CA. There needs to be a designated place where work will be kept at home. The minimum would be a big plastic box where all work is kept, but some students prefer a box file or folder for each subject. Never throw anything away until you have asked if it is needed. What looks to you like a scrap of paper and a few notes could be important. Forgetting to bring an exercise book will be a problem, especially if the lesson requires students to use previous work and writing on paper increases the chances of work getting lost, so encouraging your child to pack their bag the night before will help. Attendance Government research and guidance indicates that attendance below 96% will affect performance in exams and this has certainly been our own experience too. Missing lessons will often result in work having to be caught up on, especially in the preparation phase of a controlled assessment. Although parents have little control over the timing of hospital appointments and orthodontic appointments, it is 3|Page important that other medical appointments such as routine dental appointments and doctor’s appointments that can be made after or before school, take place outside of school hours. No child should attend school and pass on bugs that we all really don’t want to get, but students will need to learn to cope with coming to school if they are feeling slightly ‘under the weather’. Homework There is no such thing as no homework! Students must do a minimum of one hour of work at home per subject per week. This may increase dramatically if your child is preparing for a controlled assessment. If no specific task has been set or if students finish the set task in less than an hour, time must be spent reading through work on previous topics using a revision guide or their class notes. In the Subject Information Booklet issued in October (also available on the website) Heads of Department have specified which revision guide students should purchase. These are suggested roles you will need to fulfil to support your child; Project manager It is not going to be possible for you to be there all the time when your child has homework, but doing the following things will … Encourage your child to attend after school sessions. Anything that is currently available will be on the website. Have a ‘to do list’ pinned on the fridge. Each day transfer the homework to the ‘to do list’ and write the due date. In this way your child can see the homework list getting longer and it avoids the ‘oh it’s not due to next week’ comment students will often use. Talk about what will be done the next night after school, so even if you are not there your child knows what has been agreed will happen. Organising how time is spent at the weekends is especially important. Study buddy Revise with your child. You don’t need to know the answers, test them on what is written in the revision guide. Get them to explain something to you Simply be near by Take them a drink or a treat Keep them going! If they get stuck and stressed you may need to take charge. If your child is getting stressed about a piece of work or doesn’t understand a particular topic you may need to tell them to leave the work and go and see their teacher. 4|Page Agent (All celebrities, footballers and GCSE students need an agent!) If you know there is a problem let us know If it’s a subject specific issue contact the subject teacher If the problem is of a more general nature contact the tutor or Head of House Do not assume that just because your child has told you they have spoken to a teacher that this is true Stationery purchaser There are all kinds of things your child will need when they revise, the things listed below will be useful. Revision guides as specified by departments Printer paper Highlighter pens A4 notebooks for making notes Index cards Sticky notes Sources of information Homework booklet Subject information booklet Learning and Teaching (an area of the school network that can be accessed through the school website. Students will know how to access this and it is a place where teachers can put useful information) Year 10 parent section of the school website 5|Page GCSE ENGLISH • No more Controlled Assessments (previously worth 40%) • Graded 9 (highest) to 1 (lowest) instead of letters (A*-G). • Assessment is now by 2 external examinations at the end of Year 11, each is worth 50% • Students will study a range of literary fiction and nonfiction to prepare them for the final examinations (19th, 20th and 21st Century) • Speaking and Listening is now called ‘Spoken Language’. It must be taught but has no weighting. • There is no longer a choice for students between Higher and Foundation tiers – ALL students will sit the same paper • GCSE ENGLISH LITERATURE • No more Controlled Assessment (previously worth 25%) • Graded 9 (highest) to 1 (lowest) instead of letters (A*-G). • Assessment is now by 2 external examinations at the end of Year 11. • Students will study a Shakespeare play, a 19th Century novel, a prose or drama text and 15 poems from an Anthology provided by AQA. • All exam questions are ‘CLOSED BOOK’ (students cannot take any texts into the examination room). They will need to know the texts well and need to read them often over the 2 years. • There is no longer a choice for students between Higher and Foundation tiers - ALL students will sit the same paper. Paper 1: Shakespeare and the 19th Century Novel (1 hour 45 minutes- 40%) Section A: Shakespeare Students will be required to write in detail about an extract from the play and then to write about the play as a whole. Students are either doing ‘Macbeth’ or ‘Romeo and Juliet’ Section B: The 19th-century novel: Students will be required to write in detail about an extract from the novel and then to write about the novel as a whole. Your child will study one of the novels in the list below. The choice of novel will depend on the teacher, who will usually make a choice in consultation with the class. • Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë • Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde – R L Stevenson 6|Page • A Christmas Carol – Charles Dickens • Great Expectations-Charles Dickens • Pride and Prejudice – Jane Austen • The Sign of Four- Sir Arthur Conan Doyle • Frankenstein – Mary Shelley Paper 2: Modern texts and poetry (2 hour 15 minutes- 60%) Drama (one of the following) • An Inspector Calls – J. B. Priestley • Blood Brothers- Willy Russell • The History Boys- Alan Bennett • The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (play script)- Simon Stephens • A Taste of Honey- Shelagh Delaney • DNA – Dennis Kelly. OR Prose (one of the following) • Anita and Me – Meera Syal • Never Let Me Go – Kazuo Ishiguro • Animal Farm – George Orwell • Lord of the Flies- William Golding • Telling Tales- AQA Anthology • Pigeon English- Stephen Kelman Section B Poetry: students will answer one question comparing one named poem printed in the exam paper with one other poem from their anthology. (The poems were written between 1789 and the present day.) Section C Unseen poetry: Students will answer one question on one unseen poem and one question comparing this poem with a second unseen poem Some of the key skills needed: ability to compare poems, knowledge of poetic terms, and understanding of poets’ intentions 7|Page Please also note that 20% of the total GCSE English Language marks will be allocated to the use of: ‘A range of vocabulary and sentence structures for clarity, purpose and effect, with accurate spelling and punctuation'. PARAGRAPHING is also an essential skill! SPAG is worth 5% of GCSE English Literature Total: 25% (and it’s not just English that is assessed for SPAG) How we will support your child in English • We have planned the course carefully for the new specifications to ensure full coverage of the 2 GCSEs over 2 years. We are a committed team of specialists who love our subject. • We are in the process of creating a bank of GCSE resources for parents that will be available on the school’s website to support with learning at home (e.g. sample GCSE exam papers, mark schemes, key English terms, SPAG resources, etc.). • We will carry out regular GCSE assessments, adhering to the AQA question format used in the sample examination papers, and provide detailed feedback to support your child in knowing their ‘next steps’. • Intervention will be in place for students requiring support. What you can do to support your child • Encourage wide reading at home. Read texts together and ‘quality’ newspapers such as ‘The Guardian’ or ‘The Independent’. Discuss opinions on the reading. • Read the set texts your child is studying so you can ask questions about the characters, plot and themes. Watch the film (the version your child’s English teacher recommends). • Use the GCSE English area of the school’s website to support your child (exam papers, mark schemes, top tips etc.) Discuss with your child the targets your English teacher has set in their Assessment Book. • Ask your child to read through their work with you, have a thesaurus and dictionary to hand. • Purchase revision guides such as York Notes and the 3 GCSE set texts. Use BBC Bitesize and the AQA website. 8|Page MATHEMATICS New GCSE from 2016 • Graded 9 (highest) to 1 (lowest) instead of letters (A*-G). • Edexcel syllabus. • Students will now take 3 exams for their GCSE in Mathematics: - 1 non-calculator and 2 calculator each 1 hour and 30 minutes long - Equal weighting (33% each) • More emphasis on problem solving techniques. • More content to be covered at foundation and higher. • Students will need to memorise formulae to use. How are we are preparing the students for the new course? • Scheme of work re-written to include new content. • Assessments re-written to reflect the change in style of the new GCSE. • Increased variety of work in lessons, encouraging deeper understanding and ability to tackle unfamiliar problems. • Increase in ‘reading for meaning’ – extracting key information, and understanding what the question requires. • Encouraging use of Mathswatch and MyMaths websites which have both been thoroughly updated to match the new curriculum. • Staff training and development in department to include delivering the new qualification. What can students do to ensure success in this important year? • Students need to make sure they are fully engaged in their studies. • Students need to make sure they are frequently looking over their work to make sure key methods and formulae remain fresh in their minds. • Complete all homework, to the very best of their ability. Any ‘spare’ homework time can be used for reviewing/revising work. • Bring full equipment to every lesson. • Make sure they ask for help if they are stuck with any of the work. • Use the drop-in session on a Thursday after school for extra help. 9|Page What can parents do? • Take an interest. Ask your child about their maths work. • Be positive about maths, and highlight when you use it in your everyday life or at work. • Help them learn key formulas (these used to be provided for students but now they need to learn them off by heart) • Make sure they complete homework to the best of their ability. If you feel able, then help them when they are ‘stuck’. • Contact school if you have any concerns. • Use resources available online to support your child Including www.mymaths.co.uk and www.mathswatchvle.com . SCIENCE Yr 9 – 10 students study Core Science GCSE Students who have shown that they are working well, attending after school sessions if requested to do so and we feel are showing the commitment needed, will take their Core Science GCSE in the summer term of year 10. The advantage of this is that they get 3 exams out of the way (bearing in mind they could have 20 exams to sit in the summer of 2017) and they do not have to remember everything they have learnt in Years 9 and 10 at the end of year 11. The content that is studied for the Additional Science GCSE covers different areas. 25% Biology 25% Chemistry 25% Physics 25% ISA Yr 11 students study Additional Science GCSE They take their exams in the summer of year 11 25% Biology 25% Chemistry 25% Physics 25% ISA How to achieve in Science Excel in the ISA The ISA is our practical exam. It is worth 25% of the course. Whereas in the subject areas students study for 2 years for each exam, the ISA is an intense and highly controlled examination day. We are able to give a lot of guidance and so students typically achieve up to 3 grades higher than in their subject exams. 10 | P a g e The Science ISA day in Year 10 is13th October. Students must attend on this day and the 3 lessons prior to the day when we give the training. Then it is all down to effort. The ISA is not based on ability, it is not tiered. If a student tries hard they WILL get a high grade. Learn the content All students have a revision guide that has been bought for them by the school and was provided in year 9. Science is a very content rich subject. We learn NEW content EVERY lesson. Lessons are about understanding the content. Homework is set to begin the process of consolidating the learning. It is the work done at home, that is not set as homework that really makes a difference. The revision guide needs to be read. A LOT! It needs to be read before each lesson, after each lesson and then frequently between the lessons and the exams. This is where parenting comes into play the most – encouraging your child to go the extra mile. • All students have a Doddle account. This contains a ‘resources’ section that has animations that teach the content. • GCSE Bitesize contains AQA specific content, activities and tests. Key points • Revision should not be learning. • Most students who do not achieve their targets only learn the content in the revision period leading up to exams. • Learning is a continuous process that is best achieved at home under the watchful eye of the parent/guardian • Revision is the final stage, going over work and relating it specifically to exam style questions. • Teachers will be doing this in lessons now, in the lead up to the exams and teaching students how to use mark schemes to check that they are best able to convey their understanding Help within school After school support has already begun. • Chemistry teachers are available on Tuesdays 3 – 4pm • Physics teachers are available on Wednesdays 3 – 4pm • Biology teachers are available on Thursdays 3 – 4pm • Students should initially see their own teacher as they know them and their needs best, however any teacher will be happy to help. 11 | P a g e Due to the overwhelming ‘yes’ vote at the Parent Information Evening, we will run a 'how to help your child revise in science' evening in the spring term. This will be key in supporting your child with their science revision for their core science exam, summer 2016. 12 | P a g e