Bulletin 1st June

Welcome back everyone - I hope you enjoyed the sunshine and had a well-deserved rest. Lots more glorious weather and no Year 10 this week!

Department Meeting on Tuesday
C26
3.15 - 4.15
Agenda
- Coursework / grouping issues (current Year 9 and 10) (TBo)
- Departmental priorities (TBo)
- Raising engagment through Co-operative learning in English / Media (TBo / EWa)


GCSE Coursework

Sorting out the GCSE coursework was difficult this year due to a high level of incomplete folders and numerous problems with adding up marks.

To try to make our coursework run more smoothly and effectively, I'd like to collect all the Year 10 coursework marks in over the next two weeks and will be sending out Excel documents for this purpose on Monday. Please fill them in with the grades for the coursework that's been completed so far, and I'll store this information centrally. This is a slightly fiddly job, but will not take more than a few minutes and it has the advantage of doing the adding up for us! I'll put the instructions on the email- any questions get back to me.


We do need to make sure that there are as few gaps as possible in our Year 10 coursework by the end of this year, so please keep the following in mind:


- coursework should now be completed in controlled assessment conditions, ie working in silence in class over approx two lessons.
- where students have missed this lesson(s), they need to complete the assessment as soon as possible, probably in a different classroom - let me know if you need me to supervise students in completing this.
- where work is missing from previous teachers, eg media or speaking and listening work from year 9, it is the current teacher's responsibility to ensure that this work is caught up and completed.



Year 9 this term

As Liz communicated last term, Year 9 will be asked to complete a SATS reading paper in week 3 of this term. Please do not feel that you have to spend a lot of time preparing the students for this - the skills tested are taught elsewhere in our KS3 SOW. It would be a good idea, however, to go through the format of the paper with them beforehand, and look at some of the wording for typical questions. We will distribute copies of the paper beforehand, and provide an alternative for students working below level 4.


Part of the reason that we are doing this is to provide us with supportive data for forming groups for next year, but please don't suggest to the students that their set placing is dependent on their performance (it isn't). Sets will be formed for next year using the following data, in the following order:

- Teacher Assessment levels from this year
- Writing grades from their Year 9 media piece (film review)
- Reading grades from the SATS paper
- Speaking and Listening grades from the end of year 9
- Prior attainment and FFT data

Have a great week!
Tom