I do hope that Year 11 has got off to a good start and that your son/daughter has settled down to some hard work. Year 11 will pass very quickly and December’s mock exams will soon be upon us. We will endeavour to keep you informed of your child’s progress and inform the students of what they need to do to improve.
Mentoring Programme
The Mentoring process for Year 11 will begin this week. Below are some key points about the mentor meetings:
- Your child has been allocated a Mentor who will work closely with their allocated students for the remainder of the Year, will meet with them on seven occasions throughout the Year and provide a detailed Mentor written report in spring 2017.
- A dialogue will take place in meetings, approximately 10 minutes in duration, to review progress towards projected grades, discuss progress with coursework and meeting deadlines.
- The mentor will provide encouragement, support, direction and assistance where appropriate and obviously an element of challenge, using individual subject data in conjunction with judgements made about progress and effort to ensure that all students are working to the best of their ability in all subject areas.
- The Mentor will identify remedial intervention which may require the students to remain after the College day to improve or catch up with work, meet imminent deadlines or to clarify understanding and key teaching points.
Since its introduction, students and staff have found the Mentoring Process extremely beneficial and the data we use is current and frequently updated.
Throughout the year there will be a number of meetings between your child and mentor. I do hope that these meetings are useful and assist your child in achieving good GCSE grades in the examinations during the summer term.
Changes to the Interim Report
We are pleased to enclose an interim report which includes important information on subject Target Grades, Projected Grades, Currently Working at grades and Effort Scores for the range of subjects your child is studying. This is important information about the progress your child is making and will have been discussed with your child’s mentor. It is important that your child responds to the advice given by the mentor in order to achieve well in the forthcoming GCSE examinations.
You may notice some changes to the information provided. We have made changes to the Effort score (formerly ‘motivation’ on a 1-9 scale). This is now a four-point scale from A to D. A key is provided at the bottom of the report. In addition, we have reviewed how we think about fine grades (when a grade has a plus or minus next to it). We have included a definition box for these on the report also. Through these definitions we aim to make it clear whether a grade is secure or not and the level of intervention that might need to take place in order to improve.
Online Reporting
As you will be aware from our earlier communication we are in the process of merging our online reporting systems now we have become one school. This means that until we announce how we are replacing MyChildAtSchool.com we will be issuing paper reports and that online service will be unavailable.
Mock Examinations
In the week commencing Monday 5th December we shall be commencing our mock examinations which will give us an insight into how well prepared students are for the actual examinations and give them practice of writing in silence for an extended length of time.
It is imperative that students meet the deadlines set and approach their studies seriously by doing a good level of revision for the mock examinations.
We recognise that this is an anxious time for many students but if they pace themselves and work consistently hard over the coming weeks and keep up to date, this will reduce stress levels and the need for cramming prior to the examinations.
I do hope you find the information provided in your child’s interim report useful and we look forward to a challenging but successful year ahead.
Please do not hesitate to contact the College if you have any questions or are in need of clarification on any aspect of Year 11 or the GCSE Examinations.
Yours sincerely,
Mr J Sleath
Principal