Helping exam pupils achieve their goals

Independent schools ensured the pandemic did not halt efforts to support exam year pupils beyond their own gates. Partnerships designed to support students with exam preparation and revision are well-established and many have moved online as a result of the pandemic limiting schools ’ ability to host in-person workshops.

City of London School (CLS) supports IntoUniversity, an education charity that inspires students from disadvantaged communities to broaden their horizons and achieve their full potential. Due to COVID restrictions, students at the school who act as mentors for GCSE-age pupils on the IntoUniversity programme organised a committee and working groups to create digital video tutorials on a range of topics, including subject specific mentoring and revision advice. CLS plans to offer a hybrid model in 2021-22 in which students have a choice to support in one or both of online content creation or faceto-face mentoring. CLS will also be expanding the support it can provide to IntoUniversity by collaborating with Year 12 students at City of London School for Girls. Arguably, one of the lesser-told stories resulting from exam disruption and the subsequent changes to assessment over the past two years is the impact on external candidates. Wotton House International School, in Gloucester, helped external candidates across the country as an accredited centre, enabling them to achieve their qualifications and move on to the next stage of their education or career. The school supported a range of home-schooled young people, including some with serious anxiety issues or long-term health problems. Teaching assistants at Wotton House acted as invigilators during supervised assessments over Zoom and the school asked for supporting information from tutors and other teachers in order to make a holistic grading judgement once it had collected all the evidence.

“The videos have allowed us to support our students across a broader range of subjects and have become an important tool for their independent learning. “ IntoUniversity’s secondary FOCUS coordinator, Liam Johnston

It was an extremely time-consuming process but some of the stories we heard were really heart-warming - of refugees needing GCSEs to obtain employment, children in care who had been victims of abuse, mature students, and Ghurkhas. Dr Daniel Sturdy, principal at Wotton House International School