The Mock Turtle

Betty is such a joiner-in-er at school that I'm barely seeing her until 5pm each day!

So far she's auditioned for and won a role in a Much Ado About Nothing so rehearses every Friday until 5. Then she's in the Rock Orchestra every Thursday, she's joined the art club that runs during lunches and wants to join the Glee Club too. Other than that she chooses to stay back after school to go to the library every night. Other than that she's also got her LGBT youth group and Scouts every week.

Add into that Scouts and Cubs for the other two I'm considering getting a taxi sign for my car.

We’ve just put in Squeak’s GCSE option choice form and now we’re stressing about the future. There was a long conversation about the merits of Russell group universities and the Ebacc, the workload in science vs triple science, whether she even wants a traditional career, and if any 14 year old ever saw themselves on a management graduate trainee programme.

Urgh. I absolutely hate it, Pip. The SAM gets really stressed out by it all and still had no idea what he wants to do. He's picked traditional academic subject and I'm still not sure it is a good idea.

She’s picked, in this order:
1. History
2. RS
3. Textiles
Back up: French
But then French as an after school option, so she’ll do it regardless.

I dread to think what will happen if she doesn’t get RS & Textiles, they’re what she really wants to do.

There was a lot of toing and froing over L’s options this time last year. Ultimately he went with subjects he thought he’d enjoy.

A started talking about his GCSE options on the way home from football, he’s only in Y7

RE is one of our compulsory core subjects.

Same stress here - A has zero clue what he wants to do this weekend, let alone when he’s thirty. For both of them we opted for academic as far as possible but in subjects they enjoy (hate the least).

E’s current school has an appalling offering, so that complicated it a bit further.

Good luck to Squeak getting the options she wants.

Our place hasn’t mentioned it yet but J had end of Key Stage exams last week for Maths and Science. No results yet.

Texaco Shirley wrote: ↑Thu Jan 20, 2022 9:01 pm RE is one of our compulsory core subjects.

There’s the compulsory RE, and Religious Studies, to my knowledge. I’m actually delighted she wants to do this GCSE, it’s totally my subject.

I didn’t know they were different.

I think they had to do RE/PHSE as an unexamined subject, don’t they? Unless your boys’ school is making them do the GCSE.

When I did them back in 1995 ( ), we had the choice of 3 humanities subjects rather than just History/Geography (for the Ebacc).

Yes, it’s a compulsory GCSE.

That’s quite cool. My uni course is now way harder to get onto than it was because it’s more popular and I think that’s really good.

We had to do GCSE RE at my school. I was in a small year, so I had about two options.

I went to a fairly religious school but it wasn’t compulsory.

RE at GCSE is compulsory at A’s school too.

I think we had to do English, English Lit, Maths, then either double/separate science, a technology, a language, history or geography, and then based on the science choice you either had one or two free choices (where you could pick RE, art, PE etc).

We had to do 35 minutes a week of RE but there wasn’t a GCSE in it.

We had to do English Lit, English and maths and then I chose German, French, history, geography, double science and textiles. I’m sure I’m missing some there as I ended up with 14 GCSE results.

14! I got 8.

I had 8 as well.