Summer holidays or summer school - what's happening?

I think its fair to say 2020 is not going to plan.

Like many people, I tend to use New Year as a milestone to set goals and plans for the year ahead. And as usual, in January, I made my plans for 2020.

Guess how much of that stood up to lockdown?

I'm sure the same applies to you too, unless you're Mystic Meg, and you're having to make many adjustments to your plans this year.

Maybe you've had to cancel a family holiday and negotiate refunds from multiple different providers.

Maybe you've been furloughed or are working from home, and finding out that's not all its cracked up to be.

For students leading up to exams, it threw everything up in the air, and its only very slowly falling back down into some sort of plan. Many of the major parts are still up there somewhere causing anxiety as we wait for them to settle.

Summer 2020 assessments

As we shared before, any exams due to take place in Summer 2020 are now being replaced by Ofqual coordinated teacher assessments. This means that students don't actually sit an exam in an exam hall, but feedback from their school and standardisation from Ofqual will assign them a grade for any exams they should have been sitting.

These grades will be released 22nd August 2020 and until then, those teens are really just in limbo wondering how things will pan out for them in September.

Its worth having a back up plan in case those grades aren't good enough to move forward with the planned further studies.

You can find the Government answers to the most common questions on this here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/coronavirus-covid-19-cancellation-of-gcses-as-and-a-levels-in-2020.

National Tutoring Programme

However if your exams were due to take place in 2021, while you have a little longer to prepare, studies are still being disrupted as schools are closed for the foreseeable future.

And with the best of intentions, home studies just aren't the same.

I've been working closely with teachers since schools closed in my free Facebook group for tutors and teachers. For many, it has been a steep learning curve. But even having helped them to set up online classrooms and share materials with their students, they just can't work in the same way that a personal tutor can.

And it seems that this has been recognised by the Government too, as they have set up the National Tutoring Programme. This is intended to use tutors and coaches to provide additional one to one or small group support to disadvantaged students who ordinarily wouldn't have been able to access private tuition.

I'm really excited to see how this will work going forward, and I expect it to have a big impact on the tutoring world of the future.

This is clear recognition of the benefit good quality tutoring can make in a child's life.

I also expect it to pave the way in standardising and growing tutor certification, as it will involve quality, safeguarding, and evaluation standards.

If you'd like additional support with home schooling for your child, get in touch to find out how tutoring can help, or join our free Facebook group for GCSE parents and students.