October 2023 Religious Studies subject update

On the 7th September, we sent out a communication regarding updating our level descriptors.  

Following feedback from centres, this year we are offering our GCSE exam feedback events as pre-recorded on-demand sessions so that centres can access these at a time convenient for them.  

Running these as a pre-record also means that our senior examining team were able to deliver the training directly (as senior examiners cannot run live training events with teachers). 

We now have a video available focusing on 3-mark 'Outline' questions.  This looks at requirements and exam answers that achieved different marks across papers.  

We plan to produce different videos to cover different question types in the upcoming months.  

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We are introducing six separate entry codes for International GCSE Religious Studies Paper 2 from the June 2024 series onwards.

Centres will now select the entry code that aligns to their chosen religion from the optional modules available, meaning that candidates will receive a smaller paper booklet with only questions aligned to that module. This benefits candidates as they will no longer have to sift through 56 pages of questions to identify the sections and questions relevant to them. We hope this will ease the assessment experience, as there will no longer be any chance of accidentally answering questions on the ‘wrong’ religion.

The change to entry codes will not affect your teaching or your students’ learning in any way. This new approach to making entries is designed to more directly reflect the way the qualification is taught. The change is purely an administrative one and has no impact on the content of the specification.

A further environmental benefit of this approach is the reduction of unnecessary printing and shipping of paper through reducing the size of the examination booklets by approximately 80%.

NATRE are hosting their Strictly RE conference virtually again in January 2024 and we are excited to be attending as an exhibitor.  

We hope you can also attend and I look forward to seeing you there!

• NATRE Strictly RE 2024
  To find out more about the conference or for information about booking, please use this link.