Dane Court Grammar School

Name Dane Court Grammar School    
Type Grammar School    
Location Broadstairs, Kent    
Cohort GCSE Statistics cohort size: 180  Cohort EAL: 6–10% Cohort SEN: 4–8%

Background

Dane Court Grammar School is a mixed grammar school of 1200 students aged 11 to 19 and has been offering Pearson Edexcel GCSE (9–1) Mathematics and GCSE (9–1) Statistics since 2015.

Simon Ballard, Head of Mathematics at Dane Court Grammar: Our school is in an area known as Thanet, which is near the coast, but has quite a high level of deprivation. Our students come from a wide variety of backgrounds. We study GCSEs at KS4 but we are an IB school in KS5 and use the IB principles for our KS3 teaching.

GCSE Statistics has helped improve the confidence of all students as they know how to achieve success

2021 will be the sixth year of teaching Pearson Edexcel GCSE Statistics. The new specification has made the exam more challenging in terms of the language. To overcome this, we have had to ensure long-term memory is tested on key terms and language at regular intervals. In addition, we ensure that students have notebooks with worked-through examples separate to their working notebooks so that they have a self-created revision guide they can learn from for tests. 

We also find that students who struggle with mathematics, but who are perhaps better at languages, get the chance to have a greater level of achievement in a subject that normally they do not succeed in by taking GCSE Statistics.

We teach Pearson Edexcel GCSE Maths and GCSE Statistics together

We start teaching GCSE Statistics in January of year 9 but changed the order of the chapters to cope with the lower levels of interpretation skills they have at this stage. The GCSE Statistics assessment is taken at the end of year 10. 

We are allocated 18% curriculum time in year 10 to teach GCSE Statistics to try to alleviate the increased curriculum time required. We reduce this to 16% in year 11 as by then we have covered part of the GCSE Maths syllabus through GCSE Statistics. We finish teaching the GCSE Statistics syllabus just before the end of the autumn term. We then teach GCSE Maths until about four weeks after the Easter holiday. Students are then allocated approximately five weeks of lesson time to revise for GCSE Statistics exams. Topics of the GCSE that are covered in Statistics are then only revised at the end of year 11 and not actually retaught.

Embedding GCSE Statistics gives students a new focus halfway through year 9

What embedding GCSE Statistics does for all of our students is give them a new focus halfway through year 9 when generally they start to drift from academic rigor due to options, and give them an opportunity at the end of year 10 to test themselves in a GCSE setting to see what they can achieve. It ticks the boxes of being in an exam hall and preparing for a real exam that counts without the pressure of all the other GCSEs and it gives them confidence that they can achieve a positive result before they start their year 11 exams.

In conclusion? 

GCSE Statistics has helped improve the confidence of all students as they know how to achieve success. It also helps students understand the amount of work that needs to be done to be successful at this level.

As a school it has been really important over the past few years to add to their ‘free basket’ of results and therefore improve the progress score of quite a few students.