Courses on Offer/Entry Policies
You are now at the point of choosing what to do and where to go beyond Year 11. Making decisions about the next stage of your education is both exciting and challenging. Exciting because you can now focus on the areas of study, which you are most passionate about, which will lead to success and enjoyment. Challenging, because you need to make an informed decision, which might play a significant part in your career plans for the future.
As an Academy we have taken care to provide a broad curriculum offer, working in partnership with local schools where appropriate. We aim to make learning interesting, inspiring and enjoyable. The curriculum structure of our post-16 courses means you can take a broad range of courses and gain nationally recognised qualifications at the end of both Year 12 and Year 13.
Some of the subjects will be entirely new to you; others may offer progression from your current GCSEs.
Instead of studying up to ten subjects you will now be studying only a few, perhaps three or four. Class sizes will be smaller and you might find that lessons have more discussion taking place. The work will, of course, be more challenging and you will need to study hard to understand some of the ideas you will encounter. More will be expected of you outside the classroom in terms of preparation and independent study and you will be expected to be interested enough in your chosen subjects to be ‘reading around’ them.
Many of you will choose subjects at AS Level that you have not studied before. It is particularly important in these subjects that you read about the subject and find out all you can to confirm your interest in taking lessons in the subject every day in Year 12. You can’t change your subject choices once we get into the teaching year – it would be too late to pick up a different subject if you’ve missed the start of the course. It is possible to change on enrolment day after you have your GCSE results, assuming that you have met the entry requirements and that we still have spaces on the course.
You now have important decisions to make and your teachers will only be too pleased to help. If you are unsure of any point or have any further questions, please do not hesitate to ask your tutor or any senior member of staff.