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I was looking at the Toolkits sent out from the Department for Education to try and help schools reduce workload. I think they have some good ideas to start off some schools who really struggle with this. I like this graph idea where you identify as high workload / low impact to give you area of focus.

Should these practices be stopped, amended to make them less time intensive, or refined so they have more impact?

If it does not really help students in a major way, we all just need to ditch it and do things that work. Marking is a huge part of this and some people are obsessed with it. However, the golden part of marking is pupils reflecting on their own work. This actually often does not need to be as teacher centric as many schools make it.

What can all of us (school leaders, teachers and support staff) do to lower the burden.

By updating policies and practice, streamlining or just stopping dead all the things that hoover up your time?

I think schools are really poor at times at just saying no to parents or stakeholders and often people in SLT positions add on tasks all the time without removal of existing burdens. Industry is great at avoiding this as usually your business collapses as the profits dry up and inefficiency’s creep in. Also schools historically are tied to all sorts of traditions which seem to be stuck in the UK. Things like a yearly school reports on paper, got replaced by multiple reports which ultimately may be done on a computer but generally seem to be more of a burden than ever before. In an age where we can share any grade with parents online, why not just share the testing and any behaviour issues when they come up? Also just keep it simple!

I wonder how many people in SLT see it as their job to be the “streamliner” and efficiency expert. This is your key role and everyone should have the mantra that if they can shave even 30s off a process it may ultimately lead to hours of saving of time for staff at the whiteboard. Filling in forms and sharing information is another notoriously complex task in some schools. This can all be streamlined, and project managed to give a better outcome in less time.

Final point, maybe teachers need to have a standard 36 hour contract and then anything else is paid overtime. This may bring out the best in SLT and middle managers to get it right for staff. When you are paid by the hour, you never take longer to do anything that is mission critical

I am extremely disappointed by this year’s AQA Spec A A-level papers. The challenge was simply too much for many pupils and clearly the difficulty of the papers in comparison to Edexcel as a comparison was clear from the papers and marks requires for higher grades which were significantly different. See my analysis below of the difference between the two papers.

The content itself is clearly similar overall to both courses but the contexts were not to that taught. Pupils and teachers expect to teach on a factual and then see that mostly that content is obvious when tested. The whole question should not be cryptic and clearly whoever was writing most of the longer answer questions was someone with a point to prove. The Physics subject is not popular at most schools and has become worse over time with many pupils simply not picking it as the chances of getting an A or A* at other subjects is easier. We have no coursework to pick up some easier marks so it’s all on 3 hard papers. Paper 3 had a question to start about the “duty cycle” of an oscilloscope. Interesting you don’t need to know what that is to answer to that to get the 1 marker, but I have never each heard of a “duty cycle”. When you delve into it with the internet available and work through the question with help of a mark scheme it is clear. Not complex but convoluted and not accessible. So, if I have never heard of it, taught or, been taught it and I have a pure Physics degree, who will?  I pride myself on doing a thorough job and even teach Lissajous figures which most don’t so how did my pupils get caught out?

Also, Paper 3 Q1.3 talks of “graphical analysis of figure 1” which is a photograph and not graph. As a good teacher I always ask pupils to look at the whole of a question before they start. When I did Q1.3 I was confused I as looked at figure 3 after the question as it was a graph wondering what to do. It’s another example of poor wording and making the questions so long over pages it is just confusing. Also, some of the practical questions were just not clear on what they wanted and again so convoluted it was hard for any pupil so see what to answer. A lot were just stabbing around in the dark as was I when I did the papers myself in lots of questions. They took me ages to work out and the time you gave in the exam was not enough. I would have certainly run out of time and not been tested on what I knew. The practical skills are hard enough to teach with simply basic examples of graphing and skills we don’t need to make it into a maths exercise. Which brings me onto the maths across all three papers. In reality your exams are not accessible for any pupils not taking A-level Maths to an A2 level. Virtually every question seemed to have some fiddly maths on each level to start and finish a question. Paper3 Q7 on nuclear decay and thermal neutrons usually has been a straightforward word-based question to explain. However, they showed a complex ratio graph, again which I have never seen in all my travels (and I worked at the Nuclear electric but had not taken a “nuclear physics degree”). It’s just too involved for mainstream exams and pushing onto university ideas. If you want them to be taught this kind of thing, it needs to be clearly defined in the specifications so I can teach them some of it beforehand.

The leaps expected for most students are so tricky, again they are just guessing and randomly stumbling on an answer. Why make it so tricky, just not needed. It is wrong to do this as we are ending up cutting off many students. Since the A-level reforms nobody does AS so we don’t even have pupils taking Maths further than GCSE. If you want this to be the case, you need to put out new guidance to teachers so we can make this clear. Again, the Maths only route is really not great for Physics numbers.

I have taught AQA for all of my 21-year career and had many pupils obtain A* grades over an extended period of time and see many go to Oxbridge or other high class destinations. We also had pupils with exceptionally low grades which made 2 years of their and our lives pointless. This is similar to when pupils and teachers were cheating at AQA ISA exams and I realised that they had become impossible to do unless you cheated, I switched to the EMPA exam and found my A* students again were obtaining A* instead of C on the ISA exams. We must change it for next year or we will end up with an even bigger crisis than ever in Physics teaching and nobody will take physics. I am really saddened and hope AQA will listen.

So if anyone who works with AQA has any thoughts, please share them, and AQA might listen?

https://www.psypost.org/2021/05/brain-imaging-study-finds-that-teaching-math-anxious-students-to-reframe-their-anxieties-improves-their-performance-60954

This is super research and fits in with what I see daily in Physics.

The idea that if you are stressed you do worse at the mathematics components I think it’s key for Physics. This is why for nearly all my work I give full answers in printed or electronic form and allow my students to read what they want at their own pace.  I avoid excessive questioning in front of the class and make it low stakes.

If you are learning through written questions or works well. a most pupils then slowly learn without stress at their own pace.

I think we all need to move to this type of work and forget a lot of what has gone on for many years. If you want to pressure a pupil give them a proper test in exam conditions. This of course has it place too, but in the classroom normally, Physics is about practice and not stress!