Year 9 Options
Welcome to the Year 9 Options page of our website. This page contains all the information you will need as a family to help make option choices for GCSE study.
This web page contains a short series of video clips, and documents to download which will help students and parents when choosing GCSE options for next year. We have purposely made several clips and added the options booklet, option blocks and further information below, so this can be viewed and reflected upon throughout the process.
The Options meetings are planned to be face-to-face between your child and a member of the Options Guidance Team. Students will receive an invite in their register in the morning with the time and room to attend. Most appointments take between 10 and 15 minutes. In this meeting, the member of staff will record the student’s 4 choices for their GCSE options, alongside a reserve choice (in the rare event of a subject not running, we would always discuss this with them and you before giving students their reserve choice).
In tutorial on the 15th of January, students have completed a ‘Personal Profile’ about themselves. This will be followed by another tutorial where they will choose the options they would like to select, so we would encourage parents and students to discuss their potential options from now. This will allow the member of staff conducting the meeting to have researched the potential choices and student interests in advance of the meeting.
We very much want this to be a collaborative process involving students, parents and the school guidance team. We will keep parents up to date at each stage of the process and parents can ask the Year 9 Team any additional questions they might have.
This is a very important process as we know if students select the right courses, they will enjoy their learning, be taught and supported very well and go on to achieve excellent results.
Our first video introduces you to the Year 9 options process and is from the Head of Year, Abi Welch.
The next video is by Linda Buckle (Deputy Headteacher) who will discuss all the stages of the options process.
Our next video is by Andy Sherlaw (Deputy Headteacher) who will provide further information that you should consider when selecting your 4 GCSE options.
We thought we'd share with you the thoughts of some of our Year 11 students when reflecting back to their experience of the options process, and how it has impacted on them now.
Our final video is the concluding comments of Steve Wilson (Headteacher) who will summarise the key messages of our previous videos.