Running a successful revision information evening.

When we get to the weeks leading up to Easter revision season is upon us.

In schools all over the land colleagues find themselves somewhere on the spectrum between being inundated with eager students to dragging them kicking and screaming to revision classes.

There is clearly a lot to be said for revision being something that students should take personal responsibility for and even an argument that we are creating a culture of learned helplessness by laying on revision classes in schools.

In our school we are required to put on extra classes and  force students to attend (all year around!). Attendance at these sessions  is entered into SIMs. SLT then check up on who hasn’t attended and Heads of Department are asked to follow this up. All of this eats into curriculum planning time.

Interestingly Richard and Alec gained really high rates of progress and attainment at GCSE for a period of over 10 years when they worked together, without ever running a revision class! A*-A passes were roughly 40%, A*-C rates were between 85-95% yearly.

This was all down to a well planned curriculum which took an enquiry based approach and had revision built in throughout the year.

Re-visiting materials over a long period of time seems to be something that some people think is a new idea… sorry, we have been doing it for the last 20 years. And we didn’t need academic research to tell us it was important, we kind of worked it out for ourselves.

However, come September and those conversations with SLT about results we all need to be able to hand-on-heart argue that we did everything that we could.

With this in mind we decided three years ago that we would not only offer regular revision classes after school but that we would also seek to involve our parents in the revision process. Parental engagement is harder in some schools / areas than others. But it is vital to a school’s success.

So, we decided to run an annual parental information evening just before the Easter break.  What follows is an outline of what we offer in this information evening.

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