The main concern facing every GCSE teacher of the new specification is how to teach the amount of content that is now required.  With this in mind, I am suggesting that you focus your KS3 teaching on embedding the historical thinking and concepts so that you can master the content teaching needed at KS4.

If you are teaching the new Edexcel GCSE, my new KS3 Workbooks should help you embed a concept focused programme in the lower years that will free up time for you to cover the content needed across the three examination papers.  Here are my top tips for planning your KS3 programme, with a little help from my workbooks!

Faced by the challenges of GCSE almost every history department seems to be introducing GCSE question types into their KS3 lessons – the question is whether that is a good thing, and if it is how best to do it, and if it isn’t, what do to instead - how best to revise your KS3 schemes of work so that you actually build the underlying GCSE skills with or without question drilling.

That is the subject of this blog and also the focus of our new Key Stage 3 workbooks which are published at the end of March (Workbook 1) and end of May (Workbook 2).

To succeed in the OCR A specification students need a range of skills. As for any GCSE History exam they’ll need to work with source material, recall factual knowledge, and demonstrate conceptual understanding of the past.
 
However there are also some specific challenges in the OCR A spec. This blog gives your students three practical ways to revise or prepare for some of these specific question types.