Exam Readiness

Running from now until the end of term, Forest School’s exam readiness cycle aims to support our Senior School pupils as they enter the Trinity examinations period.

The aims of Exam-Readiness Cycle are:

To dedicate lesson time for pupils to reflect on the process of exams rather than just their content.

To embed and model a range of learning strategies and what they look like in practice within a subject. These include:

  • Retrieval Practice: engaging students in quizzing and testing their knowledge frequently.
  • Deliberate practice (Elaboration): activities that go through the motions of an exam, reflecting on papers through discussion &collaboration.
  • Interleaving: mixing multiple topics, as happens in an examination paper.
  • Exemplification (Concrete Examples): guiding pupils through model answers and exemplars.
  • Dual Coding: processing information and knowledge by presenting it in a different format to the written word.
  • Spaced practice: leveraging the ‘spacing effect’ by spreading out learning in order to better consolidate knowledge and skills.

To provide for a co-ordinated opportunity for pupils to reflect on the extent of their exam literacy.

To support pupils to be exam-ready in advance of the End of Year Examinations and to make the most of this crucial learning opportunity.

The expectation for teachers over the course of the cycle is:

  • Substantial lesson time is devoted to modelling explicit strategies (not just the explanation of what strategies like ‘dual coding’ are but actually putting this into practice in your subject and leading this discussion/reflection)
  • Homework during the cycle is targeted towards a facet of exam readiness (past paper completion, set exam questions with strict timings, explicit exercises like making mindmaps, retrieval roulette type questions, asking pupils to summarise learning and create their own question banks).
  • There will be a host of very clear and informative exam readiness videos (age and stage appropriate) sent to pupils and parents through the ‘Exam Readiness Toolkit’ Sway.

We pride ourselves on our ‘every child known and valued’ ethos and know that by ensuring our exam readiness cycle encapsulates a broad range of learning strategies, our pupils enter these coming weeks learning strategies that work for them, along with all the support they need to succeed.

Good Luck All!