Students studying a ‘Short Fat’ option take a GCSE qualification in 1 academic year in an intensive course with 5 timetabled hours a week.

The end of year target for short fat courses is always the same as their GCSE end of KS4 target grades.

As students should aim to be working at this target level as soon as possible we have not included a progress path graph.

You should expect to see a steady improvement towards the target level throughout the year and students should work with this final goal in mind throughout the course.

In Key Stage 4, for much of the GCSE course, students are working on topics that are part of the Dynamic Planet and People and the Planet units.

These topics take between 7 and 10 hours of teaching time to cover and students’ progress is assessed through routine class and homework, for which GCSE equivalent grades are awarded, and through past exam paper questions for that topic  which are graded using exam board marking schemes .

For unit 3, ‘Making geographical decisions’ students work on the pre-released resource pack is assessed in lessons in the final stage of the course leading up to the terminal exam. For unit 4, the controlled assessment, student progress is assessed against the exam board marking criteria with students self-assessing their work against the criteria and staff giving the appropriate level of permitted guidance.