What is KS3?
Quite simply, Key Stage 3 is the education a student is expected to receive in UK schools from the ages of 11 to 14.
Our courses have been designed to cover the same material as the National Curriculum.
How you use our courses is up to you. You may feel that you want your child to study the entirety of the course and do not wish to miss some aspects out. For example, our Science course touches on the Darwinian Theory of Evolution. As a parent you are able to decide yourself whether you would wish your child to cover this topic or not. We will be as flexible as you are.
The Role of the Tutor
Your tutor will be available to you by telephone and, whilst the student is actively studying, will contact the student to check everything is OK. When you first enrol with Oxford Home Schooling, your tutor will contact you to introduce themselves and arrange planned contact with the student. The tutor is primarily involved in academic enquiries.
The Role of the Mentor
It’s hard studying on your own, even if you have a tutor who is just a phone call away. There is no doubt that a child’s chances of completing the course and succeeding in their studies improve if they have the right back-up team. However much support the student gets over the phone from the tutor, no home schooling student will thrive without daily help from a mentor. In the case of young students that nearly always means the parent.
Here are a few of the roles that the parent/mentor might play:
- Encourager
- Motivator
- Study organiser
- Topic explainer
- Exercise marker
- Stick-and-carrot provider
- Friend and confidant
- Progress assessor
- Transporter
- Technical facilitator
- Ideas provider
- Exam arranger
- Careers (and HE) adviser
Full details of all these roles can be found in the Oxford Home Schooling document, “The Role of the Parent or Mentor”. The full text of which can be found here.
The Oxford Home Schooling Key Stage 3 courses are normally divided into three separate one-year courses. These match typical school-based programmes for Years 7, 8 and 9. It is not necessary for students to be in the “appropriate” school year to tackle each of these courses because students proceed at very different speeds. By the end of the Year 9 course, students are in a position to make a successful start on the equivalent GCSE or IGCSE course, perhaps at age 14.