Six tips for teachers on getting the most from OCR on results day

Andy Brunning, Chemistry and Geology Subject Advisor

Results day is one of the most important days in the academic year and one of mixed emotions. Whether you’re a teacher or a student, we’re sure you’re anxiously waiting to see if your hard work has paid off. Then, after the celebrations, commiserations and goodbyes, teachers’ thoughts turn to final planning for the next group of students.

But how do you make sure that you use your students’ results to best inform your next year’s teaching? Or help those students who didn’t do quite as well as expected? Or really understand what the results mean for you and your students?

This updated blog explores six ways in which we have improved our support to you both on results day and as you start preparing your next group of students for their exams.

1. Feedback on exam performance

Our examiners’ reports share our knowledge and insight from the summer series and help you to prepare students for their exams.

These reports are framed around questions from the exam paper and some include exemplar candidate work from the series, as well as valuable insight and feedback from our principal examiners.

The reports will be available on Teach Cambridge from results day onwards. More detailed candidate exemplar reports will follow for many subjects later in the academic year.

2. Helping students understand their results

We provide lots of useful information on our results slips (the OCR statements of marks). As well as the overall mark and grade, these show the breakdown of marks for each paper – making it easier to see exactly how well a student has done.

We’ve also produced a handy visual guide to these results slips that tells you exactly what all the information means and will help you explain this to your students.

If you want to help your students to understand how their A Level and GCSE grades are calculated, take a look at the two info sheets on this page.

3. Quick access to past papers

After every exam, we upload the exam papers to Teach Cambridge within two to ten days. Mark schemes will also be available on Teach Cambridge on results day.

Using past papers alongside the relevant examiners’ report can be a great revision tool for your students as well as helping to fine-tune your own teaching. One of our subject advisors explores this in more detail in his blog: How to use examiners’ reports as classroom resources.

4. Easier to plan your professional development for next year

All our qualifications are supported by a comprehensive range of online training. We’ve designed the programme for 2024/2025 to help you get to know and get the most from our qualifications, so that you can deliver them effectively and with confidence. Our events enable you to progress from an introduction to a new or revised qualification, through to a deeper understanding of its assessment criteria, to a mastery of the specification and the practical ways to deliver it in your classroom.

Our Exam Review webinars take place earlier in the academic year. These sessions will offer you expert insight and constructive feedback to help you support your next cohort of students, complementing our examiners’ reports and exemplar materials. 

You can read about our full professional development programme and book your place on our courses through the training page on Teach Cambridge. 

5. Enhanced Active Results service

Available from results day, you can review exam performance with Active Results, our free results analysis service. You can use it to review reports on the performance of individual students, cohorts and whole schools, analyse results at question item level, and help identify trends across your centre.

To support you with your results analysis, we continue to make Active Results more user friendly, with enhanced accessibility, speed and performance. See what information you can access with Active Results in our user guide.

Active Results is available for all GCSEs, A Levels and Cambridge Nationals.

6. Free Access to Scripts

Access to Scripts is our free, on-demand service which allows you to download copies of students’ completed question papers. This can help you make decisions about whether to request a review of marking, as well as the papers being a useful source of additional exemplars to support teaching and learning. Learn more about getting started with our Access to Scripts service.

Stay connected

Whatever kind of results day you have, don’t forget we offer ongoing support through our Customer Support Centre, our subject advisors and our range of resources. You can email us at support@ocr.org.uk, or call us on 01223 553998. You can also sign up to subject updates to receive information about resources and support.

We hope that you found this blog useful, and you have a successful results day and enjoy the rest of your summer.

About the author

Andy joined OCR in September 2017 as the subject advisor for A Level Chemistry. He has a Chemistry BSc and a Secondary Science PGCE from the University of Bath. Before joining OCR, he worked as a chemistry teacher in Bournemouth and Cambridge. He also sidelines as a science communicator and has produced infographic projects for the Royal Society of Chemistry and the American Chemical Society.