"In my experience subject knowledge always seems to be the biggest concern for teachers when faced with qualification change; especially at A Level. Fortunately this also is the most enjoyable to address… read! As a head of department I was keen to clear as much time as possible to clear time and workload for my team to concentrate on reading to improve their own subject knowledge.
The ethos of West London Free School means that, even at lower school, ‘what’ we are teaching is prioritised over ‘how’ we teach it, so as a department we were determined to read around the topic. Fortunately, the fascinating topics on offer from OCR meant this was a pleasure. As we only established our new sixth form in September 2016 we only started teaching the new A Level this year. This means we are developing a summer reading list for ‘Russia and its Rulers’ which is fascinating!"
"The second issue tends to be the intricacies of new mark schemes and uncertainty surrounding slight changes to specified content."