Reintegrating into Full-Time Education after Missing School:
Near the end of Year 9, I began suffering from a nerve pain condition, something that wasn’t diagnosed for over a year. When unmedicated, it caused horrific pain in my legs, triggered by the heat of summer. It meant I could barely move around the house, let alone attend school. I missed around two weeks of school in the summer term, and for the remainder of the year, I only attended lessons for the subjects I would be continuing at GCSE.
I started Year 10, still undiagnosed, unmedicated, and suffering from another chronic condition. I managed 3 days before I was in too much pain, and had to take a day off. I didn’t end up returning to school again until January. In the winter term, I tried, and largely failed, to keep up with work – not only did I find the pain distracting and had little motivation, teachers sent work very intermittently, and some they did send I just couldn’t do at home, without teaching. The council told my parents there was nothing they could do to provide extra help, so I briefly had a private maths tutor. I had about four sessions before my parents could no longer afford it. I ‘kept up’ with a few subjects – Latin, History and Chemistry. At the end of winter term, we discussed reintegration. In January, I started attending Latin, History, Chemistry and Art. Over the rest of the year, I tried to catch up, and ended up in half of my English lessons, Biology, Physics and RS. At the end of the year, I sat a few mocks, but didn’t do too great in most as I was still trying to catch up when I was meant to be revising.
In Year 11, I went to school full-time. I had missed an entire year of Maths and Computer Science, and largely hadn’t caught up with most subjects, but I thought it was important to be back in all subjects for coursework and exam prep. I had free periods when PE was, which helped – either to do work, or basically have a rest between lessons! Whilst doing Year 11 full time was a lot, I was okay, knowing that A-Levels would have more free time and would be a fresh start. I still had awful attendance during the remainder of my full-time education – hovering at about 80% in Year 11, and getting ever so slightly better in sixth form.
I think missing that time meant that I did learn some really useful skills for the future. I had to learn to look at the mountains of work I’d miss, and take the useful parts. I learnt how to read and navigate specifications and mark schemes and compare that to the work I had to do, so I could cut out the filler. My school always warned that memorising the textbook cover-to-cover would only get you a B: they were wrong, memorising the revision handbook published by the examiner and the typical way marks are awarded actually gets you an A/A*. Even now, I still haven’t caught up with most of the work I was set – I still haven’t read Great Expectations – and a lot was finished last-minute (I finished my Art coursework on the morning of my first Biology exam).
I know other people in my situation were approached to drop subjects or repeat the year – this was never offered to me, and I personally would’ve chosen not to. This is a personal choice – repeating a year is especially worth considering if your illness is short term, or you can study part-time for more of your education (see our other case studies).
My tips to anyone missing school would be:
If there’s a non-compulsory subject you’re struggling with, and it won’t affect your future education (i.e. does dropping it stop you taking an A-Level you want to do?), drop it. Employers won’t care if you did 9 or 10 or 11 GCSEs in the end, if the 9 you got were passes.
Go through the work you’ve been given, learn how to tell what’s a filler task, what’s repetitive, what doesn’t help you learn what you need to. Turn the work into something manageable. My teachers rarely gave me imaginative work, usually just doing every exercise in the textbook. Don’t do that. Take notes, make sure your notes could give you the answer to every question. Do as many pages a day as you sustainably can – you will get through months of lessons in a few days. My teachers didn’t chase me to finish the work they set, and yours should be understanding if you explain why you’ve chosen to work in a different way (e.g. using bullet-pointed notes instead of writing an essay). They might be a bit distant whilst you’re catching up, but they’re still your teachers, and should be able to help if you need it!
Specifications are your new best friend. When you start on a subject, have the specification open, and cross reference with the work you’ve been set – is there superfluous information in the work? Sometimes, I’d even find the reverse, and add in new things that others weren’t taught at school (it may take some time to find the new information, but it gives you an advantage).
Mark schemes and past papers are also your friend. Once you think you’ve done a solid chunk of content, do a past paper – don’t expect to do well, it’s there to help check whether you caught up with everything from those topics (sometimes the textbooks are missing things that the teacher would’ve told you), and what you’re still missing. Sometimes, you might surprise yourself, and find you are instinctively competent at topic questions you haven’t covered yet! When you do these, you’ll start to see patterns of what’s expected in an answer, and you may have the joy of seeing a question in the real exam that’s ever so slightly altered from one in a past paper, and you can get some easy free marks.
If you don’t know something, make an educated guess and move on. Do what you do know well – perfecting what you can to avoid making silly mistakes will help make sure you get as many marks as possible from what you can do, and might help get you over a grade boundary (this is particularly relevant for Maths GCSE, where harder questions are often worth around the same amount as the easier ones).
YouTube. There are so many free resources based on specifications online. I got an A* in Computer Science despite not being caught up by binge watching YouTube explanations on x2 speed and taking notes on it the night before the exam.
If your results end up not being what you wanted, re-marks might help you out – I got a higher grade in Latin GCSE by asking my school to pay for a re-mark, and I got my English Literature A-Level re-marked and appealed to get the grade I deserved.
Written by Anna
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The general aim and objective of Head Up! is to promote the interests of young people with disabilities, physical and/or mental health conditions, specific learning difficulties and neurodivergence; offering them practical advice and support concerning their education and welfare.