Students forced to retake their GCSEs at college can find it difficult to engage; that’s an acknowledged fact across the further education sector. Many will have failed maths and English multiple times and be battling on to get that all-important grade 4. On GCSE results day last year, Tes told the story of Lauren Reid, a student at City College Plymouth, who had managed to secure that crucial grade 4 on her ninth attempt. 

This summer, of course, GCSE results day will look – and feel – very different. Not only will students receive a teacher-calculated grade for their GCSE maths and English exams, but learners will have finished their courses online, following the closure of colleges and schools to most learners because of the coronavirus pandemic. 

The FE sector’s quick transition to online learning during lockdown has received much praise from government and leaders across the sector.

And for one college, teaching GCSE maths and English resits online has been so successful that it has decided it will continue to teach the subjects exclusively online for the foreseeable future – even when other courses return to face-to-face delivery.

Background: Meet the student who passed GCSE maths at the NINTH try

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Opinion: We need a better plan for English and maths

'A shift in student dynamic'

Milton Keynes College has huge cohorts of students resitting maths and English GCSE: 800-900 students for English and 700-800 for maths. The college also prides itself on its good track record when it comes to pass rates: 31 per cent of students gained a grade 4 in maths in 2018-19, compared with 22.3 per cent nationally, and 31 per cent of students gained a grade 4 in English, compared with 31.9 per cent nationally. 

It could be seen as a risky move to shift this already successful provision online full time, but Keith Turner, the college’s director of study programmes, tells Tes that he was confident that the new approach would continue to foster great achievement. 

He says that initially, the decision was about creating a consistent approach across the delivery of the courses, and safeguarding against the number of students in college at any one time. But actually, the tutors report that motivation, engagement, and – perhaps most crucially – attendance has improved since the provision was forced to move online during lockdown. 

“If I'm being really honest, we were fairly slow adopters to online learning because we've always considered the face-to-face [time] to be the most critical thing for students. The relationship between the tutor and the student is really quite critical but while we're in lockdown and delivering online, we recognise that there were actually quite a lot of advantages,” Turner says. 

“Students who perhaps have struggled in the classroom environment and who haven’t participated fully, they actually seem to come to the forefront – they seem to respond incredibly well to online learning. We saw a complete shift in terms of student dynamic.”

He says that working online has eliminated any class behaviour issues too – something they have found relatively common in face-to-face GCSE resit classes. He says that teachers are not having to spend time dealing with low-level disruption, and that students are more focused.

Turner adds that, while attendance has been high, there are some students who don’t always log on to the online sessions. When this happens, a "progress tutor" from the college “scoops up” these students, providing personal mentoring to understand why they aren’t attending.

“We can deploy the progress tutors as a sort of SWAT team to focus on those students who are struggling the most or, in this case, who aren't attending as much as they should be,” he says.  “So, we have the opportunity through that team of progress mentors to scoop up any kind of issues, any sort of problems that arise with those one or two who aren't engaging.”

The college is putting various measures in place to ensure that no one falls through the net in September. To maintain those strong teacher-learner relationships, students will initially come into college for an induction period for GCSE resit classes before the learning moves online. And in order to cater for those students who cannot easily access a smart device or laptop in order to work successfully online, the college is repurposing rooms as computer labs. That way, a disadvantaged student can still participate with the online learning, but do so from the college itself.

And the staff, Turner says, are really embracing this new way of teaching – as well as the flexibility it brings for them. 

“Besides that initial reluctance, they've really really adopted online [measures] incredibly well,” he says. “I'm watching a lot of the planning that they're doing over the summer and there's a real excitement about the new ways of approaching teaching online. They more than just embrace it. In terms of their own development, it's been phenomenal. 

“We often run twilight and holiday revision sessions, and now that they don’t need to physically happen in the classroom, it will give teachers more flexibility in where they work.”

Motivation and engagement

Eddie Playfair, senior policy manager at the Association of Colleges, says that finding ways to motivate and engage learners online was key to making this provision work. 

“Motivation and engagement are the big issues with GCSE retake students. Students will miss the face to face and the group dynamic, the chemistry of learning together, encouraging and supporting each other. That’s something that is difficult to replicate online, but there are ways that online approaches can do so,” he says. 

“I think the important skill is going to be to design programmes that are flexible enough to move up and down that spectrum of [being] on campus and online. We also need to ask whether there are one-to-one approaches that can supplement or follow up the online experience, and when learners do come on to the campus, what can you offer them that’s unique and special and can only be done on campus face to face or as part of group social experience. 

“Colleges are experimenting and trying out all sorts of approaches and it’s easier working with students who you already know; you can build on the relationship you already have with them. With new students, it’s harder if you’re trying to establish those relationships online.”

The digital divide, he says, is a major issue – and that colleges will need to think about having learning centres from which students can work if their own home environment isn’t conducive to learning or if they don’t have digital devices of their own. 

Relationships and networks

Apprenticeship and skills minister Gillian Keegan tells Tes that she thinks that there are upsides of online learning – but that it has to be “supplemented with the ability to ask questions, to be able to get things explained to you, to be able to have that more in depth tuition as well”.

She says the friendships, relationships and networks people had in colleges were really important: “All those interactions are vitally important and obviously vital for mental health as well. And of course, not everybody’s home life is equal, either. It is very important and that is why we are delighted that we can give colleges the flexibility to be able to bring back students face to face. They know the people who will benefit from it most, they know the courses that need it most.”