#200: OCR Consultative Forum #1

I've had some chance to digest and read through my notes from my attendance at the first GCSE Natural History Consultative Forum. 

I have previously been a member of the OCR Consultative Forum for Geography for some years and always find the meetings valuable.

The first meeting started with introductions to people with a wide range of experience and expertise, broadly in the area of Natural History. Some of them have been involved in various stages of developing the various documents that will ultimately become the subject criteria / draft specification that teachers will work with, along with various publishers.

There were a number of discussions that followed some presentations earlier. One of them was on the National Education Nature Park which I've signed our school up to.

It ended with a few discussions, where the ideas of the forum were gathered on a number of key questions.

Here's one for you to think about.

What support would you need, and what do you think will help overcome some of the natural uncertainty about starting to teach a new specification?

This is the 200th post on this blog. 

I started it as part of my preparation for potentially teaching the new subject when it appears. There are another two hundred posts in draft, and as the 2024 develops it would be good to think that we might see the subject criteria released so that the awarding bodies and publishers can start working on resources. I have a Google Drive folder full of resources, ideas, reports, images and field guides.

I'm going to explore a few habitats during the Christmas break and aim to put together a guide to how they could be used as a focus for student exploration.

As a final aside, it was good to see the progress made on the GCSE in British Sign Language (BSL). This was first announced in 2019, and the pandemic has been blamed for the delay.

The BSL Subject Content was released a few days ago - we need the Natural History GCSE to reach this point next.

The size of the document and nature of the contents may give some indication as to what will emerge, although the nature of the subject is a lot more 'political' and contested and defining elements will be less simple.