Those of us that work in sixth form colleges often get told by friends and colleagues that our job is easier than working in a school. As a teacher who has worked in both environments I always respond to this by saying that it’s not necessarily easier it’s just different. This blog will hopefully share some of those differences and give me a chance to explore the rhythm of our academic year.

One of my team started her course meeting with this picture last week which she felt described the roller coaster ride experienced by teachers (and students) in a sixth form college environment.

It’s the 11th September and I’m writing this post at the end of the lengthly prologue. We returned from the summer on the 29th August but don’t actually start on our full timetables until today! This enormous gap is certainly not downtime as the enormous machine that is timetabling runs in the days Inbetween. We have just over half of our students enrol with us to start year 12 each September and in a college numbering just over three thousand students there’s a lot of work to do getting ready for them. Our application cycle started the previous November with open evenings followed by applications, interviews and new students days but we never know for certain who is going to arrive until the 29th/30th August when we enrol them all.

In the first week in September we teach our returning year 13 students on Monday and Friday and during the gap in the middle our guidance team with those who are making priority University applications to help with personal statements etc.

We don’t have any INSET days once the students are in college so our whole college training, updates on safeguarding etc happen in this time.

As a HoD there is a lot of reflection on last year to organise with teaching teams mostly around considering the outcomes of students with a view to fine tuning our plans for the coming year. Alongside finalising rooming, adjusting timetables and making sure all our systems are in place we also deal with queries from the Summer exam series.

In my area we welcome 13 groups of year 13 Chemists and 9 groups of Physicists to the department in the next three days. This is just over 490 new students! We also have race day on Sunday for our Greenpower racing team. We draw on a massive number of feeder schools so our learning support team work really hard to get arrangements in place for our new students. We get personalised information about their individual learning needs etc but planning can be down to the wire for these students.

That’s all for now as it’s time to enter the exposition stage of our roller coaster ride!