Today, again working in partnership with Cambridge University Press, Mike Moores and I signed-off the text for the third of the three guides that we are publishing this autumn with Cambridge University Press. Curriculum 2015: your guide to the new qualifications landscape is a professional development guide for school and college leaders, curriculum and pastoral managers, and classroom teachers in secondary and further education, and is now at the printers.
The publication of this latest guide follows the publication earlier this month of Starting A levels: your guide to exam success, the second of two student and parent guides. At the end of September we published the first student and parent guide, Starting GCSEs: your guide to exam success, making it three texts in a little over three weeks. Both are featured in a previous Breslin Public Policy blog.
Very broadly, the student and parent guides seek to provide a generic induction into examination study, an outline of how the exam system works, an explanation of the key principles behind the recent reforms, and guidance on study skills, revision techniques and exam room strategy, while the teacher guide focuses on the implications of the changes for practitioners in schools and colleges, and related changes to the inspection and funding frameworks and to school and college performance measures.
We are immensely grateful to Michael McGarvey and his team at CUP for commissioning the series and for supporting us throughout, and to members of our Expert Panel who have reviewed earlier drafts of the three publications. The guides mark the launch of CUP's new series of GCSE and A level texts, designed to support the new specifications published this year and emerging over the next three years. You can view their new texts here.
All three publications are available FREE to download, with the first two available now and the latest from Monday 2nd November. You can download Starting GCSEs here and Starting A levels here.
On a personal note, and as I said at the launch of the first two guides, I have loved working with Mike Moores on the books. Mike has been a mentor, guide and friend since the outset of my teaching career and, in writing these books and last year's summary of educational research and policy over the past 40 years for the British Educational Research Association (BERA): 40@40: a portrait of 40 years of educational research through 40 studies, we have fulfilled a longstanding plan to 'get a book out'. Indeed, with this series of three now being published, you could say Breslin and Moores authored books, are a bit like buses - you wait a long time for one, and then several come along at once!
You can download our earlier, and very positively reviewed, BERA text here and, for a limited period you can get hard copies from the BERA office. There are also a limited number of hard copies of our new guides available, but strictly on a 'first come - first served' basis.
We would welcome feedback on the guides and enquiries from schools and colleges willing to trial the texts; feel free to forward this note to friends and colleagues, especially if they have children starting GCSEs or A levels or if they work in secondary or further education!
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