The government’s recent announcement about this year’s assessments sent many teachers across the country into a spin as you scrambled to work out what the changes to specifications for this year’s exams mean for you and your classes.

What does it mean for each subject?

Maths

The process for maths is relatively straightforward - the changes for maths GCSE have just created ‘focus’ areas on topics that are very likely to come up in exams, but there could still be questions on anything in the course. This means that there is no need to make any changes to your Tassomai account and retrieval practice for all topics will be even more helpful for your classes as they revise the full course.

English literature

Most teachers will still need to teach a Shakespeare text this year, potentially to their students’ dismay, but will have to drop one of their other texts before exams this summer. Please email admin@tassomai.com or get in touch directly with your Customer Success Manager to have them remove your chosen text from your classes.

Science

Here is where it gets a bit more complicated! Biology, chemistry and physics all have different levels of changes to their specifications this year, and it varies even more between different exam boards. But fear not, we’re here to help!

Pausing topics

Now that teachers are able to have fine-tuning control over topics and subtopics on Tassomai, you are able to ‘pause’ any content that has been outlined as part of topics not assessed in this year’s exams. The Tassomai team has combed through the government guidance to match up specification points with the Tassomai topics and sub-topics that will not be included this year. 

To find out more about ‘pausing’ topics and how to find this feature, read our earlier blog post here.

We realise that different teachers will take their own approaches to these changes so we will not be making any blanket alterations to schools’ courses. However, we are giving you a few options to make the process as hassle-free as possible:

1. Do nothing

You can leave the content as it is and allow your students to have access to the entirety of the course, even though some of it may not be covered by assessments this year. 

2. Pause topics yourself

Although this may not be an ideal solution, teachers who would like complete control over their topics can manually ‘pause’ content for their students via the Teacher Dashboard. Please get in touch if you wish to have a copy of the list we have compiled to help with this switch - we have matched up excluded specification points to their corresponding topics and subtopics on Tassomai to try and make this process as seamless as possible.

3. Request topic pausing

Send us an email at admin@tassomai.com or contact your Customer Success Manager to have your account altered. We will go through and automatically update your classes’ content so that anything not being covered in exams this year will be ‘paused’ on your students’ accounts.

We hope this information helps to put your mind at ease when it comes to thinking about the changes to the exams this year and you can rest assured that your students will only be covering the Tassomai topics you have chosen for them.