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Does Studying A level Spanish improve my conversational Spanish? I was asked this question myself recently. Not knowing the answer myself, I asked Laura Lopez-Sheriff, one of Oxford Open Learning’s Spanish teaching team, to answer for me.  This is what she said: “Studying A level Spanish most definitely will improve your conversational skills, for the […]

Last Dates for Registration This year Oxford Open Learning’s final dates for registration onto courses leading to summer 2014 examinations are shown below. GCSE or IGCSE,  Friday the 15th November Full A level, Monday  the 30th September AS or A2 level, Thursday the 31st October These are guideline dates.  If you have a particularly strong […]

Good luck to all Oxford Open Learning and Oxford Home Schooling students who will be getting their results today. Getting a good result from home learning should be especially satisfying as it requires a great deal of self-motivation and dedication and this is something that is usually well respected by other educational institutions. One of […]

Last year 18,000 students sat an English International GCSE in the UK.  This year it is a staggering 78,000 students, a rise of 430%.  So why have schools suddenly abandoned the more traditional GCSE qualification? The first thing to remember is that almost everyone in the system wants the student to pass.  The exam boards […]

It’s that time of year, folks.  I don’t mean that time of year when we celebrate our children’s achievements in passing their exams before they go on to F.E. College or University, though.  No, it’s time instead to nod sagely when we see a teenager with 10 A*s, and say: “They wouldn’t have got those […]

UK students are collecting results certificates today and for the second year running, fewer people have been awarded an A* grade than in previous years. Oxford Open Learning’s first two results of the day in English Literature and English Language have not reflected this trend so far, with an A* and an A grade respectively. […]

Inherited intelligence could account for nearly 60 per cent of a pupil’s results at GCSE level, according to new research by a scientist at Kings College London. Based on a long-term study of more than 11,000 twins in England and Wales, the study by Professor Robert Plomin suggests that children’s genes have a “substantial” bearing […]

Thousands of GCSE maths students are to sit more than one exam to raise the chances of them achieving a grade C or greater, the exams regulator has warned. Ofqual said as many as 15 per cent of GCSE candidates were last year submitted for maths exams with multiple boards in a bid to boost […]

Biology students at Runshaw College in Lancashire are to receive only their predicted AS and A level grades for a recent exam, after an examining board ruled that their teachers had given them an unfair advantage. The Lancashire Evening Post reports that some 650 biology A level candidates at the college, which claims to be […]

Changes to the way schools are ranked have resulted in more than 100 institutions previously rated as “outstanding” being downgraded by schools inspector Ofsted. Prior to the new system, introduced in September 2012, schools could be rated “outstanding” even if the quality of teaching was not judged to be of the very highest level. This […]