The King's (The Cathedral) School

Peterborough

UCAS Applications 2021 Statement

Contextual Positioning Statement – The King’s (The Cathedral) School Peterborough

We have worked as hard as we can to maintain the provision for our students throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.  Despite the efforts of our staff and students to maintain as much of a regular academic provision as usual, there are some points which should be taken into consideration for UCAS Applications in 2021.

On 20 March 2020, The King’s (The Cathedral) School was forced to close its doors to students to comply with lockdown with, at the time, an uncertain return date. 

All students were provided with lesson materials using our online file sharing system.  This meant that they were able to follow the courses for which they were enrolled, through to the end of the academic year. Teachers received work electronically and provided feedback to students where possible.  Our usual programme of rigorous internal assessment was more challenging, and it is clear that our usual level of face-to-face provision was unachievable.

Because of our very strict and detailed safeguarding policies, we were only able to utilise video conferencing platforms towards the end of the lockdown period for schools; this meant that there were minimal student-teacher interactions or verbal feedback on work set. 

In the summer term (June) Year 12 were invited in to school for a one-to-one mentoring session but we were unable to offer formal subject teaching at this point, to comply with social distancing guidelines. 

As a school we decided that we would still run internal Year 12 Exams, which were all conducted remotely; only after these were completed did students get the opportunity for a limited number of real-time online lessons, using Microsoft Teams.  In total 14 teaching weeks were missed, which amounted to 62 hours of face-to-face teaching missed per subject, as well as 62 hours of supervised private study, which invaluably helps our students in Year 12 maintain effective study habits.