[rharris]

Hello,

I work as a History teacher in a college of FE and teach the AS and A2 programmes. Our catchment area is very diverse in terms of the economic and social backgrounds of the students, and also in terms of the GCSEs they take at school.

I have noticed a change in our applicants' GCSE profiles this year because more and more schools are now offering GCSE Humanities instead of Geog/History. I've had a look at the exam specs, but could anyone add some flesh to these 'bones'? What sort of skills are required to be successful on the course? How does it compare to GCSE History in terms of content and the format of the exam? I'm eager to find out; the transition from GSCE to AS History is quite daunting for the students, but at least I know what to expect! As for the transition from Humanities to AS History, I'm clueless!

[HRS]

I guess it all depends which exam boards you use for both Hist/Geog and Humanities in order to compare content and skills. I can only speak from my limited experience of teaching AQA Humanities, although have been teaching and marking AQA Modern History B for around 5 years.

In our case Humanities is only offered to the weakest students who could not cope with full Hist and Geog GCSEs - this is the first issue as although the Humanities AQA exam has a number of 1 and 2 mark questions where only a single word or sentence answer are needed - the paper is actually as difficult for our lower ability kids as Hist/Geog would be!

We divide the Humanities teaching between a Historian and a Geographer - so the optional units that we chose we were biased towards these disciplines so there would be quite a few content overlaps in bewteen the case studies we chose for humanities and what we teach in our own subjects. However, there are several optional units for AQA Humanities - so this would not necessarily be the case in ever school teaching the course.

Skills wise - the AQA Humanities paper format is very different the AQA GCSE History format, although I couldn't comment the the comparison with OCR, Edexcel or WJEC. Source analysis skills are needed for Humanities, but usually to answer short questions linking directly to the source eg give 2 examples from the source.... for 2 marks etc. There is more focus on learning and applying case studies in Humanities.

As I teach both subjects - I have to say that they way I teach Hums is very different to the way I teach History, but that could be down to the ability of the respective cohorts...

Sorry to add more confusion rather than answers

Helen