Year 11 Psychology
Scheme of Work

The second year completes the specification and ends in a programme rather than a revision list. Ten sections per unit, the same shape as Year 10, and every promise Year 10 makes about Year 11 is kept and cross-checked: the three research-methods requirements it deliberately held, the five mathematical requirements it placed here, and the debates it met but did not argue.

The clinical unit is the one a senior leader will read first. It teaches classification before either condition, so that characteristics are a set of dimensions rather than a list to self-measure against; it names no prevalence figure, because a number printed in a book is out of date before the cohort sits the paper, and teaches instead the four reasons a recorded figure moves and where to find the current one; and it is explicit about what to tell the pastoral lead, when to tell them, and what to do with a disclosure. A student who does not want to be in the room is told privately the week before and has an exit agreed in advance, so no permission has to be asked for in front of the class.

One point of currency that most material has not caught up with: the Department requires the two conditions to be characterised according to the International Classification of Disease and names no edition, and neither do AQA or Pearson Edexcel. OCR's specification is the exception: a footnote tells teachers to use the most recent version of ICD when starting a two-year course. ICD-11 came into effect in January 2022, replacing ICD-10, so the unit teaches the current classification: the characteristics and what classification is for, not a symptom count learned from an older list.

Research methods closes the course by being used rather than revised: students judge reliability, validity and ethics against the plans they wrote themselves in Year 10, which is why the unit opens by telling departments to keep them. The debates are then argued on four examples the course already owns, not introduced as a new topic in the last half-term.

Written to

GCSE subject content: psychology (DfE, DFE-00213-2015) and Ofqual’s GCSE subject level conditions for psychology

Intended for

heads of psychology, subject leaders and every teacher who has to deliver it

Extent

85 pages · 27 sections