GCSE Geography A: I am new to OCR where would be the best place for me to get support and the resources I need?

We have a qualification page GCSE A where you can find all the information you need to get started. The specification is a key document as it details the content and skills to be delivered and how students will be assessed at GCSE, as well as essential administrative information.

Planning and teaching

To help you plan the course over two or three years we have a course planning guide which outlines models for delivery.

We have provided support for you in teaching our qualifications through the Delivery Guides. These guides are written by teachers for teachers and they include bespoke teaching and learning activities for each specification topic (GCSE B) or theme (GCSE A).

The geography qualifications require the delivery of geographical skills, as there will be questions on these skills in the exams. We have produced two interactive resources which can be shared with students. These explain each geographical skill including examples of the graphs and charts as well as the maps to be studied.

We have changed the country groupings in our specification, resources and assessments, this was based on research from the IMF and World Bank. Please see our blog article for more support and information: https://www.ocr.org.uk/news/why-acs-edcs-and-lidcs/  

Assessment

When the GCSE qualifications were reformed we developed Sample Assessment Support Materials (SAMs) which aimed to give details about the new style of assessments. The guides to the SAMs explore the variety of question styles, command terms, question tariffs and the assessment objectives. We have included the mark scheme extracts to show the sorts of points students could in their answers.

We also produced another full set of papers which we called practice papers, this was to support teachers with further examples of questions and mark schemes. These papers could be used for mock exams and / or topic tests.

You can also access candidate exemplars from the 2018 series with senior examiner commentary as well as past papers, mark schemes and examiner reports from the Teach Cambridge.