As part of our commitment to supporting our Sixth Form students to achieve highly and maximise their potential, we have recently asked departments to review their wider reading lists.

The purpose for doing this was to be able to place academic support material on our school website in much the same way that universities would do with undergraduate and postgraduate reading lists.  This way, students not only have access to what additional work they can be completing in support of their studies but they will also gain a sense of how higher education institutions will communicate their academic catalogue to students who study at university.  Additionally, we were keen to give parents increased transparency of what students can be doing to supplement their academic studies, so I hope this initiative is valuable in a number of ways.

We have launched this resource to Sixth Form students and have explained that this reading opportunity is designed to expand students’ knowledge base within their subjects.  It is also valuable for the purpose of expanding transferable literacy skills.  These skills are highly applicable to students’ current A-Level studies considering the significant level of analysis contained within question wording in all subjects.  Again, we hope that this initiative will have a variety of benefits to our students.

Whilst the wider reading lists are not designed to be compulsory, they are highly recommended to students as excellent independent learning activities that can be completed both in and out of school.

Mr P Ging, Head of Sixth Form