Physics Delivery to schools in Coventry

Finham Park School is a mixed 11-18 comprehensive in Coventry with more than 1,500 students, including over 300 in the Sixth Form. Coventry Local Authority is organised around four Federations and Finham Park has the largest sixth-form in its South West Federation. It offers a variety of opportunities post-16 for students in its Federation schools who wish to study physics, offering the International Baccalaureate and A-level courses.

Because of a strong uptake at AS and A2-level physics, Finham is able to attract and retain high quality specialist physics teachers. This in turn allows the school to offer stability for students from other schools where A2 physics groups may collapse due to the lack of numbers. Finham also offers special support to PGCE/GTP students in physics.

Finham’s physics department has been able to offer training for NQT teachers in “hard to teach” areas of physics working with the Local Authority. They have also been able to support the delivery of the electronics element of the physics courses at both KS4 and A-level using their specialist status community funding. Finham has also provided training for non-specialist KS4 teachers region-wide. This comprises a series of twilight sessions and evaluation shows high levels of satisfaction and a demand for additional training sessions. This will form part of their outreach programme for 2008-09. Apart from raising teaching standards in physics across the region, the project has the benefit of improving the profile of physics at KS4 and thus increases demand for A-level physics courses.  

Contact details: Craig Hewitt, Head of Science, Finham Park School, Green Lane, Coventry, CV3 6EA Tel: 024 7641 8135, c.hewitt@finhampark.co.uk