Hey Blog! This week I’m writing about going somewhere that I will be going to again in May and is part of a new chapter of my home ed.
Regular readers will know I am currently studying for an Environmental Management GCSE, which is to take place this May. Because I am home educated, as I discussed in my post on what home education is like (How I home ed, 2nd April 2023), we have to find our own way to sit and finance exams, and this is massively helped by an organisation called Tutors and Exams, who provide a connection for home educating families between examiners, tutors, and students. They now have ten exam centres across the UK – and last Tuesday was the opening day for one of these!
When we first looked at booking me an exam, we thought the nearest centre would be Doncaster – which for a multitude of reasons isn’t ideal. However, we recently heard there was to be a centre opening in Birmingham, which suits us better as there are more trains to get there! We also decided to go and have a look around so when we went for real, I would know what it was like. Therefore, we popped off to Birmingham to have a look around.
Having-to-be-got-up-at-6:30 and two train journeys later, we arrived at Birmingham New St. There are more entrances than are useful and no compasses visible at the station, so it took us several wrong turns and half an hour of looking at the map for considerable periods and going the wrong way before we got on track to arrive at the new exam centre. We were just a hundred metres down the street from it when we saw a coffee shop – something we had wanted to find and of which there was a slight lack in the area! It turned out that Tutors and Exams struck a deal with the shop to have a small discount for people coming to the centre while we were in the shop – so we were the first customers to get it! After a very nice coffee and pastries that came included (something I’ve never seen before!), we got in to the new centre. It seems very nice. There is a small set of rooms downstairs, where we waited to go up to the exam rooms, two upper floors of rooms full of clocks, desks exactly a certain distance apart – because the exam rules are ridiculously precise – and posters listing the specific things you can’t bring into the room. As I have never been into an exam room before, I didn’t know what to expect so I was not delighted or disappointed, but as Mum used to be a teacher herself, she did – and apparently these rooms were lighter and airier than typical exam rooms. This is good – I am glad that these are better because when it does come to GCSEs I will be in a place that I am happy in.
After we had seen the rooms, there was a talk about the organisation and the new centre, which apparently answered all of Mum’s questions, and the opening ceremony. I even got onto the Facebook page as a photo of me was used in the video of the opening. This photo was much better than the one we had to send off when we booked the exam – that one makes me look like a convict! Either way, it was a nice day out and I plan to be back there, sitting (and obviously passing) the exam, sometime in May.