This Foundation Workbook is designed to support the development of key literacy and numeracy skills of students in the 1-3 grade range, as well as building confidence in answering open response questions. The amount of scaffolded support decreases throughout the workbook to encourage independent learning.


- Summarises all the Foundation content to be learned for each topic
- Provides plenty of practice questions
- Builds confidence by showing how to answer questions or work through calculations
- Helps students to improve their answers by focusing on use of key scientific vocabulary, how to link key concepts, and work with graphs


Each topic opens with a bulleted summary of the key ideas, reminding students of the key scientific vocabulary and equations they should be able to recall. The questions begin with confidence-building, low demand questions (multiple choice, matching, sentence completion or closed short answer) leading to more open questions including calculations as part of structured questions. The questions include applying and analysing as well as recall, for example bringing in skills used in analysing results from practical work.


Frequent support notes provide hints and tips on key vocabulary, how to answer open response questions (for example by writing causal explanations), strategies for decoding questions (for example by identifying key words in the question) and how to interpret information from tables and graphs.


‘Show me’ writing frames demonstrate how to build longer answers, how to work with equations in science and how to convert units. In later pages the level of scaffolding is gradually reduced by removing the guided support so that students are supported in becoming independent learners throughout their GCSE course.