Second week of year eleven and I already feel like I'm dying :(

Don't listen to the people saying GCSEs are nothing compared to A levels. It's a completely different way of working, and by the time you get there, you're ready for it. They just like feeling superior.

As for how to cope: timetable timetable timetable! I wish I'd done this for GCSEs, and it's saving my life now. Part of the reason you are stressed is you don't know when you're going to do the work. Plan the next few days, working out when you'll have time slots, and fill them in with specific pieces of work (not just 'homework'. You'll start to feel a lot more on top of things, I promise. It also makes it less hard to procrastinate.

I did music and another coursework heavy subject and I did struggle a bit but I managed. In music, I started out at grade two piano and got my grade 3 at the end of year 10. I'm okay at reading sheet music, but there were singers in my class that had absolutely no idea how to read it. I knew the basics of theory, but that wasn't a lot. Ask your music teacher or your piano teacher (if you have one) about how to improve on your theory, thats really the best way to go about it, they will know how to help.

Coursework is tough, it can feel like you can't see the end of it but what I recommend doing is:

- Plan everything you need to finish, make to-do lists and tick each item off one by one. (I did this with my computing coursework)
- If you are allowed/are able to, stay after school to finish coursework, that's how I got all mine finished, and at break time. Once you get home you probably want to relax and are out of the mindset of schoolwork.

I didn't love computing at all, and I hated science, but I managed to do okay in the end. GCSE's aren't the be all and end all, no matter how much it may feel like that.

Also, at my school, deadlines for coursework weren't set in stone, and likely they aren't at your school either because coursework doesn't need sending off to the exam board until the spring. You may get a telling off perhaps, or a detention, but it isn't the end of the world if you don't finish, your teachers want you to do the best you can so they won't send off unfinished coursework.

So basically it doesn't matter if I fail them because I don't have to put them on my CV?

So basically it doesn't matter if I fail them because I don't have to put them on my CV?