The CAFS Advice That's Costing Your Students Marks

The night before the CAFS HSC, my DMs filled up with last-minute questions from your students.

A lot of them started with "but someone told me..."

Someone on TikTok. An ex-student. A set of notes passed around online. AI. Some of that advice sounds right. A lot of it is wrong. And it's quietly costing Community and Family Studies students marks.

Here are the two fixes I'd make in every CAFS classroom tomorrow.

1. Acronyms help students plan. Examples earn the marks.

Acronyms are not what HSC markers are looking for. They're memory joggers for students. Nothing in the performance band descriptors asks for extensive knowledge and understanding of acronyms.

Use them where they belong: in the 30 seconds to a minute before students write.

That's what RUN FAR is for.

• Read the question
• Underline the syllabus content and the Glossary of Key Words term
• Note down acronyms, definitions and key ideas
• Formulate a plan
• Answer the question in the lines provided
• Reread and refine

Then the examples have to do the heavy lifting. Red Cross, Vinnies and Mission Australia are correct examples of support for people experiencing homelessness. But anyone could walk in off the street and write them.

Coast Shelter, Orange Sky Laundry and The Big Issue support the uniqueness of that group.

They are SUAVE examples:

• Specific
• Unique
• Applied to the question
• Varied
• Explicit

2. Link to wellbeing when the question asks. And always in Part C.

Some advice out there tells students to link every answer back to wellbeing. That's incorrect.

• If the question asks about wellbeing, link to wellbeing. If it doesn't, don't.
• That goes for Parenting and Caring and Groups in Context.
• In the Option, Parts a and b only link to wellbeing when the question tells them to.
• In Part c, every single paragraph links back to wellbeing. The marking guidelines have a whole dot point on it.

This is exactly why so many CAFS students are still sitting on 7 or 8 out of 15 for Part c.

And start in Year 11

Year 11 Community and Family Studies isn't the easy year. It's where Band 5 and 6 habits are built. Teach content that links to Year 12 concepts, like support organisations from Parenting and Caring, and link your IRP topics to the Option. When we did this, our Option results lifted from 11 or 12 out of 15 to 13, 14 and 15.

🎧 Listen to Episode #194 of The PDHPE & CAFS Podcast: thelearnnet.com/194

And if you'd love CAFS resources, scaffolds and sample answers written by someone who's marked the HSC for over 16 years, come and join us inside The CAFS Collective.

thelearnnet.com/collective