This resource is for the 2018-24 specification. Please visit the 2025 section of the website for up-to-date materials.
How many hours does it take to write an Individual Report, and what is the process really like?
After writing the first seven lessons of the Family: Troubled Teens unit of the “Out of the Box” IGCSE GP course, I decided to write an Individual Report myself to find out.
As a classroom teacher, it was always hard to find the time, but ideally I like to do the tasks that I set my students. I have written example essays and presentations for Theory of Knowledge, example stories and descriptive pieces for IGCSE English – even prepared and delivered example IB English mock Individual Orals. It always gives me insights into the required skills and processes, and fresh ideas about how to teach them. Sometimes I have even reversed my advice after I’ve faced the realities of the task. I call it “leading from the middle” – and the students really respond well to it too – nothing clarifies my expectations better.
Ideally, I get a class to help me – like a news desk editor with a team of roving reporters, or a prof running a laboratory with a team of research students.
“Dorcas, please fact check this claim that elephants are heading for extinction in ten years.”
“Bobo, please find out who Avaaz are, and whether they’re a credible source of information.”
Last Monday I sat down, sharpened my word processor, and started to write my IGCSE Individual Report: Should countries allow “tough love” residential programmes for troubled teens? I thought I’d have it finished in time for dinner – how wrong I was!
Summary of time taken:
| (2 weeks) | Reading & viewing sources while writing lessons 1-7 |
| 4 hrs | First draft – tell the story, let it flow! |
| 2 hrs | Second draft – getting to grips with what I wrote. Restructuring, refocusing. |
| 5 hrs | Third draft — adding citations |
| 3 hrs | Fourth draft – cutting it down to size |
| Total 14 hrs | (of actual writing) |
| +3 hrs | Writing assessment commentary |
So now I know how long it would takes; what else did I learn?
My biggest breakthrough came when I reviewed the definitions of global and national perspectives from the IGCSE GP Coursework Handbook. That led me to define “tough love” as the global perspective in question, and that in turn prompted me to ask “what is the alternative?” and identify a contrary perspective, which I called the “evidence-based care” perspective. What the Coursework Handbook says about national perspectives also prompted me to ask why America seemed to be fertile ground for this industry in comparison to other countries. So in this respect I think this exercise has helped me to write perspectives better. I have gathered these insights into Lesson 9 of the Troubled Teens unit.
How good was the result? Well, it was good… it was too good — and yet it was not good enough.
Let me explain!
It was good in the sense that it gives a clear and detailed picture of the industry – what is wrong with it and why. It hits all the assessment criteria, and if it were submitted as a piece of student work it should score well.
However, I used all my grown up language skill to edit the draft down from the initial 2800 words to 2000 words, and I went to town on the references, doing lots of further reading to back up my claims. The result is a pretty strong brew. I had originally thought that this IR would be the culmination of the Troubled Teens unit, which was intended as an introductory unit. But the way it turned out, it isn’t suitable for that purpose. I can’t imagine many IGCSE students being able to write something as concise and thoroughly referenced as the paragraph “Is this an American phenomenon?” It looks too difficult to offer as a model for student writing at the start of the course.
And in an important sense I feel the report could be improved by emphasising the perspectives further. It is right for an IR to help the writer develop their own personal perspective on the issue, but in places my report becomes a bit polemical; I would like to improve the balance by letting voices for the industry play devil’s advocate. To achieve that, I’d need to narrow the scope to make space. Some detail, and luxuries such as perhaps the discussion of language and Sherman’s comic song could be jettisoned. As Dr Johnson said: “Read over your compositions, and wherever you meet with a passage which you think is particularly fine, strike it out.”
I have, in the past, written an “Individual Report” with my students where each paragraph was directly based on one of the five or six sources we studied together in class. Although that produced only a rudimentary IR, I think that is a better approach in the early stages of the course. Consequently, I’ve created an easier formative writing task in Lesson 8 to round off the unit. Students further on in the course who are ready to start their IR can use the extracts from this IR in Lesson 9 as a jumping-off-point for their own projects.
Example Individual Report on Troubled Teens
Example Individual Report on Troubled Teens with assessment commentary
Please also see our more recent example IR on Sustainable Living, which demonstrates a structure that is easier for students to grasp and emulate.
This is awesome! Thanks for sharing.
Great stuff!
So grateful for this materials!
Brilliant resources! Thank you so much for helping so many students around the world 🙂
dayum bro you really on that grind fr