Search Tips

Enter one or more words into the search box and click ‘Go’. 

Search only returns pages and content containing all the words in the query.

To refine or widen the search, add or subtract words to the search term already entered. Your original phrase is retained in the search box to help you refine your query.

The search will look for the word(s) in the text of the website pages and also in any of the downloadable documents.  To give you an idea of how this works, the phrase "BTEC National Certificate Student Guides" will return all student guides for BTEC National Certificates, and will also return other content that refers to the student guides.

If you have a set of words that you would like to be found in a certain order, place quotation marks around the whole phrase.  However, this will reduce the number of search returns.
It is also possible to search using only a specification or syllabus code.

Automatic "and" queries
Because search will only return pages and content that includes all of your search terms, it is not necessary to include "and" between terms.

Automatic exclusion of common words
Search ignores common words and characters such as "is" and "with", as well as single digits and single letters.

If a common word is essential, place quotation marks around the phrase that contains it.

Capitalisation
Searches are not case sensitive. In other words, a search on "copper sulphate" or "Copper SULphate" will return the same results.

Word variations (sometimes called ‘stemming’)
The search finds words with the same root as the term actually entered.  So "learn", "learns" and "learning" will return the same set of results. 

The same technology, known as Stemming Technology, allows you to enter a noun in either singular or plural form - the search will find all occurrences regardless.

Because we monitor search activity, we can make sure that commonly searched for words return the correct result. This progressively improves the search feature over time.