By Matt Ellis, Assistant Headteacher and Maths Lead at Eastfield Primary School. Teaching new areas of maths, especially fractions, can be a printing nightmare in schools, as we teachers often use images to support understanding. But do all these printed visuals actually support and scaffold learning for all children? At our school, we believe that […]
Read moreI’ve taught Year 6 many times in my career and memories of SATs week are all too fresh in my mind. Three hours and fifty minutes of silence will produce a snapshot of where our 11-year-olds are in reading, writing, mathematics and grammar, punctuation and spelling all summed up neatly as a scaled score. The […]
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Lucy Durrant, Assistant Head Teacher and Maths Lead at Winterbourne Junior Girls’ School in Croydon, tells us about how she and her colleagues use Inspire Maths and MyMaths to support their maths teaching. Tell us a bit about your school. Winterbourne Junior Girls’ School is a junior school in Croydon with over 270 pupils. In 2015 Ofsted rated […]
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The Oxford Language Report: Why Closing the Word Gap Matters found evidence that an increasing number of children in UK schools have a limited vocabulary – a word gap – which is holding back their learning. The report brings together the thoughts of a number of leading academics and practitioners, based on market research with over 1,300 primary and secondary teachers. Over half of those surveyed reported […]
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If a week is a long time in politics, then 21 years must be an eternity. Yet I can still remember the furore when Stephen Byers – then education secretary – was interviewed on the radio about government plans to improve numeracy in school and got his calculations wrong. No journalists have tried to trip […]
Read more Written by Louise Pennington, Professional Development Leader for maths at Oxford University Press. The Multiplication Tables Check The Standards Testing Agency (STA) published the Multiplication Tables Check Assessment Framework in November last year. This document contains some key information about the Year 4 testing that will be statutory from June 2020: Voluntary pilot 10-28th June 2019 3 week window in June 2020 […]
Read moreAs I travel far and wide, training and talking to teachers, common questions occur… How can we improve the mathematical reasoning skills of our pupils and how can we support them as well as gather evidence for it? To address these questions, firstly, we need to understand what mathematical reasoning is and understand why it […]
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