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 more
Over a year ago, in a previous post for this blog , I wrote about my focus of encouraging students of ALL ages to ‘Speak Like A Geographer’. This was in light of having previously restricted this focus on terminology to GCSE and A Level cohorts – and wondering why they didn’t manage to adjust to the required key words and […]
Read more
‘Inspire Maths is future proofing both our children and our curriculum’ – Maths Teacher at St Thomas’ C of E Primary School St Thomas’ C of E Primary School became an Advocate School for Inspire Maths in Spring 2017. Assistant Headteacher Liam Noon, and Maths Subject Lead and Teacher Judith Myhill discuss the triumphs of implementing […]
Read more
Is spelling really that important any more? Especially in the modern world where children are growing up using onscreen documents, emails, texts, all with autocorrect? Unfortunately, as Jerrold Zar illustrates in his poem ‘An Ode to a Spellchecker’, we can’t always trust the computer to spot the ‘Miss steaks aye kin knot sea’. The truth […]
Read more
Vanessa Pittard shares expert advice on how to build firm foundations with mastery. I’d like to suggest that one of the benefits of mastery is the avoidance of misery. I’ll focus on primary maths, but what I write here applies as much at KS4/GCSE as to Key Stage 2. What’s the point of introducing mastery […]
Read moreRebecca Geoghegan shares her advice for supporting ‘low ability readers’. You can also read her blog about approaches for supporting lower ability writers . When I hear the label ‘low ability reader’, I instantly think of the Allan Ahlberg poem ‘I am a Slow Reader’ which depicts the syllabification of words as the ‘slow reader’ gets to grips with the decoding […]
Read more
After 15 years as a psychology teacher it was noticeable that for many students A-levels were so much more than simply qualifications. Of course, they are high stakes examinations as the grades students achieve influence their life chances, their chances of entry into higher education and the options that are subsequently available to them, but […]
Read more
A Christmas Tale… Last Christmas, my six year old son came up with a brilliant plan. If you can’t buy something in the shops… ask Father Christmas for it! Some time ago, one of the major supermarkets made chocolate orange spread – spreadable chocolate orange! It became an instant favourite and we stockpiled a few […]
Read more Ofsted has put a fair amount of effort into debunking common myths about inspection. Its response to these, set out on gov.uk [1] and reinforced in the inspection handbook [2] , should offer some comfort to schools choosing to adopt teaching for mastery in mathematics. For example, teachers using textbooks as the basis for lesson planning will […]
Read more