Blog: Making every moment a maths moment

It has long been the case that strong verbal skills have been the prerequisite for accessing learning in classrooms across the world. Children who have low levels of literacy struggle to listen, to read and to be understood. There is no doubting the importance of these skills for school and later life.

But numeracy (the ability to understand and work with numbers) is not an area on which society seems to place the same emphasis, even though it's one of the two main curriculum areas that dominate many a school timetable. Or perhaps not yet anyway.

Imagine a school in which no child was able to tell the time, share equally or read the information in a table or a chart. For students with numeracy and maths skills that are under-developed, assumptions made by teachers of other subjects may have the same, paralysing effect as presuming that a child experiencing dyslexia doesn't need support with reading or that the student with a broken arm needs no support to record their ideas.

I know from personal experience that there is some information that the whole staffroom is interested in. Every teacher wants feedback on how students feel about the student-teacher relationship, for example, and statutory test results that might affect an external stakeholder's view of the school are relevant to everyone on the team. In recent years, great emphasis has been placed on all teachers knowing the reading abilities of each child in their classes, it is my argument that the same should become the norm for any insight into students' mathematical abilities too.

Maths anxiety

Some cultures celebrate mathematics as a foundational skill more than others. In countries like China and Singapore, for example, it is an expectation of young people and adults that their appreciation for maths - and in particular numbers - goes well beyond basic.

In other parts of the world, including the UK, the idea of maths being difficult is accepted not as something to embrace but instead as an excuse to reach for the calculator (sometimes the best strategy, to be fair) or, worse, to simply give up!

If I had a pound for every time the parent of a child in one of my classes had told me that they themselves 'weren't very good at maths' or that they 'never liked maths when at school', I probably wouldn't be writing this blog!

Can we really blame our children for displaying limited resilience in (and beyond) maths lessons when there remains such a stigma around it? How should we expect a child to respond if their significant adults openly - and, in many cases, happily - declare their own apathy towards and weakness in the subject? I rarely hear people share an inability to read quite so brazenly.

Teacher confidence

It isn't just students and their parents who suffer from a lack of number confidence. A Renaissance-commissioned YouGov poll from last autumn revealed that 40% of Early Career Teachers (ECTs) did not feel confident solving maths problems in front of their classes.

With decreasing numbers of maths-specialist teachers to both teach and to lead the subject in schools, it is clearly the case that there's a need for support with planning, the provision of efficacious teaching and learning materials and - central to it all - access to accurate information about children's starting points, areas for support and development, and ongoing progress.

A whole-school numeracy strategy will only serve to share the load and reinforce the value of taught maths content. This could be a PE lesson that fosters the use of multiples of seven when holding a stretch, for example, or a history teacher making explicit reference to calculation methods when working out the length of a reign of a UK monarch.

I am not advocating for the trickier aspects of the subject to become the responsibility of teachers who may have made conscious choices to not teach maths lessons; it is important that early mathematical development be handled by those with the right pedagogical understanding. However, reciprocal arrangements can really help.

Teaching approaches

Although there's a wealth of planning and teaching materials, including both free-to-use learning progressions and commercially-available schemes of work, there remains plenty for the classroom practitioner to do themselves. There's an acceptance that a 'one size fits all' approach doesn't, well, suit everyone!

Can we really expect youngsters to whom maths has remained a mystery for years to suddenly be able to pick up the thread solely because they have recently been given access to manipulatives and encouraged to represent the mathematics that they don't yet understand in the form of a picture? Moving from using concrete apparatus through the pictorial and on to the abstract has been proven to be very effective but this has to be coupled with a reliable understanding of a child's maths profile - their knowledge gaps, misconceptions and next steps.

Assess, Plan, Do, Review

For as long as I can remember, the teaching cycle has had four pretty staple components:

Assess where the children are in their learning
Plan to move this learning forward or to plug any gaps in that learning
Teach, ideally in a way that is flexible and responsive to the class
Evaluate those learning episodes and feed back into the same cycle.

To a degree, all of the above are achieved within the context of the school day – at least to some degree. The reality that points 2 and 4 are likely to require far more time outside of contact hours is a fundamental part of workload issues in education and a reason for teachers being so time poor.

This is why having access to the right tools is so important for classroom practitioners. In the same way that oracy and reading have become embedded in schools' DNA in recent years, so too must strong levels of numeracy become an expectation for every child through a commitment to seeing the opportunities for mathematical development in every lesson.

Get reliable information to support the right students in the right ways

Schools using our Progress Test in Maths to validate their curriculum design, Star Maths and/or the recently-published New Group Maths Test (NGMT) to provide their students with a highly personalised test, do so because they know that the data they receive post-assessment is valid and highly reliable.

Supplementing ongoing teacher assessment information with standardised test data, especially when that data is derived from a student experience that takes account of the diversity in maths attainment using adaptive questions, means that teachers can:

Corroborate their sense of each student's overall level of maths attainment
Compare student performance against those of learners of the same age
Gain further insight into curriculum areas of relative strength
Identify mathematical domains posing challenges for the group and/or specific individuals
Make decisions about teaching and learning using reliable, objective information.

Personalise practice to maximise learning

The power of such assessments is often in interrogating the data, both asking and answering questions of it - not least the 'so what?' question. What comes next should address any findings to maximise the potential for learning.

GL Assessment is now a Renaissance company and we are pleased to add Freckle to our portfolio. Freckle is an engaging learning platform that increases student progress and proficiency in maths through objectives-specific skill development, personalised target setting and individualised practice sessions.

Aligned to the English National Curriculum, Freckle provides self-paced activities that are pitched at exactly where each child is in their development, using data from the child's most recent assessment. The activities also continuously adapt to the students' responses as they work through the wide range of levels and curriculum domains. Teachers can assign a specific skill or objective for some or all students to practise, as well as create exit cards or mini-assessments using a bank of questions and set homework.

It is not sufficient for our young people to learn enough maths to get by. Taking advantage of opportunities to make mathematics both fun and real is crucial to children enjoying the subject, fostering a positive attitude towards it and towards lifelong maths learning. To do this, our teachers need access to the right tools, every day, to help build strong foundational understanding of the subject and their students' knowledge, understanding and skills across it.