To have not known kids have to attain grade 4 in maths?

No. Not just you. The whole system is just bonkers.

Nail on the head. We need to be realistic and practical. Give an academic education to those able to do it and a practical one to others.

Is anyone else casting their mind back to their own gcse results and breathing a sigh of relief they left school so long ago?

No? Just me then

With access to modern technology, knowing theories like the one you describe is becoming increasingly unnecesarry. Like others, teaching the basic four elements of maths to students who struggle makes far more sense.

I have reached 50, had several responsible jobs, now run my own business. But despite numerous people trying to teach me, I cannot get my head round long division. I can hold my own in average company with the rest of it, and when I was using it regularly could outshine most at mental arithmetic.

Was it sensible to keep making me try to learn something it was blatantly clear I had the ability of a primary school child where that was concerned!

But they are already made to retake umpteen times it's soul destroying.

Are you being deliberately obtuse ?
If someone if someone is struggling to get a grade four after several goes
They are unlikely to go into careers where maths skills are essential it doesn't matter how ambitious they are
And you get kids that are just not very academic, my son is one of them
He's a lovely polite young man who I'm very proud of but he's just not cut out for high flying career, s and that's fine.

But frankly if you aren't good at maths, scraping a GCSE after several goes is not going to result in you having one of those types of jobs, is it? If a pupil takes 3 attempts to get level 4, they aren't going to be looking at careers in high finance, etc, are they?

I think they should be made to retake and also drastically change the way they are taught to get to the underlying issue of why they don't get it.

Areas of triangles have lots of practical applications for calculating amounts needed to cover them.
Also v. Useful for cutting the last slice of cake in half.

And let's be honest here. The best most well paying careers are the numerical ones. Finance, engineering, tech, medicine/pharma. Law is the exception but there are areas of law where mathematical skills are necessary.

Your average musician or artist doesn't make much, unless they are truly exceptional.

Not everyone might "want" to do this, but in the state of the economy and cost of living crisis, do you not want the best job available? Do you not want to be able to buy a house one day and have nice things?

If it's on the foundation paper it needs immediate removal

Don't be daft. Teaching finding the area of a triangle communicates the fact that if you cut a shape (a rectangle in this case) in half (via the diagonal) you end up with a shape that is half the area of the original.

This might seem completely obvious to some, but it is certainly worth teaching. And then you can move on to manipulating the triangle to show how it is still half a rectangle.

This concept isn't obscure or meaningless and it's certainly not worthless.

The way I see it is that GCSEs provide some fundamental base knowledge that will allow you to access a wide variety of careers in the future. People who "build things" need to work out areas and volumes. So do gas engineers as well to an extent.

I feel the UK overall dismisses the value of education.

Oh dear.

So what's the point? Why do our children need to know that?
One can argue value in nearly every other subject but as I am sat here looking at anything possibly triangle related, my tray ,my table etc how on earth would it benefit me to know how to calculate the triangle in the corner of my tray?

If it's on the foundation paper it needs immediate removal

It's far better for all of us to have students getting really good at the four basics and understanding investing and how to properly manage money.

Those skills would properly point them in a direction to improve their lives.
Understanding the areas of objects will never improve someone's life.

In fact it's ruining lives because some students who are really bright can't get on because of this utter nonsense chained around their necks holding them back.

Why do you think numeracy (presumably arithmetic?) is the only essential?

Functional skills which is the practical, slimmed down maths qualification still contains the area of a triangle.

But in maths which kids are forced to retake over and over agsin as it's deemed essential for everyday life,in reality most people only use the basics
So why force kids to retake maths again and again when they will never have to calculate the area of a triangle
Why not provide them with a numeracy exam thst just covers the essentials?

Let's not start thinking that knowledge is only of any value if one ever has a practical use for it.

Why does anyone need to know?
At 51 I have got through life without having to calculate the area of triangles ever.

How hard is the area of a triangle?

1/2 X base X height

Primary really push times tables now which is brilliant but as ever there isn't time and the help to get each child to the same level and place in a class.

Once they start to fall behind it snowballs and then they loose interest.
Teaching in the same way and getting failures is a definition of madness.
If a student gets past their GCSE and can't pass maths then they need to be investigated and taught differently or just not forced to take it.

The basics are all that are needed in life, addition, subtraction etc nothing else is needed at all.

How can anyone look at a 17 year old and try and convince them they must Keep slogging away at working out the area of a triangle 📐???
It's an absolute lie.

It doesn’t matter how low the pass rate is, there are still people who fail every time. My son (now 25) struggled with all exams, but maths was his worst nightmare. He was in a supportive school, with only 8 in the class, but in Y9 after working really hard, he got 0% in the end of year exam. By the time he took his GCSE, he’d improved to an E (grade 2 today) and when he went to art college aged 16, he was required to take it again. He joined a class of 30+ students with a teacher who regularly humiliated him (“how could you have scored so low?” In front of everyone) until it made him ill and he couldn’t get out of the house on maths lessons days.
i managed to get Learning Support involved and after a lot of intervention it was agreed that he was too far from the pass mark to stand a reasonable chance of success, so they suggested that he change to Functional Skills. At his first attempt (a practice) he scored 80% and went on to pass comfortably. GCSE maths is NOT the sort of maths that you need in adult life. FS covers it all - percentages, arithmetic, general number sense. You don’t need trigonometry or algebra. I loved maths but I’ve never needed any of my AO level skills.
Happy ending: my son ended up doing two years of music (after a year of art) at college and got the second highest grade on the course. He’s now a professional musician (in NME’s top 100 last year), so much happier than when he was ground down by maths lessons.

Agree wholeheartedly. I suspect most of us have managed to get through our lives without using pythagorus theorem or the square route of pi.

Providing a person has a basic grasp of maths to work out day to day stuff, putting extra pressure on them if they cannot do it is unfair.

@zingally I am 50 and doubt very much I could pass it. Pray tell me what other 'problems' I have?
It's literally only maths I struggle/struggled with. I could read at aged 3, ffs!

Why is there this continued assumption that not being able to pass one exam makes us people with 'big problems' who are not 'normal'?

We don't do this about any other GCSE, not even English! Yes, I get that these days it's a work requirement, etc, etc, but I am sick and tired of over and over again reading this crap on this thread about what sub-standard humans the many adults who have commented on this thread must be because they struggle with this.

And yet, amazingly, here we all are, most of us with jobs, mortgages, maybe families. Some of us have gasp careers! Imagine that!

For all the supposed inclusion and understanding, nothing sodding changes does it? Crap at maths = stoopid. Looks at upper 2nd class degree in English Literature and tosses in bin.

Wow, from a primary school teacher, I agree there is nothing kind about that.
This is not my experience, 2 DC’s with SEN, both got the required mark on year 6 SATS tests for maths, one very slightly above. One DC managed a 4 at GCSE and the other a 5, so that is years later. I don’t believe either of them, who met the required grade at SATS, would have passed GCSE with a 4 grade had they taken the paper then.
However, my other DC, who got a high 8 at GCSE, may have managed it but they are in the top 10% in the country (so the school have told me). It seems like comparing apples with oranges.
A quick google tells me that a child getting a pass (score of 100) in sats Maths, would likely go on to get a 4 or 5 at GCSE many years later. Are you saying that these children are making no progress in the years 6-10? Or are you comparing high achieving year 6 children with average children taking GCSE’s?

He does for his physical disabilities.

Thanks, that does make sense.

Her point is, her son is good at maths but she’s a bit of a twat 👍🏻