Maths teacher says the new maths gcse is "loads harder"

DS3 is Year 9 and his school have actually reduced the number of GCSEs they can take to try to accommodate the additional teaching time they think they'll need for the new English and Maths curriculum - the message was that they are way more content-heavy, way harder.

Question: how does the new spec compare with the old O level?

Or the IGCSE (which I thought was closer to O level than GCSE)?

I'm wondering out of interest, but also because that might mean resources used by IGCSE schools could be used. Or old O level text books rapidly reprinted.

I did O level. No calculators, no formula sheets, and a syllabus that included calculus (optional, but we did it as the teacher thought that the calculus questions were usually straightforward).

Nobel thanks for your very useful post. There seem to be so many changes being rushed through I cant keep up.

Borderline C/B is going to be interesting, as they'll need to decide whether to enter her for foundation or higher which are very different prospects.

If she is C/B when she is in with a shot at a 5, which she should go all-out for. A 4 will be considered a pass and she won't be required to resit in sixth form, but a 5 will be the pass (and resit requirement) in a few years time. She will be competing for jobs against these later cohorts in years to come so a 5 is worth fighting for.

I also think the English is going to be much harder.

Sample assessment materials (exam papers) were finally approved by Ofqual in July (after investigating then binning the previous ones for being too difficult. So there are some papers out there, and teachers should have some idea what they will look like. Yes, they are much harder. The new foundation papers are more like the old intermediate papers, containing new topics like trigonometry that were previously B grade. The new higher papers are also more difficult, one SAM I saw had an algebra question on it that was harder than anything I'd seen on the Further Maths GCSE. The style of questions is different, so teachers who are used to teaching familiar topics in familiar ways are going to have to revisit expectations and change the emphasis of their lessons (the danger is they'll see 'ratio' on the syllabus and wheel out their old ratio resources which are now inadequate). There is a bigger emphasis on criticising, justifying and explaining. E.g old GCSE would say 'give an estimate to this calculation', new GCSE would follow up with 'explain whether your answer is an over or under estimate'. There's also next to no useful stuff on the formula sheet any more so they will need to memorise the quadratic formula/area of a trapezium etc.

Textbooks were rushed out and written before the old SAMs were binned so were geared towards that level of difficulty. They are bloody awful and in some cases pitched way too hard. I'd avoid them. I've no idea if the revision guides are suffering from similar problems, but I'd advise holding off on buying anything for a while, maybe even till Y11 as more stuff is being released all the time.

Mymaths has been updated with lessons etc on the new content. Teachers are starting to post resources for the new content too, but I wouldn't use those at home as schools will probably be using them as there's so little out there.

The majority of the old content is still being tested (minor things like trial and improvement and isometric drawing have been dropped), so old resources are still useful. Your DC will still need to know how to solve equations, draw graphs, do calculations (I don't know what grade they are aiming for), so making sure they've got a solid grounding in the basics of algebra, know all their angle rules, area formulae, can process and represent data and so on will be a good start, before worrying about Venn diagrams and pre-calculus.