Best working towards a 5 at Foundation Level maths rather than the higher paper?

Along the same lines, I wonder what other maths teachers think are the most important higher topics to cover for a student who has previous been in Foundation classes, but doing fairly well and have suddenly decided they want a grade 6 so that they can do certain A-levels that sixth form college requires (not maths) - i.e., the easiest topics to pick up that are likely to give the most marks. I was thinking solving and plotting quadratics, given that they're already having to factorise. Maybe circle theorems.

It varies year on year - edexcel jumped from something like 136 to 149 out of 280 one year recently for a 4

While there is a maths teacher or two around, what sort of % is needed on Foundation for a 4 or a 5? I known it varies by board and by year, but are we talk ~50% for a grade 4 or what?

I am a maths teacher, and we only put pupils into the higher paper if they stand a chance of getting a 6. The majority of pupils find it easier to get a 5 on Foundation than higher, because they have the easier questions at the start to give them confidence. On the higher paper, even the "easy" questions are challenging for someone aiming for a 5, and they get demoralised when they can't answer half the paper.

Nurture the mental health, get through the pandemic.
Then see where you are.

@EmmaWithTheGreatHair We were lucky that we had a great primary school but also a friend who was subject head of department at a secondary school. We asked him if he could tell which students would excel at his subject and he said yes. We asked him why, he said they are the children who read around the subject, not just what they are taught but just a bit of wider context but also have a bit of knowledge about the world.

When the DCs started secondary we encouraged them to talk about what they did in a lesson rather than the standard have you had a good day line? This becomes a possible talking point and they can watch videos on it thanks to YouTube. So Ds had done a bit about the Grand Canyon in geography so we watched a short video by the park owners on it. Just little stuff like that, or watching a film and talking about it afterwards. A discussion. We have a family dinner every night and we all talk about our day (mine is incredibly dull as I am a SAHM who does a bit of volunteering but they still want to know).

Ds2 (year 10) recently watched Pride and Prejudice, he said I am not really enjoying this, my response was I never said it was enjoyable I said it was to put into context what life and manners were like around 1800 which directly links to stuff they will cover in English Lit GCSE (London by William Blake and A Christmas Carol).

I felt really stupid and uniformed when I went to uni, I was surrounded by people who had so much more of a world view than I did. I didn't want the same for my children.

What is his literacy like?

I teach science rather than maths, but reading the questions on the higher paper and understanding them is a big barrier for a lot of students.

Very often, if students are unsure, they will leave a question blank, and so not get any marks - even though the marks needed for a 5 are much lower on the higher tier, if you can't access half the paper due to your literacy, then it's not a good idea.

We do enter some students aiming for a 5 for higher but it depends a lot on their personality and their reading ability. Some are much better on foundation.

@EmmaWithTheGreatHair I really am hoping he will one day realise I only want the best for him

I tell my sons that. I don't want to see them struggle unnecessarily sadly they have a person in their lives who does earn very little and they see that struggle first hand. They know the astronomical cost of childcare as their cousin is only 3.

I think giving it to them on a level they can understand such as when all your mates are buying the PS8 (or whatever it will be by then) and you can't afford it that would make me sad, to be excluded.

I have one son who works his arse off, got incredible GCSE results and is in year 13 and I have another son who struggles at nothing and gets amazing grades.

We have also couched it that no one wants to be stupid or uniformed, so the more stuff you apply yourself to now the less like Joey Essex you will appear

@EmmaWithTheGreatHair I do think maturity comes into it.

We showed our children cold, hard facts. So if he wants to join the police then I believe the application changes shortly so he will need a degree. We also pointed out that we don't live with our parents, that we had to make this life through working.

We showed them the value of everything, so looked at salaries, housing local to us on Zoopla because on Zoopla at the bottom of the page it shows a typical mortgage and other household bills. On top of this they need to understand other outgoings such as council tax, insurance, broadband, mobile phone, food etc. How are they getting to work? Car? Bus? Walking?

Another interesting way to show them is How much a room in your house costs so literally what you could charge an adult living in a room in your house.

Make it a game, what type of house do they want, car. holidays, games console etc?. They need to see stuff costs a lot of money. Mine know th costs of our cars, furniture, flooring etc they just don't know our salaries but have an idea as Ds1 is going to uni next year so they know for the student loan calculator.

The more qualifications you have the more choices you have. At GCSE he will be competing with children in private schools with parents paying at least £12k a year for their child not to mention Eton and the tens of thousands a year plus children living in deprived areas who are motivated to educate their way out of poverty etc. Show him the statistics of who gets what grades wise.

At some point the bank of Mum and Dad should cease. He needs to see now how his effort will affect the life he will have.

@EmmaWithTheGreatHair At my son's school the cut off for sitting a higher paper is consistently achieving a solid 6, not on the border of 5/6 but well into the 6 to allow for any issues answering questions on the day. Submission for GCSE papers is I believe the February of year 11 so there is time if your son is willing to push himself.

IIRC on the AQA higher maths paper 50% of it is geared toward distinguishing the 7-9 category. I am happy to be corrected on that. So as parents we were told at maths GCSE evening in school a couple of years ago that basically it can absolutely destroy a child's confidence if they look at a higher paper and just cannot do half of it.

when he’s been given the more challenging papers in the past, he’s felt quite down about his low score which confirms your happier to be top of a foundation.

However, I will say that this is something that can be worked on. Looking ahead can sometimes help motivate. I know that A levels feel like a lifetime away at this stage but does he want to do them? Look at the entry levels for sixth forms now. Let him see where he needs to be.

But I will say that doing maths every day in short bursts can make a huge difference to their grade. He will feel more confident if he understands the maths. If children are missing basic concepts then building on those is so much harder. This is literally down to him, he can turn this around, maybe with your help, HegartyMaths or CorbettMaths every day.

Does he have any interest at all in science? I have tutored some pupils who were set to do Foundation all along, and then part way through year 10 (or later) started looking more closely at sixth form options, to find that the chosen sixth form requires a 6 in maths for all the science subjects. I don't know if that is common, though. It's been disappointing for those children, as they sometimes have more motivation at that point, having some idea of what they might want to work towards, and also often bright enough that they potentially could get a 6, but there is just too much work to catch up on to make it feasible for most of them. With the questions including more 'problem solving' ones that integrate different topics, it can be hard to try to teach them just enough that they could get more marks and achieve a 6, because separating out the material into different grades doesn't entirely work (obviously some topics are clearly harder or easier, but not everything).

So depending on how setting works at your school, and whether it's likely that he might develop a later interest in some science subject, it might be better to stay in a set that has an option of doing higher, even if he doesn't ultimately do it, at least for a while.

A good chunk of the foundation paper actually has stuff that has been taught since about Year 6/7 - all the basic whole number, fraction and decimal calculations (+ - x /), finding fractions or percents of things, place value, areas perimeters, straightforward word problems, simple ratio, basic co-ordinates, properties of shapes, etc. If a child is secure on all those topics, then they might enjoy the challenge of learning the harder foundation content and onto the higher. But if any of the basic skills like that are missing, especially if they've been reviewed each year, then Foundation is likely to be more useful - those are many of the skills that are actually helpful in life, and it's better for a child to really understand what fractions are, or how to find a percent, etc, than to learn trigonometry or factorising or whatever, even when those topics aren't necessarily hard to learn how to do (they can be a bit meaningless for some Foundation students, even if they know what the steps are).

You could certainly look at a Foundation tier paper with him now, and make sure that he can get all the basic questions and the problem solving using those basics, and that might help you decide.

Bring back the intermediate tier! And intermediate sets.

I teach in a small SEMH school and we have this debate every year. The reality is that the percentage you need to get a 5 is much lower on the higher paper than on the foundation. I think sometimes as much as 40% to 70% (but I’m not a maths specialist so I can’t be totally sure of the specifics each year), However, that “40%” will be made up of a lot of 1-3 marks out of 2-5 marks. If your DS has the maturity and resilience to understand he need to focus on the maybe 15% of questions he can get full marks on and the other 25% of getting 1/3 to 1/2 marks per questions without getting disheartened and just skipping questions he thinks are gobbledegook then it may suit him better.

The best test would be to print off some papers and see.

All i will say is my son predicted 5's he did higher level chemistry and got a u, we wish he had done foundation like he did with physics and got a 4
Also did higher maths and biology and got 4's
Should be one paper in my opinion

Another thing to consider is what type of person he is regarding confidence and competition. If he were at the bottom of the higher group, would he find the other children an inspiration to do better or would he feel intimated and his confidence knocked? Would he be in a group with the very best kids or one lower, ie still at higher level but not necessarily looking at 8/9 for final grade?

I'd stick with Foundation if he's currently Grade 3.

Much rather he get a 5 confidently on Foundation than struggles to hit the grade boundary on Higher.