Redoing my maths GCSE 32 years later…..

[Goneanddonedit]

So, after yet again not getting a job because Ido not have a C in maths (I am 49 and had many professional jobs but this counts for nothing apparently) I have decided I will have to retake my maths GCSE.

I know I can do it free, but I don’t want to do it over a year, I’d like to do it from home and ideally as quickly as possible.
I really, really struggled with maths, but now you can find help over the internet and I think I would find it a lot easier than I did at 16.

Has anyone done it and can anyone guide me in the direction of a decent online learning course? I know I will need to sit the exam in an exam centre, but I really need to start from scratch after all these years!

I am following as I’m in a similar situation and hopeful of good advice. I’m an RMN and have had a great career in despite my failings at maths but I now couldn’t get a much lower band job if I wanted it due to this issue.

I would like to do it to give me more options if I wanted to leave nursing and because both my dses are doing maths A level and I feel so thick, not even managing a GCSE pass. Ds1 is off to Oxford university to study engineering and I couldn’t even manage the GCSE😳

The problem with doing it yourself, is that each exam board follows a specific syllabus.

Also, GCSE's only happen once a year, in the summer, or a possible resit in the November .

There is the possibility of an IGCSE but that wouldnt be until Jan/Feb either. 1

What about a Functional Skill Maths Level 2 in maths - you can sit them whenever.

I took my GCSE exam 5 times and finally got a c when I was 30. The difference the final time was a good teacher, but he also made us do one past paper per week until it just became routine and not scary. I would think that you would at least need a tutor otherwise it could be pretty demoralising. Good luck!

This happening to people makes my blood boil.

Firstly by operating policies like this we are ensuring lots of people in their late 40s and 50s will be permanently removed from the jobs market.

Secondly these idiot ideas about GCSE Maths and English being more important than 30 years of experience, hold no credibility/ or point in anything other than teaching.

Thirdly it is so unfair to punish people that were educated in a system or time when passing GCSE's were not the be all and end all. Thus we are punishing people who though no fault of their own are hugely disadvantaged from circumstances of thirty years ago.

Finally many people in the 40s and 50s will have had little or no academic support at school for issues such as Dyslexia Autism e.t.c. In some cases i know of people who have acquired Masters level equivalent qualifications but don't have GCSE Maths/ English and possibly would fail them if they took them.

Finally the education system at the time paid little or no time to

Really I'd recommend you find a tutor who will go through the maths with you. If you tell them you really need a C (or a 4/5 in todays money assuming you're England) then you can aim for that.

The next exam set is November, it will depend on how good you are now as to whether that's realistic, but it wouldn't be a bad time to look for a tutor as this is often a low point for them as the year 11/13s have finished and people tend to pick up again from September.
After that I think you're looking at next June. However I know last year I think they said you could only do November exams as a resit due to the disruption. I don't know whether that's the case this year.

Dm used to tutor and she did a number of people in your situation, it wasn't uncommon for people to start having failed to get a C on more than one occasion and end up with a B. If you're prepared to work, you may surprise yourself!

Well the exams are hard so it depend on how good you are. Why don't you find a practice paper and have a go at it?
The packs you get in WHSmith usually have the mark scheme so you can mark it. If you aren't doing too bad you can move forward and aim for November.

I teach functional skills maths and that is more flexible but not always accepted by employers instead of a gcse although it isn't much easier.

What jobs are you applying for that ask for your gcse certificates? I'd just put grade c on the application form.

I completed functional skills level 2 maths last summer. It is free if you do not have a 'C' in maths. I find maths difficult but completed the course and sat the exam in around twelve weeks. I did it last summer when I had not much else to do, so did put the hrs in.

@MargaretThursday

Really I'd recommend you find a tutor who will go through the maths with you. If you tell them you really need a C (or a 4/5 in todays money assuming you're England) then you can aim for that.

The next exam set is November, it will depend on how good you are now as to whether that's realistic, but it wouldn't be a bad time to look for a tutor as this is often a low point for them as the year 11/13s have finished and people tend to pick up again from September.
After that I think you're looking at next June. However I know last year I think they said you could only do November exams as a resit due to the disruption. I don't know whether that's the case this year.

Dm used to tutor and she did a number of people in your situation, it wasn't uncommon for people to start having failed to get a C on more than one occasion and end up with a B. If you're prepared to work, you may surprise yourself!

Agree with the above! I tutor maths and now is the ideal time to find someone. In common with most tutors, my Year 11 and 13s have left and work doesn’t really pick up until the autumn when the parents of the next Y11 cohort start panicking!

A good tutor would be able to tailor a whole curriculum for you and quickly work out where you are now and what help you need.

However, your main issue if you go it alone is to find an exam centre to take it at as a private candidate. You can strike lucky but this can be no mean feat. Also, as said above, it’s not an exam you can take whever you feel ready as exams are in the summer only with resits in Nov.

Some tutors will have an idea where you might be able to sit it as a private candidáe due to having worked with home ed students, but honestly, your simplest and cheapest way is probably an adult education course, topping up your knowledge with a tutor if necessary.

Good on you for having ambitions to do it! However, I agree with PPs that it’s a crying shame and very blinkered of potential employers if all your years of experience counts for less than this one exam.

I work as a school TA and I went for a better TA job but they won’t play ball without a C grade. Whether they would actually push for certificates I don’t know, I’ve always put C for Maths on everything (I’m not even certain what I did get but I know it’s not C) and it’s never been an issue, and I have had a couple of very responsible jobs and done further training, yet for a £10ph job doing what I already successfully do it seems this maths may be the be all and end all.

Obviously I can do maths, I can add/subtract/multiply/work out % and have an ok idea of fractions, but I am not good at it.

I do feel back in the 80s it was very different, the help just wasn’t there and I was just left to sink or swim (I sunk) whereas now there is a whole host of online help, you can type a question in and someone appears on YouTube and walks you through it!!

I certainly could not sit a maths paper without some help beforehand

I redid mine when I was 27. I'm 40 now. I went to college and did a year course. The only one I couldn't attain anything higher than a 'C' but I found it much more enjoyable than at school.

I have CSEs, not a problem when I was working in the 80’s and 90’s before I married and ended up living overseas. Now that we are back here my CV goes to the bottom of the pile, and DH doesn’t understand that .

I’ll look into getting GCSE next year.

The other thing you could do is try a workbook like these below for foundation level (which will take you to a level 4/5 which is what you need). Then you can see how far you have to go. I like these -

this - there is a revision guide counterpart I’d also recommend which explains it well

CGP are good and have their own website you can browse

BBC GCSE bitesize explains anything you still don’t get quite well.
If you get these and they are way beyond you, step it back a notch by getting a KS3 book and work that first.

For GCSE don’t worry too much if it’s edexcel or AQA (the two most used by exam centres) as the syllabus is almost identical. Schools often use past papers from other exam boards for extra practice. Even OCR which I find slightly harder doesn’t have many differences. So any book/ course will get you there.

If you find these are all beyond you even with the Internet/ youtube (and you might, there’s no shame in being right back at the start after all these years), you probably need a class or a tutor.

It’s ridiculous really. I can’t say what I did before as it would too outing to anyone on here who might have an inkling who I am, but I have never failed any exams I have taken since that and I’ve done some pretty hard training for the work I did, but math has always been my nemesis, I see numbers and I get flashbacks to school and I panic.
But that doesn’t mean I am stupid, I just struggle in that one area.
It’s a shame as years of experience gets discounted because you couldn’t do Algebra very well 32 years ago!
Even if I could do Algebra I have never had to since, and my TA role is supportive, I’m not doing their work.

Thankyou for the links, I will have a look.
I have a teenager who can help me (the shame)

actually the idea of finding a past paper and giving it a good go - maybe with no time limit isn’t a bad one.
Show all your working and take your time, then if you show it to a tutor they will be able to see what you can do/struggle with.
Iirc there’s quite often needing to sort out the numerical problem from a lump of text problems, so if you can do that, but not the problem, you’ve shown different skills.

I think the trouble is I never had much of a grasp of maths at school and I’ve avoided it since! I don’t think I would even know how to do half of it. My DD does statistics and probability etc which I am sure I did not do back then so I don’t even think GCSEs then versus now is even comparable (it’s possible I was just in too low a set to do hard stuff )
I think if I say myself down and decided to learn Algebra (for example) I could probably manage to get a grasp of it before moving on.
I have just a massive, panicky mental block with maths, undoubtedly because my school were so unsupportive of anyone who struggled back then, now I would have got catch up sessions, but back then you knew it or you didn’t.
I think I’ve made it a much bigger thing in my head

Try not to panic. I’ve never tutored anyone who couldn’t grasp it with a bit of effort, but I’ve tutored a lot of people who have zero confidence and think they are way worse than they are.

It’s a weird thing with maths; it’s like solving a puzzle. If you approach it more as a puzzle game you’ll be in a much better frame of mind to do it. There’s something about panic that just shuts down all mathematical thinking and means you can’t even start. I expect this is what you’ve experienced at school.

When I’m writing examples and explaining stuff to my pupils, I’m not beyond the odd mistake and nor are other teachers I know. I get my students to try to look out for them because I’m not infallible any more than anyone else and I often find myself saying “well spotted!”. The other thing I constantly tell pupils is there’s no shame in looking at a maths problem and not knowing what to do. The key is to try to do something and then you’ll often find you can work your way through it, as long as you’ve learnt the processes. There’s a huge emphasis on problem solving in the new curriculum which means some of the questions can be quite wordy. One of the main challenges is not being scared of this.

If it’s all very daunting I’d start with a Key Stage 3 or even 2 workbook so you don’t overwhelm yourself and give up. But try to take shame out of the equation. There’s no shame. I’m not ashamed that I can’t run a marathon/ change a washer/ translate Spanish or that my daughter has to do all manner of household stuff for me because she’s better than me, so there should be no more shame in finding maths hard. We all have different strengths.

Fear of maths is definitely a thing that gets in the way. But if you can already do the basics, and work with %s then I don’t think there’s any reason why you couldn’t’t learn the rest with the right tutor.

It is going to be a lot of work if you want to do it in less than a year though. How much time do you have to give to it? Unfortunately with maths there isn’t really a way round just having to do loads of questions until you can do something without really thinking about it.

Work backwards OP. First try to find your nearest exam centre, ask them what exam boards they facilitate etc then get a tutor to whizz you through. All the best! My (foreign born) SIL has a PhD in Life Sciences from a top RG uni but as she doesn't have GCSE maths/English she can't apply for any teaching jobs, this rule is just ridiculous.

Absolutely no shame in going back to ks2 workbooks as sleepy said. IME it’s best to make sure you have no gaps there and there’s quite a lot in the ks2 curriculum these days. All of the foundational work on fractions for example.

www.mathsgenie.co.uk/papers.html

Have a look at some past papers - if you struggled at school you probably will need to attend classes and give it a year.

Many schools do not accept private candidates for exams. If they do, they will only take them if they are sitting the same exam board. Contact the Exams Officers at your local schools to find out.