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

[Pepperpotladles]

I did not know this!
I have obviously been living under a rock.
So today someone told me that if kids get grades 1, 2 or 3 in their maths GCSE, it is compulsory that all these kids have to keep on studying GCSE maths until they achieve a grade 4 or above, and they have to keep trying to achieve this up until their 25th birthday.
Is this true?!?
I can't believe my ears.
What about kids who simply can't achieve grade 4 or above in maths, for any number of reasons?

You are exactly right. And it's a shame that people who "get" maths concepts can oftentimes become very frustrated with those who cannot. I recently sat in on some secondary school maths lessons (part of a school governor project) - across the range of aptitudes - and found it absolutely fascinating how different teachers explain essentially the same core concepts and can make it far more accessible and easier to understand than others.

I learned maths years ago - and the "core concepts" appear to be rather differently explained these days (thank goodness) with more visual and diagrammatic learning. But that meant that I needed to immediately "learn" what new methods the teachers were talking about: so i sat in the exact same maths class, explaining the exact same part of the course, explained by 4 different teachers to 4 different sets of kids. The first teacher was absolutely superb: it made sense straight away and was really fun to learn - the kids were having a good time. The next teacher was fine - it made sense. The third was utterly "meh" - it wasn't explained well and children in the class looked a bit confused/zoned out. The last class was very well explained too - and took the time to explain the concepts in a couple of different ways. No prizes for guessing that the first class was taught by the best math teacher who was teaching the top set. The last class was for the lowest set and was also taught by an excellent maths teacher who was also very good at engaging students and explaining things in somewhat different ways.

Clearly if I'd had the choice of teachers for my child I would have picked the teachers in the first or last class (frankly I would have wanted to learn from both of them because they were fun to learn from). Alas kids at that age don't have the option of picking the teacher who best fits their style of learning. For children who struggle with maths concepts it's important to identify precisely which concepts they struggle with. It's generally not ALL of them, so use the stuff they do well at to give them the confidence to tackle the things that have caused bother.

Perhaps we should get the people who believe this to teach maths?

You seem to be tying yourself up in "averages" here - and forgetting that a bell curve is generally used to grade exams. So too, if all schools get better at teaching, and all students get better at learning, then the bar for what is "average" will, of course, shift. Using a Bell Curve means that there will always be people who are "below average" - that's just the way a Bell curve grading system works. f you want to read more about bell curve grading and why its used in grading students there's loads of information online you can find about them. Different grading systems are, for example, ones that state that if you get over half the questions correct you pass. That style of grading pays absolutely no attention to looking at what the average actual score was and assigning a passing mark based on that score. So, in that example if the test was so difficult that the average number of kids only scored 27%, and only 2 kids out of a group of 500 could reach the 50% grade you've got a test where the vast majority will fail, and only an outlier group will pass. Clearly that's an absurd way to grade something like GSCE maths - so the examination board will mark all the papers, put all the results on a graph, and from that representation will determine the average number of correct answers, and from that what they want the various "grades" to be.

Examination boards can set the "curve" to whatever grade they wish - so, for example, some universities have a "B+ curve" meaning that the "average" grade awarded to most students will be a B+ (that's a pretty generous curve - lol! Hooray for ivy league/top tier universities!).

I’m similar to you. I couldn’t pass Maths, despite 3 attempts. The closest I got to it was GCSE D. (I did O Levels initially but then GCSEs were introduced.) Like you, I was good at arithmetics, and could work out any sum in my head, but not more complex mathematical questions. I nevertheless managed to achieve 2 degrees at 2:1. My main skills were in languages and linguistics.

I didn’t have to pass Mathematics in order to qualify for A Level or degree courses. (I guess I would eventually have managed to scrape a C if it had been required, but we’ll obviously never know!)

I think @cakeorwine was taking the piss and reminiscing about when Michael Gove said all schools should be above average.

What a shitty post

Recipe doubling or halving or tripling is ratios not algebra or simultaneous equations.

Yes it is.

But something like having a cake recipe that feeds four people and icing recipe that will cover a 20cm by 20 cm cake but you are making cake for 46 people is easier to work out without attempting ratios.

Nice explanation.

But as @noblegiraffe says, it's a reference to Michael Gove where he said that all schools need to be above average.

@cakeorwine

How many pupils who struggle with those core concepts are being given lessons in the more complex areas of maths, even on Foundation, that they will never need?

That's the crux of the problem. The Foundation paper is basically a watered down version of the main paper. What IS needed is a completely different exam that just tests "life skills" numeracy aimed at normal adult life. Something akin to the 11+ Maths papers which basically concentrate on the most basic Maths concepts and a bit of logic. I.e the simplest of algebra, i.e. "a + 5 = 10, what is a?". They really shouldn't by trying to teach even the simplest of pythagoras to kids who can barely multiple and divide!

Those struggling with Maths is often because they don't have firm foundations in the core basics yet the school system keeps pushing them further and trying to teach new and ever more complex concepts as they are pushed through the years.

There needs to be the ability to go right back to basics, and start moving forward again.

Even a "pass" mark of 50% is awful for the kid who's struggling. It means that half the questions are inaccessible to them, and upon first opening an exam paper when they see so much they're not going to be able to do, it's hardly surprising they lose interest and get demoralised.

Two papers, i.e. foundation and higher is simply not enough for the diverse abilities of children at that age. We should have 3 or 4 different levels, each aimed at children who can answer "most" of it on a good day.

Grade 4 is not onerous for children who don't have learning disabilities

This isn’t the case for all. Not all students who do not have a learning disability are able to get a grade 4. Also, other SEN exists. For example, some pupils who don’t get a grade 4 may not have a learning disability (which is a medical diagnosis) but they may have learning difficulties (general or specific).

Well no its not for the foundation paper it's more like 60%+ as has been explained several times throughout the thread and if it was that simple why are a third of pupils failing to get a grade 4 ?

I feel as a society in the UK we're okay with just accepting "oh I can't do maths. Hate numbers."

Whereas in other countries/societies it would be seen as shameful to be bad at maths and not something easily dismissed. I've spent some time googling about maths education around the world and looked at the likes of Singapore for example. Also seen what economy is doing better etc.

Well, the way the grades are based on a distribution curve, however simple the exam and however well taught are the pupils, a third will always fail to get grade 4 if that is what the regulators have specified in their distribution curve. It's why the grade boundaries change year on year, i.e. so the "right" number of children sit within each grade boundary.

I'd far rather the difficulty of each exam was set more accurately and that grade boundaries were fixed, so that if pupils started getting genuinely better taught and more able, we'd actually get to a stage where very few got less than grade 4!

Never really understood why exams weren't written to be more consistent in terms of difficulty in the first place. It was a breath of fresh air when I was studying and taking exams for my accountancy qualification (16 exams over 5 years) as the "pass" mark was 50% - straight across the board, all exams, all years. So there was never this "ever moving target" about whether you'd pass or fail according to how well everyone else had done! Yes, some years more passed than other years or more failed than other years as it is impossible for every exam to be equally hard, but by and large, the standard and pass/fail proportions were pretty much the same on average, across the years. Of course, some exams were more difficult than others - I remember law being an absolute sod with probably the lowest number of people passing it every year - it took me three attempts, the only one of the 16 that I failed first time, but they never made it simpler, it just was what it was and what was important is that it was equally hard every year and we all knew we had to put more effort in to pass it compared with the other papers.

I agree, we do seem to have a societal problem with Maths and you're spot on with the "I can't do maths, me!" attitude.

"Something" is badly wrong within the 10+ years of supposedly quality free state education. And I think it's time we had some kind of governmental enquiry/investigation into what that is, comparing our way of teaching with other countries, as you quite rightly say, such as the Far East which have much better outcomes in terms of education and growing economies, etc.

Just making kids keep having the same kind of lessons and re-sitting the same exam is typical Einstein's "doing the same thing and expecting different results" lunacy!

Thank you. I remember in 2015 a documentary being aired for year 9s. Chinese teachers came and gave the Chinese education method to UK students.

They compared that group to the control group that had the UK teaching methods and turns out the Chinese education method group won.

@MyCyanReader @Ddakji

I don’t have a pass In maths GCSE and I retook it twice ( still got a D/3)

I’m doing just fine in life. Earn over £60k with more earning potential ahead of me in an IT technical role. The lack of a GCSE ( or A levels/ Degree) has never held me back

Neither do I and I'm 51
But unfortunately these days it's a huge stumbling block for many kids my own included with colleges not long letting kids progress with out maths and English,
And most apprenticeship,s required at least grade 4 in maths and English.

How old are you?

I'd far rather the difficulty of each exam was set more accurately and that grade boundaries were fixed, so that if pupils started getting genuinely better taught and more able, we'd actually get to a stage where very few got less than grade 4!

We do already have this. It is impossible to set an exam of the same standard each year so what happens is that each year a sample of Y11s sit the exact same exam as previous years (the top secret National Reference tests) and those are used to decide whether the cohort has got better at maths/English. If they have, the grade boundaries are adjusted so that more students get a 4.

In recent years they should have been adjusted so that fewer pupils got a grade 4 because of the impact of covid, but they didn't do this.

This isn't relevant today.

But what do you think when you look at a Foundation Maths GCSE paper, look at the results and look at the questions people struggle with.

After all those years of maths teaching.

I think 'they could do it in the lesson but they can't retain the information'.

It is really frustrating teaching kids to e.g. find the mean from a frequency table over and over and each time they will act like it is brand new information.

A lot of the time they can do the thing in the lesson. Doing the thing isn't the problem, remembering how to do the thing is.

Exactly. I struggled with retaining maths. In the lesson things are easy, but give it a few days and I forget how it’s done. I’m the sort of person who needs maths to be repeated ad nauseam before it sticks, and at school topics move on so quick because there’s such a massive syllabus that everything just moves on too quickly and got jumbled in my brain!! When I resat it in a smaller class it was a lot easier.

I’m willing to bet that a lot of the time this is the problem. Maths problems need several steps to be remembered and carried out in a certain order to solve them. It’s harder for some brains to remember them. It doesn’t make someone thick.

Edited to add: having said the above, my primary school maths teaching was abysmal and didn’t set the foundations which are vital and ultimately set me up for a struggle later on.

Good for you?

Does it matter?

It's an indication level that a person has grasped the basics so can work out how not to get ripped off. That's all. Not always essential but can be helpful.

@RampantIvy why isn’t this relevant today? I am still being successfully employed ( recently got a new job) without these qualifications