Maths GCSE in Primary

[winterisstillcoming]

Hey everybody, I was wondering if you could help clear something up for me.

I was speaking to my SIL yesterday who told me her Y5 son is revising for his maths GCSE. He is at independent school. I said be careful only the first attempt counts. As a trustee of an Academy trust that has recently decided not to put students forward early for this reason, I thought I knew what I was talking about. Apparently not according to my SIL.

So was she correct, and is it an independent school thing that students are allowed to resit? Which puts my Trust's students at a disadvantage??

She was so bloody patronising too. And she got my nephews GCSE text books out at a family wedding.

gfrnn I've been looking through the details on those people you listed. Out of interest, do you know how old they were when they sat GCSEs & A Levels (or the aquivalent)?

Could you also confirm that they were taught GCSEs/A Levels (or equivalent) within a formal education setting?

Feeling so depressed that the best some people can imagine for their talented and gifted children is acceleration to sit exams! As if GCSEs and A-Levels are somehow the pinnacle of achievement but they do give boasting rights if achieved at early ages

Exams are a necessary evil and can actually sap the joy out of a child's passion for something!

No child with accelerated abilities will find schoolwork adequately challenging if working at the 'standard level' but then they go off and find ways to challenge themselves - so many fabulous suggestions on resources to do this. Although, the problem solving and UKMT problems tend to be more difficult than learning something by rote and applying it....far easier to pass GCSEs!

@MumTryingHerBest" So your suggesting an individualised learning approach for every child?

Funnily enough an individualised learning approach is exactly what the DCSF called for in its guidance on the exceptionally able.
The middle 96% can be very well catered for by setting and enrichment in a standard comprehensive school because if you're not too far to the extremes of the ability range, there are enough other students with comparable ability to form a set. The bottom 2% need intensive support and an individualised learning approach - they have some legal rights to this through SEN law and EHCP plans. The top 2% are just as far from average ability and also have complex needs, yet they have far weaker legal entitlements to have those needs met, and it is assumed that they will "go off and find ways to challenge themselves". From what I've seen they are actively prevented from going off and finding ways to challenge themselves by teachers who insist they do the same work as the others in their class. And having been bored rigid in class, the last thing they want to do is more of the same subject outside class.

Nobody has yet addressed the issue of why these threads are always about maths.

Well they have to resist if they get under a 4. Bit pointless of a 3 will always count?

No idea about resits to get a better grade but I had heard discussions about it happening when they changed the grading.

"the best some people can imagine for their talented and gifted children is acceleration to sit exams!"

1. And yet the NAGC states that educational acceleration is one of the cornerstones of exemplary gifted education practices, with more research supporting this intervention than any other in the literature on gifted individuals.

2. The exams are incidental and could be skipped or deferred to the "normal" age. What is important is to match the pace and complexity of the curriculum to the needs of the learner.

3. The assumption being made by some here is that a choice must be made between acceleration (following the standard curriculum at faster pace) and enrichment (introducing topics outside the curriculum). This is a false dichotomy. It's possible (and recommended) to combine both. However in terms of their effect on measured attainment, acceleration is twice as effective as enrichment, hence the advice first accelerate, then enrich.
   What is not recommended is to use enrichment exclusively and to avoid acceleration - I've seen this described by several professors in gifted education as "dangerous", "indefensible", "a textbook case of educational mismanagement" and "educational malpractice".

Nobody has yet addressed the issue of why these threads arealwaysabout maths
Or the fact that on MN there seems to be a much higher number of 'gifted' children (I suspect most will be above average top of class standard, some will be very able, but most are probably not in the top tiny % and probably can be stretched without sitting exams significantly early)

Yes it is rather odd that there seems to be a vendetta against maths when it is one of the most built upon subjects

Nobody has yet addressed the issue of why these threads are always about maths.

I did!

noblegiraffe Wed 16-May-18 23:31:00
The standard answer, Bertrand is that GCSE maths doesn’t require maturity to fully appreciate it, unlike other subjects.

gfrnn - The exams are incidental and could be skipped or deferred to the "normal" age.

This is the exact point that many people have been trying to make on this thread.

To repeat what has already been said - no one is disputing that exceptionally able children would benefit from accellerated learing.

However in terms of their effect on measured attainment, acceleration is twice as effective as enrichment, hence the advice first accelerate, then enrich

As previously asked, how many of those people you named previousluy actually sat GCSEs and A Levels and how many of them studied in a formal educational setting?

I missed that noble.
That's a fair point. It would be quite difficult for a younger child to appreciate the richness of some literature (although I have no doubt if you reduced it to learning key quotations and writing a reasonable essay based on soundbites you could probably push them through a GCSE paper, not to a high standard though).

I'm still of the view that there are many very able students out there (of which a tiny % are in the exceptional range), but part of me does question how many people on MN who claim they have a truly exceptionally gifted child have a truly exceptionally able child and how many think being quite a bit in front of your peers equals exceptional. There's often lots of threads where I find myself thinking 'that situation could be resolved by better differentiation and common sense'.

"Nobody has yet addressed the issue of why these threads are always about maths"

1. Maths and literacy occupy the largest chunks of the primary timetable - both about one-third of classroom time once non-classroom activities like PE are stripped out. Acute boredom for one-third of your time in school tends to translate into a negative attitude to school in general. It also means that if a child has mastered the KS2 curriculum by the end of Y3, then in the next 3 years from Y4 -Y6 if special provision is not made a year of full-time classroom learning is completely wasted.

2. Comparing maths and literacy - firstly if you look at the old stats for those achieving level 6 at end of KS2, there were a far more achieving L6 in maths than in literacy (9% vs ~1% ?)so you'd expect there to be far more chlidren whose needs in maths are out of step with the age-based curriculum. Secondly it's easier to set open ended tasks in literacy - two children of widely differing ability can be given the same book and both enjoy it but infer different levels of meaning from it. They can be set the same essay and produce vastly different responses.

3. in some other subjects - notably music - its normal to have a 1:1 tutor, progress at the natural rate of the child, and sit exams early. No one bats an eyelid or even calls it acceleration because it's a culturally accepted middle class activity. But when you ask for your child not to completely waste a third of their time in school, you're apparently insane.

gfrnn is arguing with the wrong people. They don’t seem to have considered that the reason that the vast majority of the studies that they have posted are from the US is because the US educational system makes provision for pupils to be accelerated, and several universities have early entry programmes. They haven’t considered that the reason that they can’t find any evidence from England is because there is no standard provision for this. They’re wanging on about evidence while completely ignoring the problems discussed on this thread about sitting a maths GCSE in primary school- the issue of who will teach the advanced material and how it will be timetabled, the issue of running out of secondary maths to teach causing problems with UCAS if there is a ‘gap’ in Y13, the issue that top English universities don’t want bright pupils to be taught degree course material early, the issue that we don’t have early entry to university programmes. gfrnn can bang on about what they do in the US if they like, but until they come up with some solutions to these local problems, they’re not going to get anywhere. And they can bleat about how terrible it is that the research is being ignored by teachers who are scared of gifted children but they are just talking bollocks and not addressing the actual concerns.

Oh and I am, and have always been on this thread talking about the state system. The OP’s DN is in a private school, as I said in a previous post, they probably have the money and resources to solve at least some of the issues.

in some other subjects - notably music - its normal to have a 1:1 tutor, progress at the natural rate of the child, and sit exams early. No one bats an eyelid or even calls it acceleration because it's a culturally accepted middle class activity.
1-1 music lessons with a peripatetic instrumental teacher are not a normal feature of a music curriculum. They are extra curricular and funded by parents.
It is an ENRICHMENT activity (which is why it's not called acceleration) just like a child taking LAMDA or other performing arts exams, or taking additional dance tuition and privates with the teacher.

None of those things are mainstream curriculum decisions.

Music in school for very talented students does not mean getting whipped out of class and going elsewhere, nor does it mean entering GCSE early. I went to school with a student with perfect pitch (and was remarkable). They sat classes with the rest of us and completed a range of different work and had more freedom with composition etc. They could probably walked GCSE at 11, but that doesn't offer the same challenge as meaningful extension. Their parents knew they had an exceptional child and didn't need to push for GCSEs at 11 to tell them their child was gifted in a certain area.

no one is disputing that exceptionally able children would benefit from accelerated learning.

Absolutely. But to waste their capacity for accelerated learning by confining them to the narrow restrictions of the exam curriculum is wrong.

I appreciate the point made earlier, that if a very able child is being taught by a non-Maths specialist in Primary, the easily available [lazy] route for acceleration is to simply push them through self-learning of existing textbooks for KS3/4. However, as others have pointed out, there are a variety of books and resources out there for much broader acceleration / extension maths work, which could easily be used instead - they are no 'harder for a non-specialist to deliver' than a GCSE textbook.

They could probably walked GCSE at 11, but that doesn't offer the same challenge as meaningful extension.

This. Just this. 'Meaningful extension' is what we should be looking for here. It is wrong to push for 'acceleration by exam syllabus'. Parents / teachers of very able pupils should be pushing for 'meaningful extension / acceleration' outwith the narrow confines of the syllabus.

push them through self-learning of existing textbooks for KS3/4.

There does seem to be an expectation of the bright child to simply sit in a classroom reading a textbook while the class around them does something else. I don’t think that the famous examples quoted on this thread were self-taught, except Ramanujan who is a cautionary tale - he didn’t receive mathematical instruction and as a result used bizarre notation, had gaps in his knowledge, wasted time reproducing already proved theorems and drove GH Hardy mad by not proving things properly.

Good lord, do kids really spend a third of their time in primary school on maths? Changed a lot since my children were there.......

And there is no such thing a sitting exams early in music.

Even if there was- I have a reasonably talented musician who has chosen not to take any exams. This does not appear to have held him back or impeded his learning. Rather the opposite.

tbh, noble, my entire generation learned Maths like that from textbooks / workbooks, at least in primary - each child had their own, at their own level, and checked the answers at the back.

It probably was no good for anyone who really needed TEACHING maths....

I would say it is standard to send an hour a day in primary on Maths, out of school day of c. 5 hours (depending on the length of break / lunch, may be a little longer).

So one fifth would be the normal fraction ... A third would be at least 100 minutes - an hour and 40 mins per day.

Some schools now split the 'main' maths lesson (c. 40 minutes) from a 'fluency in number / arithmetic' lesson (c. 20 minutes) - the latter being rehearsal of times tables, standard methods, revisiting things,. clearing up any issues etc. I have never encountered a school where the total amount of time spent on Maths is more than an average of an hour or a tiny bit more per day.

Ah, I realise that gfrn has chosen to 'strip out' things like PE, and not count it in her calculation of 'time in school'. Last time I checked, PE was part of the primary curriculum and took place in school time....

Lies, damned lies and statistics. I could equally well say that 100% of school time is spent on Maths, once all lessons other than Maths are stripped out, so my child is bored 100% of their time...

cant SMP booklets? They’re actually pretty good, but it’s not just about students who need teaching, it’s about having the chance to discuss your maths with other people. The loner in a corner with a textbook is not getting a chance to share their ideas, bat them around, collaborate with others. Andrew Wiles tried the solitary approach solving Fermat’s Last Theorem but it was only really cracked once he let others in.

It varied a lot (I went to a lot of primary schools as we moved frequently). I used School Mathematics Project textbooks in secondary, the Alpha and Beta books in the equivalent of years 5 and 6, but I can't find the others to describe them. It was a bit like reading comprehension - you'd get a card out of a big box from 'your colour', do it, mark it, return it, get the next one...