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.

Exactly, noble and Bert - that's exactly the way round it ought to be - a university mentoring a school student kept with their age cohort for most subjects but helped to develop in their area of strength / giftedness. Not a school-aged student living in a university environment, with a strange double enrolment going on so that they can go back to school to fill in the rest of their education.

For one thing, how could the timetabling work? I was a STEM student at a 'big name' university and had lectures every morning - which may or may not coincide with the lessons in other subjects at a school a student was dual enrolled at.

it also assumes that the university best for a child (presumably one known for the excellence of its mathematical eduation - Cambridge, Warwick, Imperial? - otherwise what would be the point?) would be co-located with the school best for them for all other subjects, which may well not be the case...

Mentoring, on the other hand, can be done over a far greater distance as it does not require daily attendance.

There are kids at Ds's school being mentored by our local university- a few mathematicians and physicists- but I think they are all year 1O and up.

That was the original topic of the thread. sorry for staying on topic.

The topic is not about the need for excellerated learning in maths, it is about whether a Maths GCSE resit will count.

The DC has not yet sat the exam. If that child gets a 2, 3 or 4, do you think they will need accelerated learning as outlined in the links and examples you have provided?

My DS(16) is in the top 0.1% academically and sitting GCSE maths early would, imo have benefited him greatly.

Primary school was either unable or unwilling to properly differentiate, despite numerous promises from the head every time I raised the issue. And my DS was one of those children who occasionally came home crying because of it. Boring lessons he could cope with, he would have even preferred sitting in the corner staring at the wall than doing the maths lessons that he was years beyond.

In Y6 I fought with the school for DS to be allowed to sit the level six exams (they didn't let anyone sit them as it was unfair on less able children). This wasn't because we particularly wanted DC to do the exam but because it might force the school to teach more challenging content (turns out it wasn't challenging).

DS loves maths it is his hobby, he does it for fun and covers all subject areas of it at home with no pressure from me at all.

Secondary is NO better. The school tried harder provided plenty of enrichment, UKMT, competitions, university visits, statistics, a mentor at Oxford Uni, trips etc etc but the problem was maths CLASSES. He still had to sit through 5 years of a classroom curriculum that he was years beyond. Differentiation didn't even scratch the sides. The new 9-1 system has not made a jot of difference either. He now hates maths classes and for someone who loves maths that is soul destroying. Good job the UK doesn't need gifted mathematicians.

Sitting his GCSEs at moment and not spent one second revising maths, no point, we are so glad maths classes are over.

So I am strongly in favour of sitting the exams early (for gifted children) because it would force the school to address the issue that he should not be sitting in the classroom doing a curriculum he is years beyond, it is more than counter productive. No extra teaching is needed, he could sit at the back of the room with a maths book. There would be no gap in maths between A-Level and Uni because he wouldn't stop studying it, why would he, he loves it. And that would be easily proved in the STEP/MAT entrance exams.

Radically accelerated / dual enrolled in the UK:
Yasha Asley
Arran Fernandez
Ganesh Sittampalam
Simon Norton
All got firsts, went on to doctoral research. Which shows it can be done and has been done in the UK with good outcomes.

There have also been people on other threads whose children have done OU modules while at school which is also dual enrolment. The Open university is fairly clear that "normal" admission is for over 16's and that special consideration is only needed for under 16's.

Walking dead - your problem was that the school didn't differentiate when clearly they should have. But sitting the GCSE early wouldn't have solved that by the sound of it. School still wouldn't have differentiated because I assume it was too difficult to arrange.

gfrnn the OP asked if resits count - do they?

Anyone dual enrolled at uni and school in the last 25 years?

I’m assuming that parents would want modern examples to follow.

gfrnn - Radically accelerated / dual enrolled in the UK

Yasha Ayari Asley - He is now home schooled, the reason being that his father wasn't happy with his progress at Fullhurst.

Arran Fernandez - Prior to university, he was educated at home.

Ganesh Sittampalam - spending the remaining four days continuing his education at King's College Junior School [private school].

Why worry about this so early on? It sounds odd saying a year 5 student is revising for GCSE maths. I would wait until he’s in year 11 if I was her, that way he’s had as much time possible and can get an amazing grade

titchy Your right the primary was unable to differentiate to GCSE level because it was beyond their ability. And secondary tried but failed because KS3/4 teachers weren't able to differentiate to A-Level ability.

If DS had already passed the GCSE exam then there would be no reason to keep him in the class learning the curriculum. He could have sat in the library self studying. Problem solved, no difficulty involved. Instead the system is unfortunately set up to destroy a gifted child's desire to excel in the subject.

I've got an 11 year old who just read and understood Dr Faustus (Marlowe) entirely alone. The reading part took her a few hours. Then she went back to the start and read it again a few more times. She has been musing on it for a few weeks.

She wanted to buy it from the second hand bookshop with her own saved pocket money (weird little tiny edition with very antiquated spelling), I said OK, if you really want to, assuming she would give up after three pages. I mean, I know she is good at English but it is incredibly dense and antiquated text and really not at all accessible to a child still at primary school.

I did it for A level several decades ago so I talked to her about it and asked her questions, and while she probably couldn't pass an A Level in it, she does have a really fantastic understanding of the play and was able to talk to me about it on a very high level and support what she said with examples from the text. She doesn't know much/anything about morality plays, the Roman Catholic church, Greek myths and classical imagery and a whole bunch of other stuff that would probably inform her understanding of the play. I (or any competent English teacher) could probably teach her this kind of stuff within a few weeks or months and prep her to answer A Level standard questions on the play. I did tell her the story of Troy so she could understand the Helen part and supplied answers to some questions about Christianity as we are not religious.

I can't really understand how it would be of benefit to her if I prepped her for this or put her in for GCSE English and got her to read the texts and told her about the stuff that would come up. It would just be spoon-feeding exam prep. I'm pretty sure a competent teacher could easily get her through GCSE in no time at all. Clearly she is a bit ahead of her peers. I can't imagine any of her friends reading Dr Faustus for fun (and am slightly weirded out that she thinks it's fun). I'm really happy that she is so interested as to persevere with a difficult text like this and really happy that she was engaged enough to bother to ask me questions and work through it in such a mature way. But how would it help her to do GCSE early or cram her with facts to answer exam questions?

Anyway, the next thing she has picked up is Women Beware Women. I'm kind of thinking I will try to divert her to A Midsummer Night's Dream or similar.

My approach to her weird interest in ancient plays is just to encourage her to read lots more interesting things in the hope that some more of them will catch her imagination and to buy her a really nice dictionary. I'm going to encourage her to try some of the Bronte stuff next and maybe Jane Austen, though she is v fixated on plays. I'd hate her to go to university early. Who wants to be the freaky genius kid who is out of step with their peers? Better to widen your knowledge because how can that ever be a bad thing? I don't know for Maths stuff, but for DD it is definitely going to be better for her long term to read and explore and have that behind her when she does get to exam time. Richer is better than faster.

Glaciferous, how do you think your 11 year old would feel if they had to spend the next 5 years of English classes reading, rereading and then reading again the same book, Dr Faustus (Marlowe).

Because that's what its like in maths. Would you want her to do the exam and be exempt from the class then?

I think she'd be both bored and angry. But I would also wonder in that situation if she couldn't read something else in that she'd already demonstrated that she knew about that one thing but she's 11 so she does not know about lots of other stuff. I'd rather she read a load of other stuff than be prepped for an exam that she doesn't need to take yet.

Long term, reading a lot of other things and taking them in will be very useful to her in later life.

Yes of course she can and will read other things outside of class but what if inside class (and homework) just became the same book for 5 years.

And there would be no minor exam prep as she loved reading so much there would be little more to learn.

So bored and angry, is exactly how my DS felt for over 5 years in maths class.

My DCs' school pushes gifted children by expansion rather than acceleration, so DS misses two of the normal daily maths classes each to go to the special group lessons where they do things that are broadly maths related but not directly curriculum related.

I think this is a great way of keeping kids who would naturally move through the curriculum faster than their peers engaged and able to stay in the same age group

Great idea OlennasWimple, how do you think we could force every school to do that? Maybe a change in legislation to support gifted children?

I don't know, Walkingdead. It's not a UK school and I suspect that the approach developed to counter the US practice of pushing talented children through school and onto college, but I think it's so much healthier than 11 yo taking GCSEs

"Maybe a change in legislation to support gifted children?"

In the context of apallingly restricted resources I just can't see how that can, or should, be a priority.

We haven’t got enough maths teachers to teach the classes we already have without adding on extra ones.

Walkingdeadfangirl has your DC done the GCSE maths exam or are they still working on the curriculum?

And any extra maths teachers we do have should be focussing on the depressingly large %age that struggle to get the life changing 4/5.

MumTryingHerBest, just doing the exam this week, wasn't allowed to do it early. But could definitely have done it 4/5 years ago.