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.

Ah right can't I'm with you now.

gfrnn,

Are the studies purely, or mainly UK based?

OK:
You have linked to 2 studies in that post.

• One is a meta-analysis, and gives no breakdown of the national origin of the studies it includes. However, a scan of the references strongly suggests that the vast majority are US-based, based partly on the periodicals they are drawn from (e.g. Gifted Child Quarterly, a US journal) and from the vocabulary used in their titles.

• The second is Australia based.

Can you link to similar studies which are UK based, or which take full account of differences between the education system of the subjects studied and the UK education system?

I read them on 18th May. They weren’t UK based then either.

Please can you address the fact that we don’t have an age based curriculum in secondary maths.

I taught a couple of kids, one was doing A Level Maths and one was doing FM in year 7. They both came to us with A* GCSE obtained in year 6 but there was stark contrast between them. The first one was just a good mathematician who was taught early by his parents. The second kid was an exceptional case. He was taught long distance by a Cambridge tutor but because of unstructured nature of the situation and the demanding time requirement, it did not come to anything substantial. He had SNs so we couldn't teach him to take exams and he just went from one area of Maths to the next without any structure. I was an NQT so I was too busy trying to pass my NQT year and I was already busy teaching the other kid A Level Maths. No idea what happened to that second kid now. However, what I learnt from those lessons teaching these kids was that they always need structure and something to aim for. Doesn't matter what it is, even if it means they go to university early. They are still little kids and as adult, we need to give them guidance and together make the decision what is best for them.

I haven't had time to follow the whole thread even I saw my name mentioned early on but I do agree with a lot of points made by both sides.

In a way I agree with some of what gfrnn has been saying that in some exceptional cases, it is the right thing for certain kids to go to university early. However, our definition of what an exception is will be widely different. A top 0.01% in the UK is different to a top 0.01% kid in the US or China. Even if the kid can go to university early, they might not want to.

The UK education system is too rigid as it is. At one end of the spectrum, kids have to move up a year even if they are not ready and teachers are expected to teach them concepts that are way beyond what they can comprehend because their basic skills are not strong enought. At the other end, kids get held back because many schools can not provide enough resources for these kids.

A lot of parents on these board are quite openly saying that they are very happy with their children's school but how do they know that with a different school and a different teacher, they might do so much better.

There are very few children who wouldn’t do better with a different teacher in a different school.