There are some interesting posts on the subject of mastery by Mark McCourt (former director of the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics) and also by Tim Dracup (former policy lead for G&T under the labour government).
They both conclude that "mastery" as it is being implemented in this country is deeply flawed; that propaganda, lies and spin are being used to sell a very restrictive one-dimensional approach, and that the needs of high ability learners have not been considered.
McCourt's mastery fails article notes that "As I have visited each new school of late, I have – almost without exception – been faced by the most regressive and damaging practice falsely labelled mastery" and that many people have "jumped on a bandwagon boldly branded Mastery and [are] a part of a machinery propagating an obtuse and deficient approach to teaching mathematics under the banner of Mastery".
McCourt also gives an extended discussion of what a true mastery approach should consist of here
Dracup's post on breadth, depth, pace and mastery notes that:
"The recent evolution of a mastery approach can be tracked back to the Report of the Expert Panel for the National Curriculum Review (December 2011) ... For reasons best known to itself, the Panel never undertook that further work in relation to high attainers, or at least it was never published. This has created a gap in the essential groundwork necessary for the adoption of a mastery-driven approach"
A second article by Dracup on maths mastery states:
"Is ‘Maths Mastery’ primarily focused on the ‘long tail’ [of low achievement], potentially at the expense of high attainers?
The IoE evaluators think so. The primary evaluation report says that:
‘Mathematics Mastery intervention is particularly concerned with the ‘mastery’ of basic skills, and raising the attainment of low achievers"
This "raises questions about the suitability of NCETM’s version of mastery for our high attaining learners, arguing that essential groundwork has been neglected and that the present approach to ‘stretch and challenge’ is unnecessarily narrow and restrictive."
Mastery is being used as a pretext in UK schools to implement undifferentiated whole-class instruction, to deny acceleration on spurious philosophical grounds, and to remove adequate (or even any) differentiation. And apparently the good thing about this is that it will reduce teacher workloads.This is in fact a stated aim of those who are peddling this rubbish. Don't believe me? read this.
What else would you expect from a government whose first action on taking office in 2010 was to remove all funding for G&T programmes and shut down the National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth