Private schools - support for child very good at subject

[stripeydress7]

My DC is (from what I can tell) able to fairly easily able to do Maths 2-3 years ahead of what they are doing in class.

What sort of support does your school offer for this? [*post edited at OP's request]

Speak to their teacher, maybe avoid mentioning being underwhelmed.

it's not necessarily in your child's best interests to race ahead of the curriculum. yes it's great that they are very able mathematically and that will stand them in good stead later on. Getting a long way ahead of the normal curriculum doesn't lead to happiness. let them complete the class work quickly and easily and keep their energy for studying other subjects that don't come so easily.

I'm a primary teacher. Ask for mastery tasks which broaden his application and reasoning rather than, for example, working with bigger numbers. An ongoing investigation type project could be good for a week or so at a time. He has the understanding and fluency already.

What year group are you talking about? My DS is very good at maths and has been through 3 private schools so far. We had to ask directly the find out his progress/Cat/ MidYIS test results and no one really sat us down and talked about it. He was in top set from year 5. In year 8 there was an after school scholarship group for maths. He is now in year 11 and is going to do further maths GCSE having covered the syllabus for GCSE by the end of year 10. Nothing in particular before year 8 I guess and only because that was a transition year.

This is very common for maths. There are a few like it in DC's class. There isn't much maths in primary so lots of kids will know most of the primary curriculum by year 3 or 4.it doesn't necessarily mean they're exceptional. What they should be doing is a mastery curriculum. This seems to be a bit hit and miss though. My eldest did a mixture of regular syllabus work usually for a few years ahead to improve his fluency and encourage him to write stuff down (he'd do everything mentally and his presentation was awful). Once he completed that work he'd get to do more interesting maths which would just be mastery problems or occasionally random gcse reasoning problems (as these don't require any background knowledge). This year so so far he's just been doing standard work which he definitely finds dull but you do need to give the teacher a chance to get to know them etc.

If your child likes maths look at primary maths challenge for them. A bright child could start doing papers from year 2 or 3 since most of the questions don't require any knowledge just reasoning. It's definitely not a good idea to just race through the syllabus as it doesn't actually develop or demonstrate any real skill.

Thanks for the replies everyone. I'll look up Maths Primary challenge and will look into mastery tasks.