Maths year 10

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DD works hard but when it comes to tests she doesn't achieve as much as she expects. She says the questions in the exam (same test sat across whole year) are a lot harder than the questions they cover in class and that some of the topic areas haven't been covered by her teacher by the time they take the exam.

We recently had our parent teacher consultation and the teacher started off by telling me how she like to focus the majority of her time on the middle range questions and not very much time of the difficult stuff. DD explained to her that often she goes over stuff in class that she already knows and she feels not enough time of the stuff that comes up in the exams. She said if she wanted to do harder maths she should just go on Hegarty Maths and that as far as she was concerned she was covering everything.

I wonder is it just me or how can a student who is not being taught how to answer harder questions, ever hope to answer the harder questions. Every time dd sits a Maths paper she comes out feeling like she couldn't answer most of it. Dd asked if the teacher can go over the test papers in class to help her understand where she went wrong, she agreed to that.

I am a Maths tutor and work with students at different abilities and levels. If your daughter is willing to put in some work on her own, then I'd recommend mathsbusters from CgP. It costs £13 and is a pretty comprehensive teach/learn/practice/test package that you do on a computer. It has text and video explanations and you can work either by topic or by level or a mixture of both.
The only thing I would say is that the grade boundaries on their tests are way too high, so go off the percentge on the test and last year's actual grade boundaries.

Teaching the trickier parts of a course to a class isn’t always appropriate though, trying. You seem to be ignoring that.

I promise I won't ignore it again Noble.

Thanks Educatingarti we have already found a lovely tutor, so hopefully now dd will have access to as much of the course as is appropriate for her.

And if the tutor teaches her the trickier stuff and she does well on it, that still doesn’t mean that the set 2 teacher should be teaching it.

Would recommend you getting Maths workbooks, they usually contain different questions with the grade next to it. There's a white one in Waterstones by CGP.

You can also use 'mathsgenie' - it's a website that is divided into grades. I hope this helps.