Why is GCSE maths so hard?!

[bonbonours]

My daughter has just started her GCSE course which she will be doing over three years (she's in year 9). Maths is not her strong point so she has been asking me to help her to understand and work through her homework tasks.

For background, I got an A at GCSE Maths about 25 years ago, and have a 2:1 degree so whilst by no means a genius, I am fairly well-educated and work in an education field (not maths).

I have been completely baffled by a lot of her maths work, and we have had to watch how-to videos together (as recommended by school) to understand how to do some of the work. It is things like indices, including fractional indices, equations including fractions and minus numbers, surds (literally never heard that word before yesterday) etc. It is all deeply theoretical, and with no practical application that I can see in real life.

Considering that GCSE Maths is a basic requirement of pretty much any job and higher education course, this is insane surely? I can understand requiring people to have a decent working knowledge of usable day to day maths, percentages, ratios, interest rates, budgets, weights and measures etc. But why does everyone, need to know all this in-depth theoretical stuff? My husband works in a finance department and also has no idea about most of this stuff and never has to use it in his job.

It wouldn't really need any special teaching, as the questions the child would likely be able to do are things that are already being covered in class

It would need a lot of work at home to get yourself familiar with the questions compared to GCSE. It's a very different qualification.

You could pay to enter as a private candidate.

It's unlikely to get students who are suitable for A Levels that cannot scrape a grade 4 in Maths.

This is a case of a child who has quite extreme pockets of abilities and difficulties, including serious, diagnosed problems with maths - but can succeed in other areas, so it is limiting in that sense given the sixth form provision on offer. A-levels might not end up being the ideal choice, but the BTec subjects available are likely to suitable either.

In this case, the level of maths would make functional skills also very difficult, but a bit of familiarisation with the question types would probably give as good a chance as anything else - the basic fundamental maths skills that are already very problematic are being covered as much as can be in the GCSE foundation class. More ideal would be a class that only did those fundamentals, but it's not going to happen in this situation.

It is very difficult to find how and where to enter as a private candidate, particularly a Year 11 one, for an exam only - there also seem to be various boards, places offering courses plus exams, etc, and not really obvious how you can just go somewhere and have a try at an exam. It sounds like it has been made a lot harder recently as well, which might also mean that it is just as impossible as GCSE in this case.

I am all for everyone learning as much maths as possible, but it can be frustrating when a diagnosed difficulty with it makes it hard for a student to then continue in other areas post-16, when suitable courses aren't offered at all sixth forms.

@Bimbleberries
You could try Home Ed forums to help as sometimes they look for exam centres rather than courses with the exam included.

thanks, will check there. Any information I can gather to pass on to them would be helpful I think (I'm involved in a slightly different area)