Rishi to overhaul maths GCSE - resit requirements

[noblegiraffe]

I mean, I know this is all hot air because he doesn't have any time before his government is in the bin to implement anything but:

https://inews.co.uk/news/education/gcse-reform-lessons-tax-returns-rishi-sunak-maths-plan-2577578

There's a paywall so you can read the text here https://x.com/robotmaths/status/1696584449918419099?s=61&t=U9XrcF693-JpMxeIueYG7g

So it seems that the best that the maths to 18 team could come up with was teaching kids to fill in tax returns. Which won't be useful for most of them.

However most of the chat is around the 'resit' problem.

I've attached the resit pass rates which are pretty shocking. Better for English than maths though, which is....weird? Is that a maturity thing?

"“[Ministers] are taking resits extremely, extremely seriously. They know that it’s bad for the nation, bad for kids and bad for educational institutions,” a different member of the maths to 18 advisory group told i.
“I think the best thing to conclude is that the GCSE resit route should continue, but that there must be adequate alternative forms of provision for those for whom that’s not appropriate.”

No discussion of whether the resit could actually be taught any better though.

@jallopeno the bold numbers are age

So this year, for 17 year olds sitting GCSE maths at the end of Y12, 16% got the 4+, and 48.7% got a 2 or below (so nowhere near a 4).

For 18 year olds sitting at end of Y13 (so they've not got a 4 in Y11 or Y12), 9.5% got the 4, most got a 2 or below

Then you've got the 19 year olds, which would be a small group doing a third year of sixth form for whatever reason, who would have be having possibly their 7th attempt at GCSE maths. 10.7% of them finally got their 4.

@noblegiraffe thank you. I am quite shocked 48.7% got a 2 or less. That is pretty bad.

that's quite shocking given that in most colleges, anyone getting less than a 3 is usually put in functional skills classes instead (at least in my area). So the people trying GCSE would be those who already had at least 3, and are then going down to a 2 or below.

I saw another table online that showed cumulative percentage from grade 9 down to U, and there were a very very tiny percentage of people who got 9s to 6s, so that sounds like it is possible to do a higher paper in the resit, presumably for those who missed the chance to do it the first time around. The grade boundaries must be particularly difficult to work out for those, as it must be such a small number doing that paper.

I have a 1st in a classical subject from a RG university, yet my sixth form years were blighted by three GCSE maths resits. I finally scraped a C in the September of upper sixth. I'd had a private tutor since year 10 and still couldn't pass first time.

My problem was that I'd missed a lot of primary school due to health problems including glue ear. I couldn't hear. My maths skills became a problem from KS2 and I was constantly told I wasn't very good. No one actually tried to work out why. I learnt more by helping my own DC with KS1 and 2 maths during lockdown, including times tables and numeracy methods than in all of my school career.

If basic concepts are missed then it is useless flogging the horse of simulaneous equasions, ratio and triangles later on. Falling behind on the basics and being laughed and then shouted at for not knowing made me despise maths lessons and feel totally inadequate.

Maths should go up to 18 in schools and it really should be differentiated. It is such a large area. Lots of children, including my own, are able to grasp concepts my ExH learnt in high school and he has a very good maths phd. They can do this because we learnt the basic methods of working things out. I still find it amusing, that me, who struggled to add up numbers to 20 has taught the DC over what my previous knowledge was.

So maybe pp are right in that, it is not children are slow and the system is woefully inadequate.

I would like the system to be differentiated properly much, much earlier. I work with 15 year olds who still don't properly understand place value, what equivalent fractions are, that dividing by two is the same as finding half, not just counting up by twos, etc. And yet they'll work on some of the topics for a week, then move on to all the other maths topics needed for whatever year they're in, and there isn't a chance for them to just stop and stick to something like really really basic fractions for long enough that they properly understand it. Every year they get shown how to do some calculation, or they learn tricks about how to do it, and it doesn't mean much so it's forgotten by the next year. But they have to be taught what is on the curriculum, and if that is multiplying fractions, then it doesn't matter whether they really know what fractions represent, they'll be taught how to multiply them. etc. There is just no chance to go back and really catch up, to learn the basic fundamentals that you get from repeatedly playing around with number and counting in primary school, and to stop and wait until they've understood something before moving on to the next stage. Of course this is very difficult to manage when you have whole classes of children all needing to be taught, and I don't know how it could be managed well. But I do wish there was more scope for holding children back in some topics somehow, until the basics are there.

I hate trying to get 16 year olds through an exam that they aren't ready for, knowing that they aren't really understanding, just learning how to get the correct answers, and knowing that there isn't enough time to spend weeks or months going back to something like figuring out what basic fractions actually mean.

Yes, BaconWaffles.

In fact, the content of Foundation GCSE Maths is not much beyond what could and should have been learnt in primary school. With just about 55-60 per cent of available marks being sufficient to get Grade 4 in Foundation, failing to get it means that the students do not know the maths at the primary level. And the five years of secondary school were simply a waste of time for them.

Yes, if they get greater depth in the year 6 sats they can prob already get a 4 at gcse. Maybe higher.

You can get a good 3 in Foundation level GCSE Maths using only Maths that is explicitly on the primary curriculum - ie with no allowance for ‘a child would probably work out how to do that through common sense’.

And the questions in the GCSE are often much less tricksy and weirdly wordy than Y6 SATs Reasoning papers.

A child who got an Expected mark at KS2 and ends up with a 3 or below at GCSE has taken on vanishingly little each year of the secondary syllabus and gas probably forgotten stuff they could dk at the age of 11.

Y6-Y7 transition, especially in Maths, is a real issue. The curriculum doesn’t tie together well and teachers are often fairly unaware of what gies on on the other side of the primary / secondary divide. The fact that many primaries stop daily proper Maths lessons in May, post SATs, does many children a disservice, too.

Why can't these morons just get that not everyone is good at or interested in maths and will always feel a failure for failing something that's being forced upon them that they're meant to pass

It makes me so angry for the DC that struggle with maths

My DD got 57% this time which was not enough for a 4. She would have needed 61.25% to get the 4.

The 5 years (well 4 in her case) at secondary school were not a waste of time. She wasn't secure in her primary maths at end of primary any how. Off the top of my head, things she did in secondary on the foundation syllabus: nth term, angles inside regular polygons, trig, parallel line rules, pythagoras, algebra.

Due to various SEN she is still wobbly on some basic numeracy, and accuracy, but is actually pretty good at some of the harder stuff.

Primary schools do an hour a day of maths, probably more in the run up to SATs. It is that repeated practice and focus that helps get some kids over the line.

By the time you are at GCSE level the maths is diluted by 8 or so other subjects. College resits are diluted by the main focus course. For mine at least we couldn't do the repetition needed, she didn't have the stamina, and now has even less.

In Wales, we now have seperate maths and numeracy GCSEs, which I thought seemed like a good idea, but all the children I've come across take both. Also, I'm not sure a numeracy pass is enough to get you onto courses like teaching or nursing. It seems like a good idea with poor implementation.

@user9630721458.
In my experience a child whole can't get above a 3 with repeated lessons has something else going on.
It maybe that they need special 1:1 teaching.
Unfortunately, going through the same style lessons in the same way over and over probably won't help them. They need a creative and imaginative approach

I sat O grades in Scotland in the 70s. There was a Maths O grade and a separate Arithmetic. Arithmetic was compulsory but Maths was an option. It was a long time ago but if I remember the arithmetic O grade was about mental arithmetic and things like percentages. The practical skills which are useful in everyday life.
Interestingly there was only one O grade for English.
my children went to school in England so I don’t know it the system there has changed.

Many moons ago, my DBros’ school did CSE Arithmetic for everyone (rural comprehensive but only 60 intake, 2 classes that were set by ability but obviously each class had a HUGE range) and then O level Maths for the upper of the 2 classes.

It was a school that prided itself on preparing Its ex pupils for wherever they went next - 6th form then Oxbridge / Russell group or straight into local factories or farming at 16. Their Maths policy was designed around that.

GCSE Maths is really not fit for purpose. It is full of stuff that most people will rarely use or need in every day life. There really should be a GCSE numeracy, more on a par with functional skills. For students who wish to pursue a career in a field where maths is required, then they can study further maths. My DD attempted Maths GCSE at least 4 times, once at school, then November and June resits at college. The last attempt was a few marks below a 4. Fortunately the BA degree in an Arts subject that she studied at uni did not require a pass in maths, as it was completely irrelevant. She attained a 2.1, so is clearly more than capable of achieving high qualifications, but the need for maths is completely unnecessary.

Tbf, there’s a very similar disconnect between reports of ‘shock, horror, x% of 11 year olds can’t read’ and what the data actually says ‘x% of 11 year olds are pre-determined, by a government-decreed algorithm, not to get age expected or above in the Y6 SATs written reading comprehension test’.

Functional literacy (able to read a tabloid newspaper and carry out most everyday reading tasks for daily life) is around the reading / comprehension level (oral, not written) expected of Year 3, maximum Year 4. I used to work in a school with a group of oarents where adult illiteracy was common and school attendance patchy, and our aim was to ensure every child reached that magic ‘Year 3 / 4 reading / comprehension’ level at the earliest possible age.

@WestendVBroadway i agree.

It's so much kite useful to concentrate on the basics and really embed those for students who struggle than trying to expand to triangles and more advanced graphs.

.it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that dc can't read.
My own dc2 wouldn't believe reading now if it wasn't for my intervention.

I agree with so many here that the maths requirement should be separate from the GCSE course. I'd go further and suggest that a functional maths qualification could be offered universally with an expectation that kids who are strong on maths sit it in year 8 or 9, and move on to GCSE work, average kids might sit it in year 10 and have the option to resit with GCSES in year 11, alongside their maths GCSE, if necessary, and weaker kids focus on the functional qualification alone as their maths focus in school.

I think @noblegiraffe is potentially right that talking of dyscalculia is not always helpful, as the underlying issues are more likely specific memory or processing deficits and therefore the help required needs to be focussed to those deficits. But the overall term could still be helpful as a signal; I have the impression that in the UK the term dyslexia is often used as a catch-all for a variety of issues that impact reading and writing skills, rather than representing one coherent set of learning difficulties.

My mother (a specialist remedial teacher) did work with a very interesting girl years back. She was fairly seriously disabled and it was a miracle that she learnt to read, but with number, she could not grasp the concept of more or less. Functional work with her was highly tailored to working out anything she might master that would help her day to day. But again, this was not someone who was ever going to live independently.

Wouldn't these deficits affect people's literacy, language, music, art abilities as well? How is it possible for someone to excel in those areas but struggle with maths? Are these memory and processing deficits only connected to maths, and unrelated to subjects like music etc.?