Improving Outcomes for GCSE Resit Students

As a country we would like all our future employees to be functionally numerate and literate. If you then so, it is imperative that we need to start thinking more about supporting everyone in becoming functionally numerate and that starts with ensuring ALL students have access to high quality instruction and qualifications that enable them

We Need to Talk about Numeracy!!!

The current English system of setting GCSE grades using comparable outcomes, (GCSE grade distribution is pegged to what cohorts of similar ability achieved in the past), means that roughly a third of 16-year-olds year in, year out do not achieve a Grade 4 pass in English and Mathematics. Those young people who fall below this

Schemes of Learning Updates

Key Stage 2: White Rose Unit Assessments and Small Steps videos added Diagnostic Questions, (both for prerequisite assessment and for AfL in lesson) Median, Variation Theory, NRICH and Corbett Primary resources indexed to small steps. Key Stage 3: Nothing to add at the moment Key Stage 4: Nothing to add at the moment. A-Level: Nothing

Discovery learning v Direct instruction (it is not a binary argument)

The argument between these two styles of teaching has been raging on #Edutwitter for the last few years and it has become very divisive over whether you are a ‘Discoverist’ or an ‘Instructionist’. Well, let’s just think about our own experiences of learning for a while. If I was to attempt an A-Level Mathematics problem,

Schemes of Learning

There are many Schemes of Learning that are free to use and claim to be a Mastery Scheme of Learning. True mastery learning is almost impossible in most school environments as the groupings need to be as homogeneous as possible, which is not how we run education in this country. Often, there are additional demands

Exit Tickets. Fad or Fantastic?

Exit tickets have become a buzz word in education recently, but are they useful and are we using them correctly? Are they useful? Assessment for Learning is all about us, as teachers, knowing what students have learnt and understood so we can move on to the next idea, without fear that some students will not

Dazzling Desmos!

During this ‘final’ lockdown, where we have all been retraining as ‘remote learning tutors’, we have all been experimenting with different methods of supporting students learning. I am sure we have all tried both synchronous and asynchronous lessons and finding many benefits and negatives for both. One tool I tried was the Desmos Activity Platform

Flightpaths, are they relevant in our new World? (Key Stage 2 & 3)

During these strange times, with so few aircraft in the skies, is it time for schools to review their use of another airborne analogy? When the first National Curriculum came out in 1989, levels were used as guidelines for teachers to determine what a student had learned and to create some sort of progression of

Teacher workload

Damian Hinds has pledged to ‘strip away’ teacher workload. Well we can all ‘strip away’ things, from paint to clothing, but surely this sounds like removing thin layers rather than wholesale changes. So what things is he going to remove? Well for a start he could insist that school managers remove the need for every

Post-16 GCSE Maths, Fit for Purpose?

  In our brave new world of increasing numeracy rates of young people, our Government has decided on ‘increasing’ the demand of GCSE maths. This has seen a huge increase in students in Further Education having to study GCSE maths. But has this ‘higher demand’ seen an improvement in the standard of maths from post-16 students.