Member Article

Hammond’s commitment to rehabilitate maths in schools will need more than a premium to achieve meaningful success

Philip Hammond believes that mathematical ability is critical for many of the “cutting edge” jobs of the future, and that investment in the subject is required in order for the next generation of British workers to become commercially competitive in a world increasingly reliant on tech innovation.

Is the additional pledged £600 for schools for each pupil taking Maths at A-Level enough to rehabilitate interest in a declining academic discipline often deemed (by children and adults alike) as one of the blandest necessary evils of the national curriculum?

Drudging and difficult, it’s no surprise that the subject has – over many years – faced a critical decline in students pursing it further; many abandoning it as soon as the GCSE hurdle’s been jumped. Traditional methods often used to teach the subject have done little to challenge this perception, with standard textbook-based work being about as inspiring as watching the kettle boil.

It’s mind-blowing to think that the apparent randomness of everything – right down to the trajectory behaviour of billions of particles chaotically colliding into on another other in the air we breathe – can be statistically calculated and predicted by maths. Maths proves that there is order in chaos. Einstein showed this to be the case, using his analysis of random trajectories to prove that our world is made of atoms.

But how do we unlock curiosity and wonderment in maths if, from our earliest experiences of the discipline, we know it to be boring and nothing more than a curricular chore? Driving engagement and love for maths at an early stage is absolutely crucial to appreciating it not just as a subject in later life but also as an essential everyday tool that helps us get by.

Today’s announcement by the DofE that they will be expanding the mastery of mathematics programme to 3,000 more schools is an exciting announcement that promises to raise mathematics standards significantly and ensure that all children achieve a mastery of mathematics. However, can new technology in the classroom combined with a mastery based learning approach bring even greater gains?

Mastery based learning is a simple concept. The idea is that when a teacher teaches a topic, the teacher does not move on to the next topic until all students have mastered that topic. Moreover, whilst teaching the same topic to the whole class, activities in the classroom are differentiated so that less able students are given simpler problem solving exercises and extra support, whilst the most able students are given extension activities. The whole class moves at the same pace and no child gets left behind.

Moreover, this approach works and has real evidence to back it up. The Education Endowment Foundation ran a large scale randomized trial and discovered that mastery based learning can advance children on average, pupils in classes where the approach was used made one additional month’s progress compared to similar classes that did not.

However, a key challenge with mastery-based learning is firstly a teacher knowing which students have mastered a topic. Skilled questioning in class can give teachers some level of insight, but many children are often unwilling to say that they don’t understand. Moreover, teachers in secondary school will typically teach 200 or more different students every week and it’s impossible for them to have a detailed knowledge of every students current level of mastery. But this is one area in which software has a real potential to help and save teachers hours of time in the classroom.

For the past three years, we’ve been working on software that has been designed specifically to address this problem and is already having a big impact in classrooms around the world. Science teachers in Texas, for example, are reporting an 8-10% increase in standardized test scores for students of all abilities.

In a world where technology has revolutionised nearly every corner of our lives, the minimal impact it has had on changing our classrooms today in the UK for the better is confounding. China’s investment in education technology to upskill their vast blue collar workforce is testimony of just how important they believe it is as a tool to achieve their greater economic goals.

Can technology in the classroom drive mastery over subjects as well as remedy some of the wider issues beleaguering the teaching profession today – from recruitment and retention to sheer engagement in maths as a subject itself?

Absolutely. It’s a true enabler. But we are at the start of a long journey and efficacy of education technology largely lives and dies at the hands of politics, resourcing and lack of funding rather than the quality of the products themselves.

Yet there is a real opportunity to use educational software to compliment new teaching methodologies. In fact, perhaps we’d go so far as to say that educational software has the ability to enable entirely new teaching methodologies. Our goal is to save teachers’ time, make their teaching more informed, allow them to easily differentiate and ultimately to give them the ability to ensure every student fulfills their learning potential.

Provided that the government realises how education technology can be used as a vital means of achieving the aspirations voiced out in Mr Hammond’s budget, there is every reason to believe that we will cultivate a new generation of workforce academically equipped to keep the UK as a country renowned for formidable, game-changing innovators.

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Zzish .