By Paul Jenkins, Head of Secondary Curriculum Services
As GCSE exam results loom, for some students and teachers there is a growing realisation that they were simply not ready. Every school puts an incredible amount in during that last mile, with interventions, motivations and revision classes all trying to push the students over the line. Inevitably, before the exams are taken, it is a case of too little, too late for some. Schools are increasingly looking to swim upstream to improve those grades, through a clear focus on foundational skills earlier on in their school career.
The HFL Education maths team identified that, even in the older students, some firm basics were lacking, and this was holding them back, right up to GCSE level. Whilst in an ideal world these skills are all secured by the end of primary school, the reality is that some students are just not confident and fluent enough in some fundamentals before they are hit by the avalanche that is secondary learning.
Secondary maths teaching is often of high quality. However, even in the best schools there is a stubborn minority who do not seem to benefit from this teaching. Departments are starting to recognise that there is a sense of ‘building on sand’ in terms of the more complex maths needed in secondary school. Students can often master the more difficult concepts and operations being taught successfully at secondary school, but their progress is impeded by the more fundamental skills of addition and subtraction. With students’ working memory being consumed with fundamental skills, their capacity and time to practise the newly taught skills are reduced. Unfortunately, this results in Year 11 sets still needing to revisit topics they were taught in Year 7, because in a packed curriculum they simply didn’t have the high amounts of deliberate practice so necessary for weaker students to consolidate any learning.
There has been a huge push nationally around literacy, and HFL Education run a very successful Reading Fluency Programme, which delivers substantial gains for those weakest readers. Fluency in maths is a key skill but something that has received less attention from professionals. A fluent mathematician is able to calculate quickly and reliably, picking the best strategy from a range within their toolkit. Where students are less fluent, their basic calculations are slow and laboured, relying on limited or longhand methods.
Fluency is fundamentally a skill developed and underpinned by knowledge of techniques; this is what the HFL Education Making Fluent and Flexible Calculators Programme aims to address. Since the programme was run successfully across a number of primary and secondary schools, the EEF have chosen it as a research project to formally assess the gains from the programme.
Taught alongside regular lessons, Making Fluent and Flexible Calculators teaches different methodologies for addition and subtraction to increase students’ skillset and speed up their mental maths thereby improving their fluency. The trial is in its first phase of recruitment and is looking for participant secondary schools.
Watford Girls’ School was an early recipient of the programme, and their team felt that there has been lasting impact. With the aim for every student to gain at least a grade 4 at GCSE, maths teacher Emma Clay oversaw the implementation within their maths department:
“Fluent & Flexible Calculators was included as part of the classes’ wider maths curriculum once a week. I think you could run it as an intensive, shorter programme of study, but the head of department and I agreed that it would be beneficial to support the students over a longer period of time, as improving number sense requires time for the connections to be made. So while we initially ran the trial for one term, having seen the benefit, we just continued on from there.
“We don’t have data to quantify the improvements made, but for us as teachers who know our students and their abilities well, it was very clear to see that they have definitely become better at calculations, and we can see they are using strategies more often to solve numerical problems, which they weren’t before.”
“Some of our students that struggle the most still count on their fingers, but with this programme we are providing them with the skills to complete calculations faster, mentally, but also to understand how and why those calculations work so they can apply the same strategies to more complex problems. This will help push them forwards in their maths studies.”
Working with the EEF, this project is now going nationwide and as a result has the opportunity to make a difference to hundreds of students.
With 76% of re-take students failing to get a grade 4, the imperative on the profession is to make sure as many of the students as possible get that gateway qualification in Year 11. We hope that the Developing Maths Fluency in Low Prior Attainers programme – EEF part-funded trial – Making Fluent and Flexible Calculators will help teachers do that more effectively and enable more students to move onto their next stage of education with competent and fluent mathematical skills.
