Ok, so it’s not midweek, but I seem to have lost all sense of time which usually happens about this time of year, so it’ll be short and sweet! Two things:

(1) Bread and butter starters have gone done really well – you’ll find them on the post below, and I’ve already added next weeks sheets.

(2) The school at which we work has today put an advert out for a new (additional) maths teacher to join the team from September and this along with a couple of tweets from @BetterMaths got me thinking (dangerous I know!). It also got me”doing some maths” about the potential requirement for teachers to deliver the new core maths for post 16.

*WARNING* I may have got the assumptions totally wrong and you of course are entitled to your opinion!

• There were 561,315 school leavers for the year ending 2011/12, so assuming 550,000 in each year group, to account for declining birth rates.
• Some downward adjustments need to be made:
  • 30% – 165,000 students will have to resit GCSE (may go up with the new GCSE) and so are being catered for (to varying degrees) already.
  • 13% – 71,500 students are studying A level maths and so are already being taught.
  • 5.9% – 32,450 students are NEET’s (year ending 2012) so assuming this continues.
• This equates to 281,050 students in a year group that will have to study the new post 16 level 3 qualification.  So for 2 years i.e. year 12 and 13 this means we will have to teach 562,100 students.

Now for the assumptions about teaching these:

• 25 (!!!!) per teaching group = 22,484 new classes.
• 3 (some would argue as a level 3 qualification this should be 4, and I might agree) hours per week = 67,452 teaching hours. (Out of interest if this was 4 hours per week this equates to 89,936 hours)
• 20 hours per week contact hours per teacher = 3373 teachers required (on the 4 hours per week model this would be 4497 teachers)

The interesting thing is that ITE estimates for teacher training are about 2500 per year (I’m not convinced about that number though, but what I do know is that across the country this year, there was a decline in recruitment onto Maths ITE courses), so that’s it then … none of us can retire, or leave teaching or in fact get promoted! I am of course being glib … but if like the school I work at you are recruiting … good luck with that!

PS: This IS a back of a fag packet calculation and I know the actual model is very much more complicated, but you get the point!! Additionally, the new qualifications are still a work in progress, and like everything its all liable (read that as “likely”) to change. So to quote the inimitable Corporal Jones “Don’t panic Mr Mainwaring”