It is that time of year when I become a bit blinkered and focus on one thing … the maths GCSE for year 11! I’m not saying that it’s a bad thing and I’m not saying that Maths is more important than any other subject, but there are accountability measures in place upon which, so much rests … and I’m not talking about just the league tables … it is bigger than that. We operate in a system (rightly, or wrongly) of accountability and ultimately a spurious set of results, for whatever reason can start the downward spiral that could land a school in a category and that comes with massive implications.

Today marked the start of the exam season and the end is now in sight, with Maths being one of the later exams means that we “keep on going” and it feels as if there is no such thing as “gain time” … as soon as the exam is over our focus switches immediately to year 10. That’s not to say that they are ignored, just that most of the extra sessions are aimed at year 11. We are lucky enough to have our year 10 mocks scheduled for the afternoons of the main GCSE so that they get the whole “as real as possible” feeling and recently, we agreed that we would start after-school sessions this week for those year 10s that want to attend – at least for a few weeks prior to their mocks. It’s all about getting them into a routine and hitting the ground running in September. We’ll also be replicating the process of making our “best guess” paper available between the two sittings too – again, this gives them an idea of what to expect next Summer. I’ll have that ready on the evening of the first paper … look out for it!

As I’m aware that I seem to get this year 11 “tunnel vision” this time of year, I’ve forced myself to try to look past June the 8th (actually its later than that as we have students doing statistics too!!), so I’ve been working on a couple of things:

  • I’ve made a couple of these “squares” style worksheets. I saw an idea like this, a while ago, but my PGCE student Grant – @AccessMaths – (**waves**) made some fantastic ones and so credit to him for the idea! This one ( Expanding binomials – Squares ) is for expanding brackets … I’ve included “triple brackets” to futureproof its use so that it is suitable for the new GCSE too, and I know that I’d use it with my current year 10’s to extend them so that’s a “brucey bonus” too.

squares2

  • I also want to make a new display board focussing on how to approach “problems”. I’m hoping to have the steps as a flowchart but each step written in a calculator face “stylee”. OK, so it’s equally applicable to most maths questions, but the idea is that over time, as we use different strategies I’ll get students to add to the display using “speech bubbles” that I’ve made and they can add their name etc to them.

Problem solving

So I’ve mentioned the new GCSE and we’re still no further forward … I’m expecting news this week (it will be “mid-May” on Friday … so I’m guessing something will be published Friday just to ruin our weekend!). I also have a feeling that there may be a meeting being held this week with the exam boards and Ofqual – not guaranteeing that by the way just have “a feeling in my water” … it is after all the right thing to do, so that the exam bodies can formulate their plans dependent upon what the research programme shows.

Despite that, the countdown to the end of the year edges ever closer and in all honesty most schools won’t have the time to focus on the new GCSE until after the 8th June and so, any gain time will be spent looking at SAMs and possibly choosing and/or adapting 2 year schemes of work ready for September.

Tick tock, tick tock.