I know, I know!

I promised to post a blog on Monday but it’s all a bit mental at the minute – I have about 300 emails in my “justmaths” inbox (so bear with me as I work through them … I am trying but at this rate it may be the Summer holidays!). Yesterday we had our year 6’s in for transition day and Seager was out delivering some training and at some point when I wasn’t paying attention,I must have agreed to do the Maths sessions and so spent most of the day with paper aeroplanes flying around my room or on the field measuring flight distances. Not sure about the kids but I had a riot!

Anyway, having been blogging and tweeting the crap (and thank you to everyone who wrote to their MP too …. You guys are my heroes!!) out of the fact that I’d written to the PM (here’s the post – OH DAVID!! ) last week this email popped into my inbox.

huw

Monday arrived and duly armed with my points and copies of my letter to remind myself of key points I made my phone call. To summarise (and I may be paraphrasing!) my call with Huw Leslie:

  • Huw started the call by saying it would appear that we had gotten “into a pickle” about getting me a satisfactory response and he wanted to just clarify where “we think we are” before putting a formal response from the minister together and we discussed the accreditation process.
  • I clarified that I was looking for Nick to confirm that the DfE, but more specifically Nick Gibb had received the reassurances that he had requested.
  • We discussed the research programme and the government’s intention to raise the maths within England in line with other international jurisdictions. I applaud that but not at the detriment of a whole generation of students.
  • The year 9 (and to some extent year 8) students are the ones I’m concerned about as people try to shoehorn in prior knowledge topics that they haven’t studied but need to have done for the new GCSE. In fact there are a fair few year groups to pass through until we see the impact of the new KS 1 and 2. We are supposed to be embracing a depth of knowledge and this in some cases will be far from this ambition.
  • In relation to the specifics of the research programme we discussed the matter that it would be impossible to get the level of difficulty exactly the same from each board – I accept that any minor differences will get smoothed out with the grade boundary movement and what shouldn’t be allowed to happen is a “race to the bottom”.
  • The matter of the SAMs was discussed and the fact that here we are with 4 weeks left of term and still no materials.
  • I was told that overall the minister is assured and whilst it would have been preferable for us not to be at this point, there is a “big silver lining” in that we now know more about the new GCSE. “Clearly we were not supposed to have had this issue” but overall we are confident.
  • At this point I said that effectively once again the government are relying on the goodwill of teachers to deliver and that this needed to be recognised and it flies in the face of the workload challenge, especially given the shortage lots of schools are facing.

It was a productive call but don’t expect a deferral!

Whilst I had his attention I took advantage (cheeky! I know!) to discuss the latest “good pass” thing and I wanted to clarify that there is an awareness of the impact of those students that today would pass. I wrote about it here FIFTY SHADES OF PASS … least of which is the “resit” requirement and the link to funding post-16. Huw seemed to think that there was a conditional, transitional two year period for post 16 resits whereby a 4 will be enough not to require a resit in year 12 and promised to get confirmation to me. Nothing yet but I have sent a reminder!

At one point during the conversation I said words to the effect that “I just hope that you can see how passionate I am about this subject” and Huw agreed that it was obvious. I just get frustrated that no one seems to see the effect this is having on teachers and will have, on a whole generation of students.

Finally we confirmed that I would now get a written response to my letter and the points made in it. Watch this space … it’s not over yet!

In other news I’ve had my freedom of information request stuff from Ofqual back (I wrote about here … SUBJECT ASSOCIATIONS ). Amongst other letters, it includes an interesting letter from the JMC (Joint Maths Council) but before I publish it I want to tell them, as a matter of courtesy that I am publishing it either in its entirety or extracts from it. The reason for this is that the JMC don’t seem keen on making their views known – maybe they think they can influence things better by doing it quietly behind the scenes. In my opinion, those days are gone! The proliferation of social media and the power of the media mean that we need to embrace those and shout from the hilltops and rightly so in my opinion!