A conversation on twitter got me thinking about the hours of teaching that the new GCSE is getting across the UK and possibly offer a “golden nugget” of an idea if you’ve struggled to get any extra time. I’ve hunted down the original speech by Gove back in 2013 ( Here’s the speech ) when he said:
“The new mathematics GCSE will be more demanding and we anticipate that schools will want to increase the time spent teaching mathematics. On average secondary schools in England spend only 116 hours per year teaching mathematics, which international studies show is far less time than that spent on this vital subject by our competitors. Just one extra lesson each week would put England closer to countries like Australia or Singapore who teach 143 and 138 hours a year of mathematics respectively. We announced on 14 October that mathematics, alongside English, will be double weighted in secondary school performance measures from 2016. This will also provide a strong incentive for schools to ensure that they are strengthening their mathematics provision.”
However, as we know Mr Gove is history in the world of education.
That point aside, there is no “official” guidance on the teaching hours required to deliver the new GCSE but there is something known as “guided learning hours (GLH)” and all GCSE’s have between 120-140 GLH. It must be noted that from what I can garner bears no relation to “learning time” and anyway this looks like it’s being superseded by something called “total qualification time” following a recent consultation carried out by Ofqual (closed 17th June 2015).
As you can imagine no one really wants to put their neck on the line and say outright that “you must have XX hours per week” and I know some schools have been less than forthcoming when it comes to giving extra time over to maths and it is an impossible job trying to find a balance with a jam-packed curriculum. Some HODs have tackled this with so many different approaches and based on my travels there is a definite geographical difference too – but lots have been able to secure extra time in key stage 3, key stage 4 or both. A tweet from AQA this morning gives us a snapshot of teaching time (not sure of the sample size or how many hours are given to the current GCSE, which would have made this even more useful) but the MA have a 60 second survey on their site (do take 1 minute to complete it HERE you then get to view the results) and it looks like there is a definite shift upwards in the time being given to Maths.
In the Edexcel “Getting Started Guide” (which is a fab document by the way! and can be found LINK HERE ) they recommend an extra hour a week of teaching time to “adequately cover the increased content, to embed skills such as reasoning and problem solving into your teaching”. They collected information from a range of different schools and in summary :
- Current GCSE was delivered in between 3 to 4 hours in years 10 and 11.
- Half of the teachers they spoke to said they’d need an extra 1 hour per week and a quarter said they’d need and extra 2 hours a week. Interestingly: “Schools on four hours and above mostly responded to say that they did not need additional hours to deliver the new GCSE”
If you are struggling to get the extra time one of the obvious things is to start teaching the GCSE in year 9 … I don’t get the idea that one key stage ends and another begins (never have understood it to be honest) and see secondary maths as a five year journey but that’s another story. There are some great 3 year schemes of work available to support this. That’s obvious though ….
To be fair we have 4 hours in every year group (I know!!) and now listen to this … one of the things that our gaffer introduced (so I am not taking the credit!!) last year was subject specific tutor groups in year 11 (I know some of you are doing this and others of you will have heard about other schools doing it … all I’m saying is that this worked for us!) Students were allocated to an initial “focus subject” tutor group with Maths/English taking priority and then as the year progressed there may have been changes to a different subject.
For us in maths we had two groups: one focusing on higher level topics and one that myself and Seager shared – strictly speaking he doesn’t have a tutor group but it was useful for us both to be involved so that I could do the “admin” side of the job and he could focus on the maths. Trust me when I say that 15-20 minutes a day over the year for some students will have made a massive difference. Doing maths was non-negotiable – students came in grabbed some paper and got down to working through the questions on the board … initially questions were based on topics that had been done in class the previous week providing much needed reinforcement and as the exams approached were past exam questions providing exam practice. It also means that we got to monitor the students we teach on a pastoral basis and got to touch base with them every day – a softer benefit is that these students were already in learning mode by 9:10 (when tutor period ends) and not just “waking up”.
Our maths student voice survey “thang” was undeniably positive about the impact that the students themselves thought this had on them and so this forthcoming year we’re repeating the same thing and students will be allocated to either an English or Maths group.
An absolute genius idea … so if you’re struggling for teaching time is there an opportunity for subject specific tutor groups in year 11?
