It’s the start of another new half term tomorrow and having just arrived back from Hong Kong and China I’m not quite sure what time of the day it is but am raring to go feeling chilled out and very relaxed. I’ve come to the conclusion that my “to-do” list will always be “chocker-block” and that I shouldn’t stress about it … I’m also very aware that by close of play on Monday (probably by 9:10 am if I’m honest!) this laissez-faire attitude will be gone and I’ll be climbing the walls again!.

I wrote the below a few weeks ago and I’d better start ticking stuff off this list and actually publish it – I’ve got so much to tell you – the last 2 weeks have been hectic and loads has happened but one thing at a time!! I‘ve just noted that I haven’t blogged for 2 weeks!! MY BIGGEST GAP EVER!!! There are reasons which will become obvious in time .. bear with me.

I wrote about numeracy across the curriculum a couple of years ago in THIS POST and mentioned the numeracy and literacy leaders idea that was introduced at our previous school. As whole school initiatives this kind of thing has seen lots of people getting responsibility for them within schools – we’re no different and Kayleigh joined us back in January with numeracy across the school as part of her role – she’s settled in now and is really “rocking and rolling”.

During last year Seager did an audit of the use of maths within other subjects so that we could gauge what topics we could ensure our “Numeracy leaders” (more about them below) were au-fait with – it was a starting point! The Numeracy Audit Spreadsheet he asked each head of subject to complete was something he “magpied” a few years ago (if it was you he got it from please let me know so that I can credit your work here).

The vision is to have student “numeracy leaders” to support teachers in every lesson whenever a topic requires the use of maths. In the ideal world – wouldn’t it be lovely to be one step ahead of the game, so that when say, Science were drawing scatter graphs with year 8 they could be confident that students knew how to draw them .. instead of the “Jeese! They don’t even know how to draw an axes .. what are you teaching them in maths?” that I am sure takes place up and down the country. This is where we would like to get to … working with other subjects to make sure the students have the skills required so that they can just teach them their own subject.

We know that in reality, trying to get a numeracy leader in EVERY LESSON is a big ask but you have to start somewhere. Stage 1 for us was finding students across each year group – we did it in stages over the last few months – doing it a year group at a time. The students invited to become “numeracy leaders” were not necessarily the highest attaining students in the year group but students that we knew would be, first and foremost, comfortable helping other students grasp the maths at the level they required in other subjects. This involved each maths teacher suggesting students from their groups (so we could provide the coverage across the whole ability/attainment spectrum) that had the qualities we were looking for. The big job then was checking that there was at least one of them in most lessons – in some cases we were asked for more nominations to ensure this could happen.

Stage 2 involved speaking to the students and asking them to take on the role and in most cases we judged the characters of the students right and they have been happy to do this. Each of them have been given a lovely metal pin badge and the obligatory photos have been taken too! The badges are cheap but brilliant (have I mentioned how tight Seager is? He probably spent weeks sourcing them at the best price!)

I have seen this support in action with one of my groups where another student took it upon herself to help another student who was struggling whilst I was helping someone else and I have to say I was VERY IMPRESSED! So impressed that when I had to do lots of “proper” lesson plans recently I didn’t begrudge writing this bit of information down one little bit … in fact, having this information on SIMS as a “flag” against the students for me as a teacher too means that I have been making good use of them in all my lessons where I can.

Ongoing I see these becoming useful resources for other teachers, but most importantly I have seen the students flourish. For a couple of them the fact that they can verbalise to another student a mathematical idea or concept has helped them deepen their understanding too.

Phil McBride talks about how his school has adapted the idea IN THIS POST  and if you are interested in taking this further for your students you may want to check out the Maths Leaders awards through Sports Leaders

If you are interested in ordering badges the details are below:

Fax: 0845 299 1611

Email: sales@badgecreation.co.uk

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