Admittedly, not the most exciting post title you’ve ever seen, but let me draw you in with what I found out:
- The greatest proportion of maths expectations we need to improve on at my school come from the Year 1 programme of study.
- Two of the key questions that we need to get better at are taught through the KS2 computing curriculum, and not the maths curriculum.
- At my school we are really good at teaching calculating and number, but we need to improve at teaching problem solving.
- Neat, well presented work does not equate to success in maths SATs.
So, I used a useful spreadsheet I found on the TES website to analyse the maths SATs results from 2014 (you’ll need a TES login to access that link). I was particularly concerned about the 6 children who didn’t make 2 levels of progress during Key Stage 2. Six out of thirty is a large percentage for us: it moved us down from well into the top of the half the country (in terms of progress measures) to well into the bottom half. While there was a back story (read: justification) behind each child, I wanted to look more carefully at the results each child had achieved and find out why they hadn’t quite made the grade.
Having analysed the data, I made a presentation for my staff so we could talk through the issues involved. Why not just talk it through with the Key Stage 2 department? Well as I’ve indicated above, many of the statements where we need to get better at are actually taught from Year 1 or 2. I’ve put this presentation into a Movenote here. Please feel free to watch, but don’t expect quality – I was using Movenote to practice my presentation for the staff meeting on Wednesday – it’s a first take, and I’ll be expanding on many of the points during the actual staff meeting.
My two big considerations are the following:
- My children need to get better at logical reasoning to achieve well in maths. Logical reasoning is most explicitly described in the computing curriculum – how can I use the computing curriculum to raise standards in maths?
- With the foundation for success clearly coming from the teaching in Year 1 and 2, how can I make sure that this teaching is as good as it can be?
It will be interesting to see if my staff agree with me on Wednesday.