Seven years ago the Press & Journal interviewed me because of my concerns about the Maths attainment levels in Moray. Since then the educational landscape has had a massive jolt because of the pandemic – potentially an opportunity to reboot things. Moray came last in the latest national attainment tables (for overall performance not Maths) suggesting that the opportunity to initiate such a reboot may not have been taken. I’ve worked as a full time private Maths tutor for the last 12 years and typically work with 50 – 60 students each year on a 1-1 basis and many more in group sessions. This article is a summary of my observations and thoughts about the current Maths performance in schools in Moray focusing on the following issues / opportunities:
No Standardization of Learning Materials
No Standardization of the Curriculum
Students Are Given a Free Pass
Prelims Are a Missed Opportunity
The Pandemic Highlighted the Disorganization
There are two things I want to be clear on up front. First and foremost this is most certainly not intended as a criticism of any school or teacher – I have a huge amount of respect for (most) teachers and often consider the challenges they must (increasingly) face in the classroom and in a world which is rapidly changing. It’s absolutely not a job I’d want and I admire them for taking it on. That said if I observe poor performance or disorganization I’m going to call it out – I’ve seen some (many) truly bizarre things over the last 12 years. Secondly, I only work with secondary school students from S4 and above so my observations are directed at that group. Interestingly, in the Press & Journal article from 2019, Moray Council responded by mentioning ‘numeracy’ attainment levels. Maths isn’t numeracy – in fact, it could be argued that numeracy (i.e. counting – which, just to say now, is appalling in the current generation of high school students, many of whom simply cannot count) should be taught as a separate ‘life-skill’ discipline out-with Maths; as it used to be when it was called ‘arithmetic.’ The fact that the councils own comment conflated those two skill-sets is telling.
No Standardization of Learning Materials
When I first started tutoring I assumed (naively it turns out!) that all schools within a local authority – or even nationally perhaps – would use the same standardized materials. I was actually quite shocked to see that was not the case – and is still not the case 12 years later. The range of quality of materials is staggering and the fact that each school, teacher, class is using different materials speaks to disorganization, a lack of consistency and a lack of leadership – frankly, it looks amateurish. Some school have pre-prepared materials for students, some don’t. Those that do use different materials. Some have good online resources and some don’t. Some give paper copies of homework exercises and materials, some don’t (the amount of printed material is scandalous). Different schools use different textbooks. The duplication of effort (so common in the public sector) is enormous. It’s difficult to imagine the best educational systems in the world not using standardised materials.
No Standardization of the Curriculum
Worse than the lack of standardization of materials is the lack of standard approach to the curriculum. I’ve told many parents over the years that their child is being subjected to a version of the curriculum that is not only not optimized but is, in some cases, hugely detrimental to their learning. Maths is a set of skills and like any skills needs to be build up in a logical order; primarily it’s vital that students have the core skills in place to learn a new skill – but, I constantly see students for whom this is not the case. Imagine asking a student to write an essay before they’d developed skills of spelling, grammar or punction – that’s what it’s often like in Maths. This issue occurs in several schools but by far the worst – and, yes I’m going to call it out – is Elgin High School. For National 5 Maths in particular they’ve decided to essentially teach the three units of the course in the order 1, 3, then 2. How this came about I don’t know but it’s been the approach for at least the 12 years in which I’ve tutored and it never fails to stagger me. Teaching the course in this way means that students are trying to learn topics that they don’t have the fundamental skills for. To take one example, consider equations. Equations are without doubt the key skill that needs to be developed in National 5 Maths – on the final exam something like 35% of the questions will contain an equation in some form. Personally I’d teach equations at the very start of the course so that those skills are deeply embedded for later topics. Switching the order means that students try to learn multiple topics that require equation-solving skills without having properly learnt them. Time after time I’ve seen students completely lost because of this and the result is that they get overwhelmed and give up – and I don’t blame them. When I point this out to parents they generally seem sceptical or don’t recognize the significance – but it means that their child is already massively on the back foot.
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Students are Given a Free Pass
Too often students are given a free pass i.e. they haven’t truly developed a skill but are allowed to move on. This happens, in particular, in National 5 Maths where students generally start the course by developing core algebra skills such as expanding brackets, simplifying and factorising; these skills form the basis of many topics later in the course so it’s crucial that students are confident in using them. But time and again they don’t truly develop these skills – they get a superficial understanding of them (often failing assessments) and move on. It’s essentially setting them up to fail. Often it seems to come about because classes move on too fast but some topics and techniques just have to be lingered on. What’s the point in having on-going assessments if, when students fail them, they just carry on? It’s hard to believe but there are only a couple of teachers in the region who seem to recognise the importance of this and, if their students perform poorly on an assessment, will make them retake it – several times if necessary; if you instinctively think this is harsh it goes to show how low standards have been normalised because it’s actually just effective teaching. The ultimate example I’ve seen of the ‘free pass’ – one that I still find difficult to believe – is students making a ‘D’ in National 5 Maths and being allowed to progress to Higher. It used to be the case that students had to make an ‘A’ or strong ‘B’ at National 5 to be allowed to progress to Higher; it won’t surprise you to learn that such students did not do well in Higher Maths!
Prelims Are a Missed Opportunity
Having seen many hundreds of students be subjected to the prelims it’s my opinion that, in their current form, they are a complete waste of time. In many cases, most cases in fact, they simply undermine student confidence, cause a halt in momentum, and all too often result in students essentially giving up. Even if students ‘survive’ the prelims and are allowed to progress to the final exams their prelim score (which is generally well below their ability) often plays on their mind and they fail to rise above it. So, what are the issues with the prelims? The problems with the prelims are the content (I can only comment on Maths, not other subjects) and the timing / approach. Prelims are, in my opinion, just too difficult. It’s not that students should be given an unrealistic assessment but, at that point in the year, they just don’t have enough experience to be able to answer a wide enough range of questions. Success in Maths takes technical ability, of course, but it also takes experience – significant experience. If I was setting a prelim I’m throttle it back by 10% or so – take out the majority of ‘problem-solving’ questions for example – to give students an opportunity to make an ‘encouraging’ score – even if it’s still below their ultimate ability. It seems that the current approach is to ‘shock’ students into working harder for the final exam but I can confidently say that this never happens – most teenagers will simply give up if they make a low score, accept that this is the limit of their ability and normalise it. Would it not be far more helpful to have students make a higher prelim score – even if the assessment is ‘straight-forward’ – which then encourages them to keep going for the final exam? The second issue with the prelims is the timing. The standard approach to the prelims (in Moray at least) until recently has been to have them just after the Christmas holidays (often with a couple of days of returning to school) – the idea being that students will use their break to study. Of course, that idea is completely ridiculous in most cases – students are simply not going to spend much (or any) of their time off studying. Instead, what tends to happen is that just before they go back to school they realise they need to get their heads down – but then they may have 5, 6 or more prelims over the course of the next week or so to prepare for and they just run out of time. Even well intentioned students fall victim to this and simply get caught out. In recent years schools in Moray have tried variations with the prelims – some give study leave, some don’t; some give time off on the day or the day before, some don’t; some give their students prep time in class, some don’t. Students from different schools are taking prelims under completely different conditions – clearly not all of these approaches can be optimal. So, what’s a possible solution? The approach they take in Highland strikes me as sensible. In many schools the National 5 students take their prelims in December before they go on holiday and the Higher students generally take their prelims after the holidays but they start a couple of weeks after returning to school – so, in both cases, students don’t have to spend their holidays studying. How about just taking a week in class to review some of the key techniques and question types and then have students take their prelim? Genius! Again, it’s setting students up to fail to not give them suitable prep time – and is, frankly, just weird. The prelims don’t need to be standardised they need to be reframed as an opportunity and not the burden / tick-box exercise they seem to be at the moment.
The Pandemic Highlighted the Disorganization
Long before the pandemic hit education was changing. In particular the proliferation of new technologies allowed options that simply were not previously possible – or imaginable. Systems had already sprung up that allowed students to access online learning content, for teachers to share and collect documents (homework exercises for example) and even systems where students could do their working online. In many countries – and in some parts of this country – these systems were already in use well before the pandemic. It was fairly clear that these new technologies were going to play a central role in the future of education. Governments and local authorities should have been well down the road of investing in them when the pandemic started. But many were not and when the pandemic hit they floundered – badly. The range of quality of what schools offered at this time was staggering. Many offered nothing – they had nothing to offer, nothing in place, leaving students frustrated and often disengaged. Fast-forward to the present and there is still a wide spectrum of how these (potentially helpful) technologies are being utilised. That aside it strikes me that the lack of future-proofing that was evident during the pandemic may still be evident today – there doesn’t seem to be a coherent strategy (locally or nationally) as to the resources the schools will use going forward; the curriculums are being modernised but the provision of appropriate (and useful) learning materials needs to be considered also. After the pandemic there appeared online some nationally produced Maths instructional videos. They were nicely produced and I assumed they’d continue to make a whole series – but they just stopped, weird. There was a sudden push to use the ‘Glow’ system and a range of learner resources were going to be available there . . . and then it seemed to slip off radar. Now there’s just a hodge-podge of random materials used by different schools – some probably breaching copyright and many pointing their students to commercial websites. It just shows a lack of leadership, direction and ambition.
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Where Do We Go From Here?
Some of my observations in this post are, clearly, not easily addressed – I don’t, for example, expect there to be a nationally created set of standard learning materials any time soon (although, why not?!). However, there are things which are within the influence of the local authority and schools. Firstly, take a consistent approach which speaks to coherence, organization and oversight. Secondly, stop giving students a free pass – it’s just setting them up to fail and not doing anyone any good. If students are not demonstrating skill and competence in a topic or technique they need more practice. Individual schools and teachers cannot force students to do additional study or practice (parents have a significant role to play here also!) but they can, at least, encourage their students and give them resources. I know some do already but many don’t – they just move on and brush things under the carpet. Thirdly, standardise, as far as possible, the prelims. I get that different classes and students will inevitably be at different stages when they take the prelim – and, therefore, may require different prelim papers. But, they can be standardized in two ways – 1) see them as an opportunity to help students develop not as a burden 2) give students the best chance of success by setting the questions at a reasonable level and giving students a suitable opportunity to prepare. Of course, the ultimate responsibility for learning lies with the student – and, frankly, many just don’t do the work. But many don’t do the work because of the conditions they face – a bit of encouragement, a good set of resources and a coherent strategy could go a long way. To make an improvement in anything requires an acknowledgement that there’s room for improvement – that takes humility – perhaps that’s a good place to start . . .