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 just 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. It’s already potentially difficult for students to develop certain new skills – but if they don’t even have the core skills they’re built on they have almost no chance. 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 – they’re trying to learn a new skill but don’t have the fundamental skills for it – so they’re trying to learn those skills at the same time. 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
Maths is a skill and like all skills gets built up in stages – students learn skill 1 and later use it as the basis for skill 2. Trying to move on and learn new skills without having the foundation is, clearly, not going to work. In that situation – which I see on an almost daily basis – students are understandably overwhelmed and often just give up. How does this situation come about? Often, it’s because 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 (in fact, they’re arguably the key to success for the entire course) so it’s crucial that students develop them and are confident in using them. But time and again students 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. There are opportunities in all courses to move on quickly (i.e. small, less demanding or important topics) and there are topics and techniques that 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
When I first started tutoring I assumed the prelims would be, at least to some extent, standardised. It turns out nothing could be further from the truth – there’s almost nothing in common between the prelims offered in different schools; the approach to the prelims, the content, and the dates vary wildly. Having seen many hundreds of students be subjected to the prelims it’s my opinion that, in their current form, the prelims 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 lack of standardization is not, in itself, necessarily an issue – it would be impossible to get students in every school to the same stage and familiar with the same topics to standardise the prelims. Some students start their courses – especially National 5 Maths – in the previous year and, in some cases, actually complete the entire course by prelim time. The problem, rather, is the content on the prelims (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. I can’t tell you how many students, even good students, I’ve seen fall victim to excessively demanding prelims; it seems that the approach is to ‘shock’ students into working harder for the final exam but I can confidently say that this never happens – most teenagers (who generally don’t have enough life experience to have a lot of resilience) will simply give up if they make a low score. They’ll 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 sad thing is that in the 12 years that I’ve tutored I’ve seen the same fallout from the prelims every year – and despite the fact that there is clearly an issue with them (and the many many complaints from students and parents) the same approach is taken every year – ‘keep doing the same things keep getting the same results’ comes to mind. 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. Some schools in Moray did move their prelims to before the Christmas holidays in recent years – but instead of having them, say, early-to-mid December they ran them at the end of November or early December – and didn’t give them prep time in class – how do you think those students got on?! How about instead 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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