Compulsory Maths till you’re 18.

Callistemon21

growstuff

Mamie

There is no doubt growstuff that we all forget things we don't use. I meet plenty of people who tell me that they did French at school and can't remember a word of it.

Exactly! All learning needs to be revisited.

But if they never go to France or have no intention of ever going, it's unnecessary.
Other languages are more important now imo.

Maths, or at least arithmetic to a certain level, is essential to everyday life.
Whether or not anyone who hasn't learnt enough to cope with day-to-day life by the time they are 16 will learn enough by 18 is a moot point. If not, then will continuing Maths education until the age of 18 be of any use at all?

I'm not making any claims for the importance of learning French.

perhaps he is trying to distract us??

Nooooooooooooo! As if ...

growstuff

Mamie

There is no doubt growstuff that we all forget things we don't use. I meet plenty of people who tell me that they did French at school and can't remember a word of it.

Exactly! All learning needs to be revisited.

But if they never go to France or have no intention of ever going, it's unnecessary.
Other languages are more important now imo.

Maths, or at least arithmetic to a certain level, is essential to everyday life.
Whether or not anyone who hasn't learnt enough to cope with day-to-day life by the time they are 16 will learn enough by 18 is a moot point. If not, then will continuing Maths education until the age of 18 be of any use at all?

I actually did learn maths until I was 18 because I did A level General Studies, which in those days included a compulsory maths element. The questions were nothing like O level. From memory, they were things like "How many tins of paint do you need, if you want to paint a room with dimensions of x and y and the tin says the coverage is z metres square per litre?" or working out compound interest rates.

Mamie

There is no doubt growstuff that we all forget things we don't use. I meet plenty of people who tell me that they did French at school and can't remember a word of it.

Exactly! All learning needs to be revisited.

Mollygo

Growstuff I’m not disagreeing that some children come out of school-primary or secondary without sufficient maths skills, but other than revisiting and extending areas of maths again and again, as happens now, how would you ensure all children leave with sufficient basic skills and what do you class as basic skills^?
In your experience as an MFL teacher, how did you ensure all your students left school being able to use the MFL you taught?

I didn't because MFL GCSE wasn't compulsory.

Ridiculous. I agree everyone should do maths to GCSE, but I can see no point in everyone studying it until 18, what is he trying to achieve. You would think he had enough other things to sort out - perhaps he is trying to distract us??

Iam64

Maths to age 18, compulsory?
I’d have left and never returned to higher Ed if that had been the case for me.
We don’t teach maths well. Imagine the stress of always finding it difficult, then being told if yiu want to A level English/history/drama/art you’ve to add maths . No

I doubt most people will be expected to do A-level Maths.

Maths to age 18, compulsory?
I’d have left and never returned to higher Ed if that had been the case for me.
We don’t teach maths well. Imagine the stress of always finding it difficult, then being told if yiu want to A level English/history/drama/art you’ve to add maths . No

Growstuff I’m not disagreeing that some children come out of school-primary or secondary without sufficient maths skills, but other than revisiting and extending areas of maths again and again, as happens now, how would you ensure all children leave with sufficient basic skills and what do you class as basic skills^?
In your experience as an MFL teacher, how did you ensure all your students left school being able to use the MFL you taught?

There is no doubt growstuff that we all forget things we don't use. I meet plenty of people who tell me that they did French at school and can't remember a word of it.

growstuff

Mamie

Exactly Mollygo. I quite agree.
These are the programmes of study up to age 11. (Date is 2013 so would be grateful if there are updates that don't appear on the site. )

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/335158/PRIMARY_national_curriculum_-_Mathematics_220714.pdf

But a Programme of Study doesn't mean that pupils have understood everything.

Agreed, but that is why you have systems for assessment.

It would be a nightmare! Like Fanny, I’d refuse.

Luckily, I could get into university to read English without maths O level provided I had Latin, which I did. Maths would have been a total waste of time for me, and for the teacher.

Mamie

Exactly Mollygo. I quite agree.
These are the programmes of study up to age 11. (Date is 2013 so would be grateful if there are updates that don't appear on the site. )

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/335158/PRIMARY_national_curriculum_-_Mathematics_220714.pdf

But a Programme of Study doesn't mean that pupils have understood everything.

Mollygo I'm not an expert in designing schemes for maths, but I do know that skills need constant recycling. I saw from my own children how topics were sometimes visited, assumed to be learnt and then the whole class moved on.

I also saw from my own experience as a secondary MFL teacher how many Year 7 pupils couldn't tell the time or understand a train timetable. When it came to teaching numbers in a foreign language, we would sometimes give pupils simple arithmetic puzzles to practise the new vocabulary and there were always some pupils who couldn't do very basic addition, subtraction or sequencing, despite (in some cases) achieving reasonable SATs results.

Agree with your post of 11.33 that is!

Exactly Mollygo. I quite agree.
These are the programmes of study up to age 11. (Date is 2013 so would be grateful if there are updates that don't appear on the site. )

assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/335158/PRIMARY_national_curriculum_-_Mathematics_220714.pdf

growstuff

I guess pupils could learn to count in Roman numerals.

Heaven forbid! That would count as a fun activity. We already do that when the theme is Romans.

I guess pupils could learn to count in Roman numerals.

Horse to water?
Provision is made, far more than when I was at primary school where we had A, B and C streams and the D stream who “weren’t expected to achieve much”.

Primary maths is at least an hour a day. Any more than that and accusations of narrowing the curriculum are levelled at teachers. Interventions and support are provided for pupils who struggle. Far more focus is put on children, understanding the basic arithmetic they are doing, where we just learnt to do it.

What do you consider to be basic maths that all children should be able to do at the end of primary or secondary education?
What strategy do you think would ensure that no pupils leave school without those skills?

MayBee70

I suppose it makes more sense than Boris Johnson’s idea that everyone should learn Latin…( does Sunak realise that some people leave school at 16?)

They don't - not in England, anyway. They might leave school, but they have to stay in education of some sort until 18.

Baggs

growstuff

So why do so many people (including some on GN) misunderstand averages?

PS. It's a bit of an obsession of mine!

Because they are fairly abstract ideas and because there's 'average' and 'mean' and people get confused.

Many people also don't understand, for example, that if you quote a figure for a nation's average annual income, what it means is that most people earn less than that.

It's still a useful measure though.

Well, people shouldn't get confused. There are three different "averages" (mean, mode, median) and it's important that people understand what is meant.

You're right that some people don't understand that half of people receive less than the median income and there's rarely any indication how low the "tail" of the distribution goes. That's the kind of thing I mean. The average quoted is usually the mean, which is almost always higher than the median.

I suppose it makes more sense than Boris Johnson’s idea that everyone should learn Latin…( does Sunak realise that some people leave school at 16?)

Blossoming

Mollygo

Blossoming

I think basic literacy and numeracy should be taught to all. Appropriate provision should be made for pupils struggling with either.

In primary school, huge efforts are made to do exactly that. We have had training in using strategies to address dyslexia and dyscalculia. Strategies which
address the needs of pupils with either but are useful for all pupils.
I’d love to know what GNs class as basic maths and basic literacy.
Would we have total agreement or would each Gransnetter have their own views about what constitutes basic?

Yet many pupils leave school without those skills. So it appears that there isn’t appropriate provision.

What happens is that a topic is "taught" and it's assumed it's been "learnt" and the appropriate box (done that) gets ticked. All learning needs to be reinforced, if it's to be retained and it's naive to think that all pupils will have understood something just because it's been taught.

FannyCornforth

Yes, vegansrock, I’d forgotten about that.
At my last secondary school, it was the job of the Business Studies lot

I’m a business studies teacher and absolutely rubbish at maths!! Did teach English at Level 2 though.