How can we develop a robust school system to facilitate our understanding of progression of students' mathematical understanding, and what key milestones or learning outcomes are outlined to ensure a comprehensive and developmental mathematical education during a pupils' primary school journey?

 

Enquiry design and methodology 500

We have designed our enquiry so that we can learn more about successful mathematics curricular and arrangements for progression and assessment to support our curriculum planning. We are interested in learning more about arrangements for pupil progress around the world. In order to do this, we have started by investigating different philosophies in relation to pupil progress and we have investigated how curricular differ in objectives.  We are going to design our enquiry so that we obtain the views of both pupils and staff. We feel that this is of paramount importance. Ultimately, when we collect pupil progress data we have two aims. First of all, we would like to know how pupils are progressing against a set of objectives. How we set these standards and objectives will become a key question. Second, we would like to know what it is that pupils are finding difficult to understand. We are going to place greater emphasis on this second point as the learner is at the heart of curriculum for Wales and our core aspiration is to support pupils to make excellent progress from their starting points.

 

Methodology

We are going to develop an assessment which informs teachers of pupils’ progress. In order to do this, we are going to consider several different assessment and progression models. We are particularly interested in learning more about if there are ‘key mile stones’ at specific ages that we need to recognise. It has been interesting to listen to debates in England where standards have been almost pushed up by one-year group in order to raise aspirations. This has not happened in Wales but PISA results suggest that this has had an impact. 

 In order for us to learn more about the progression of children at Johnston, we are going to use a range of methods.

1.            Pupil voice questionnaire. We feel that it is important to take pupil views into account. We do not want to introduce any assessments that make children feel anxious or cause them to develop a dislike of mathematics.

2.            We are going to use a standardised assessment. We use the Welsh Government Assessments each year as they provide us with a baseline to pupil progress.

3.            We are going to introduce our own system of assessment, a hybrid between teacher assessment and standardised scores which will allow us to judge the progress of our pupils.

4.            Staff reflections. We are going to develop a system to take into account teachers’ views. Ultimately it is important that any systems we develop support staff to improve their teaching and identify gaps in pupils’ knowledge. Therefore, we would like to hear how supportive teachers feel systems are and ensure that they are not too onerous in terms of workload.

 

 

Emerging findings 600

 

During our discussions during staff meetings, one thing became very apparent. The new mathematics curriculum is anything but clear. In the new curriculum descriptions of learning are organised into progression steps. In variably, more experienced teachers are able to break these down, thinking about how best to support pupils to develop a deep understanding. As a relatively large schools we have teachers with a large progression in teaching experience. NQTs and those at the beginning of their career found the descriptions of learning much more difficult to break down and they found some impossible to understand. Although we aimed to give these members of staff some support, in a very busy school environment this is always difficult. Interestingly, one thing that sets our school apart from some others is are very close cluster working. When we started to talk to other schools about how they were approaching the new mathematics curriculum nearly all of the seven schools had move towards using a scheme which was written for the English Curriculum.

We encountered further difficulties when we started to approach our regional support for advice. They provided training and advice linked to the four purposes and the five proficiencies but this training was presented at a very abstract and theoretical level. Whilst, as a staff, we agreed with almost everything that was discussed, we didn’t leave any training feeling that we had gained an understanding of how to improve our maths teaching. Based upon the journey that we had developed in recent years, we had already done a great deal to teach fluency, strategic competence and the other proficiencies. 

Considering all of the literature that we had read, the school visits that we had made and the training that we had experienced we decided that we needed to use the guidance to develop a bespoke maths curriculum. In order to do this, we set about creating a scheme of work which we felt would best serve the needs of our pupils.

1.            Curriculum mapping. The reality is that teachers are time poor and we need them to be able to focus on delivering excellent lessons using a mastery approach. Spending hours mapping skills and trying to work out what to teach does not serve this purpose. Therefore, we decided to create a scheme of work for our teachers. It does not tell them how to teach, as this is the key teacher agency that needs to be well developed. Instead, we created a one week per unit plan, which sets out the what matters statements, the description of learning as well as the old LNF. We have used principles of retrieval practice to inform this because we feel that this helps us to ensure that pupils are making good progress. Key units repeat throughout the year so that teachers can build pupil skills. This allows teachers to know what they are teaching each week.

2.            To support our curriculum mapping, we also decided to create a system of progression and assessment. We did this by looking in detail at the descriptions of learning, and creating a question for each year group to check pupils’ understanding. To accompany this, we designed a spreadsheet which allows us to input pupil data and then generate a report showing us key areas of weakness and key areas of strength. We used staff input to inform this design as we decided that we would like to administer the evidence gathering progression work four times per year.

 

 

Limitations 150

So far, we have not encountered a great deal of limitations in the work that we have done. Staff feedback and professional reflections have been an important part of our enquiry. Staff feel that the curriculum mapping that we have undertaken has been very helpful as it has allowed them to pend PPA time focusing on what is important (teaching and learning) rather than trying to open several documents and understand what they need to teach.

For me, in my reflections as a leader the biggest limitation to our work is the cluster buy in. Guidance clearly states that curriculum should be developed a cluster but in reality unless you are a 3-16 school this is very difficult to achieve. When we have tried to pull things together, nearly all schools have already travelled a long way towards creating their own curriculum and therefore they are unwilling or unable to commit to creating a curriculum or progression arrangement which aligns with another school. For me, this is very limiting as it means that our feeder secondary school will not receive consistent information on pupils.

 

 

Key recommendations 300

A key area that we feel that we have found success in has been creating an assessment that supports pupils. There is a lot of stigma around assessment and progression arrangements that place a lot of pressure of pupils and build anxiety. Therefore, we wanted to develop a system which was more sophisticated in its design. Instead of administering the test in a traditional way LSA take a small group (around six) pupils and they ask pupils questions which they then show the answer to on a whiteboard. We do not tell pupils that they are taking an assessment and support staff provide encouragement to pupils rather than telling them if they are correct or incorrect. We have also advised support staff to use their discretion based upon how difficult pupils are finding the work. For example, if they are finding it very difficult then support staff skip questions rather than making pupils feel that they are failing.

Pupil voice, staff feedback and lesson observations have shown that this model is very supportive. It reduces staff workload as they are administering assessment as part of their weekly carousel whilst also providing detailed and useful data. Pupils like them because they do not feel under pressure and they are able to complete the with the support of an LSA. We use the same system from Early Year to Year Six. Of course, one limitation might me the judgement/quality of the questions. We have found that we need to continually refine as in some year groups our questions were clearly far too difficult whilst in other they were too easy.

 

Ethical Considerations 150

•             We have endeavoured to ensure that no pupil are disadvantaged in any way by our new curriculum and assessment arrangements.

•             Another key part of this has been ensure that we do not raise pupil anxieties.

•             Ensuring that we are providing a broad and balanced mathematics curriculum.

 

Literature Review 350

As the recent IFS (2024) highlights that unclear guidance has led to a decline in standards: 

PISA scores declined by more in Wales than in most other countries in 2022, with scores declining by about 20 points (equivalent to about 20% of a standard deviation, which is a big decline). This brought scores in Wales to their lowest ever level, significantly below the average across OECD countries and significantly below those seen across the rest of the UK. Scotland and Northern Ireland also saw declines in PISA scores in 2022, whilst scores were relatively stable in England.

https://ifs.org.uk/publications/major-challenges-education-wales

Sinem Hizli-Alkan, Traversing between Supra, Macro, and Meso Sites, Scottish Educational Review, 10.1163/27730840-54010007, 54, 1, (70-92), (2022).

In this article, it is noted that maths should be left to be maths. Marie Joubert visited many classrooms in Wales and she notes how the four purposes and created a confusing, unclear curriculum.

Lyakhova, S., Joubert, M., Capraro, M. M., & Capraro, R. M. (2019). Designing a curriculum based on four purposes: let mathematics speak for itself. Journal of Curriculum Studies, 51(4), 513–529. https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2019.1594389