The National Audit Office (NAO) yesterday released a damning report on the state of primary school leavers’ maths ability (which we will cover in more detail tomorrow).Â
An interesting note in the report suggests that family maths classes will help students.
The report, which examined maths teaching in 28 schools, suggested that one way to help to close these gaps and improve the effectiveness of maths teaching, would be to involve parents more.
Examples of good practice include family learning events ranging from informal coffee mornings to parental classes on the curriculum.
In this respect, we can feel vindicated that Maths-Whizz methods chime with the NAO researchers’ findings. Parental engagement with students’ maths is a cornerstone of the Maths-Whizz Tutoring programme.
With Maths-Whizz, progress and performance reports are available online at any time. We always encourage new subscribers to login to their account pages to see how their children are doing. Crucially, we also want parents to talk to their students about maths. After all, as Sarah Ebner, a Times Online journo and blogger, suggests, it is almost as useful for parents to know how their children are learning maths as it is for the children themselves.
If we want to shed our national image of blissful mathematical ignorance, it seems we’ll have to teach the kids and their parents. I don’t doubt there are thousands of ten-year-olds who would willingly give away a fortune in sweets to see their parents mugging up on their maths.
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