In a report which looks at the limited impact of the money spent on the Skills for Life programme, author Dame Mary Marsh points out that poor numeracy is somehow far less shameful than poor literacy – a sentiment echoed by NIACE Director of Operations Carol Taylor.

The parents who come to Maths-Whizz to give their children a boost in numeracy are the opposite of the bad maths ‘badge of honour’ wearers. They are the parents who recognise the importance of maths not just for passing exams but for the life that follows the school years.

Even so, we still sometimes see an attitude which may be behind the problem outlined by NIACE. I once spoke to a parent who told me she was an accountant, and used maths every day. “Bravo!”, I thought. The mother was certainly keen on her son improving his maths, but she was angered that he was required to do so much pencil and paper-style working out (roughly 10% of the Whizz curriculum at his age). This was because, to use her words, “he can just use a calculator”.

At this point I confess I wanted to throw the telephone across the room and go for a long walk. But hers is an all-too-common sentiment that maybe is at the heart of our ‘problem’: namely, that whilst maths is A Good Thing To Know, we don’t really need to know it.

This attitude may be less a function of maths per se, and more a function of an advancing technical society. Maths skills are no less in demand than they were, and sectors like software, finance, research and business require good maths; but almost all of us can rub along with the very basics.

In fact, the NIACE report points out that only one in 10 adults with numeracy skills lower than an 11-year-old had taken a numeracy course. I don’t find this remotely surprising, because the maths required of a 10-year-old is often adequate for adult life.

The Whizz curriculum, which is based on the Primary National Strategy for Maths, teaches ratio, percentages, basic statistics, coordinate geometry, relatively tricky mental maths, and long division (amongst other subjects) to its maths age 10 students.

If we could all do long division and understand the difference between mean, median, and mode we would be a damn sight better off than we are now. So I suspect NIACE is pointing at the wrong statistics. In my opinion it’s less about whether we’re better mathematicians than our year 5 students, and more about whether we truly understand, or use, our year 5 maths skills.

If we fail to spot the right change in a shop, or work out the best interest rates for our savings, or understand the health statistics associated with lifestyle changes we may end up considerably less healthy and wealthy, but we won’t attribute such mistakes to poor maths. Instead, we put this failure down to others’ lack of scruples.

Government and industry should work harder to convey numeric information better (such as medical test reports and mortgage documents) in an age in which we are bombarded with data. But the very quantity of such data has made us passive, trusting, recipients. Whether or not we have the maths skills of an 11-year-old is irrelevant if we don’t know when to use those skills.

To take our accountant’s son, he doesn’t need to know how long division works, only that he can put the numbers into a calculator in a particular order to get the right answer. And since calculators never fail, he’ll be fine. But, as any good software developer knows, GIGO – “Garbage In, Garbage Out”. In other words, even the best calculator in the world can’t give you the right answer if you type the numbers in the wrong order.

And this is why a technologically advanced society risks losing an appreciation of maths skills just as it risks losing an appreciation of basic engineering or science. Despite being surrounded by electronic appliances, and the fruits of centuries of scientific development, we really only need to know that such appliances work, and not why, or even how.

Sixty-odd years ago, CP Snow decried an equivalent embarrassment gap to the one described by Dame Mary. He compared being asked to name, say, a Shakespeare tragedy and the Laws of Thermodynamics. He was right that this was a massive imbalance of priorities, but wrong to focus on shame, because once you’ve established that the Laws of Thermodynamics explain how the refrigerator works, the conversation generally ends. Which is a pity, but we take the fridge on trust. We don’t do the same for Hamlet.

So, to cut a long blog post short – NIACE is right, and yet they might be fighting the wrong battle. If we bang on too much about whether we have the necessary maths skills we might not stop to wonder whether we’re actually using them.

It is in both these respects that BETT has chosen to shortlist us for their 2011 BETT Awards:

BETT Awards 2011

BETT, as any fule kno, is “the world’s largest technology in education show.” The awards fall on the first night of the four-day show. Any fan of ed. tech. who has been to the awards or the show in recent years will attest to the scale, snazziness, and the impressive number of Madonna-style headsets worn by shiny-faced presenters in front of tennis-court-sized interactive whiteboards.

In the time since Whizz started attending – first as guests, and for the last five years as stand-holders – we’ve seen the event get glossier and more corporate. We don’t yet have Madonna-style headsets (The God of Whizz wouldn’t be seen dead, etc.) but we always have interested packs of teachers, parents, and students stopping by, some just to say hi, and many more to find out what makes us tick.

This interest goes both ways, and that’s why we come every year. We love to find out what we’re doing right, and what we can improve on. So if you want to bend our ears about Maths-Whizz, or tell us what you love, or just put faces to names in the Whizz team, then make sure you’re at BETT 2011 at London’s Olympia, 12-15th January.

Who knows, we may even have a shiny award to show you!

You can read up about our 2010 BETT Show and our previous triumphant BETT Award showing.

UPDATE (22/10/10): Bett Awards official shortlist now available to view online.

The new government has pledged to reduce the UK’s deficit by £6bn in the short term, with further savings to follow. This amount is relatively trivial in relation to the size of the deficit, but seen by some as an important first step.

1.3% of that six billion will – according to today’s news – be Becta-shaped (page 3 in the PDF linked above). The Department for Children, Schools, and Families has already changed to the more Ronseal Department for Education.

We’re still figuring out exactly what the demise of Becta means for us at Whizz, but with the organisation’s (or ‘quango’s') remit to increase awareness and uptake of educational technology in state schools, there may be some negative effects.

Despite this, its our users and our staff who do the most work to spread the word about Maths-Whizz, and so the appearance or disappearance of government-funded bodies we hope will not affect our fortunes too greatly…

The £315m already allocated to the scheme would be disbursed amongst the local education authorities. Parents who felt their children were falling through the cracks, and not getting the needed additional help, would be able to appeal via the courts.

As the BBC reports, this system will build on the ‘making good progress’ pilots, which to date have involved:

…short, sharp bursts of intensive one-to-one tuition on top of normal schooling. Typically children have been signed up for 10 hours of personal tuition.

Classes could run either during or outside school hours, a DCSF spokeswoman said.

It would be immodest to suggest that Maths-Whizz is THE ANSWER TO ED BALLS’ PRAYERS, but it’s incumbent on us to point out that, with our online Tutoring Plus service Balls, Brown, et. al. might get a lot more bang for their buck, and achieve much the same improvement in struggling student maths scores, as if they employed breathing human tutors.

The terms of the tutoring boost sessions described above, including the fact that children would be able to learn in-school or out-, are a good fit with the Maths-Whizz method – which allows students to log on anywhere, anytime, for quick sessions on the maths tutor.

We hope Balls is listening…

The report’s chair, Edward Leigh, said:

It is disgraceful that over one fifth of all primary school children reach the end of their primary education without a secure grasp of basic mathematical skills.
This can have serious long-term consequences: for many then continue through secondary school without acquiring basic numeracy skills, impairing their chances in life and leaving them later in need of expensive remedial education.

It would seem that more primary school students need the preventive attentions of somewhat cheaper education services if the Commons Public Accounts Committee (PAC) report’s findings hold true. Edward Leigh points to the fact that early maths teaching is where it all begins, recognising what I think are the basic truths about maths teaching:
- Maths is progressive – complex maths is built on the simple
- Early experiences of maths help to define lifelong confidence in the subject.

The report notes that maths is the one area in which primary age boys are outperforming girls, and that the performance gap is widening. There are various theories about the reason for girls’ underperformance in maths and science, but it’s arguable that this discrepancy is a symptom of the wider problem that the PAC report points to – namely, that too many students think “maths is boring”.

You could argue this is a little obvious – a weak student by default will be turned off by his or her least favourite subject – but that this complaint is so often heard, despite the huge amounts spent on boosting maths teaching in primary schools over recent years, is cause for concern. Early gains in student maths performance have apparently levelled off, leaving the government’s targets (that students at age 11 reach Level 4) a less attainable.

In defence of the government’s ahicevements (or lack thereof) Schools Minister Sarah McCarthy-Fry pointed out that last year 100,000 more students achieveved level 4 at age 11 than did so in 1997.

Polly Curtis reports:

Rather than an evening a term queueing for a five-minute chat with teachers, parents want more frequent access, or to monitor their children’s progress online, according to research commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families.

The DCSF report, summarised here, suggests that parents’ working lives are getting in the way of engagement with their students’ education, especially homework.

DCSF secretary Ed Balls:

Parents tell us they like having informal contact with their child’s school – whether that’s a chat in the playground or the chance to go online and see their teenager’s latest marks and make sure they are going to all their classes.

The DCSF research was based on telephone interviews with more than 5,000 parents or guardians of children at state schools. This is part of the government department’s ‘Parent Know How’ scheme, which is looking at ways to help parents with support and advice. (Teachernet already offers some bullet-pointed advice for teachers on how to get the most out of parents’ evenings, here.)

The DCSF is approaching this from the parent’s direction. Meeting the needs of parents with online reporting is something we’re very interested in – after all, we already do this with our Maths-Whizz Tutoring, and components for the forthcoming Maths-Whizz Tutoring for Schools service (click here if you’re a teacher or school administrator to grab one of the remaining places on our summer trial).

We want to make sure Maths-Whizz Tutoring for Schools features in the government’s 10-year children’s plan, which involves (amongst other things) ensuring access to tutors for every child and online information for parents by 2010.

Despite this enthusiasm from government, access to live school work information has its downsides. The New York Times reported earlier this week on parents (sometimes known as ‘Helicopter Parents’) who use services like ParentConnect, Edline or PowerSchools obsessively to track their children’s performance and class attendance.

The rationale behind such programmes is sensible:

Citing studies showing that parental involvement can have a positive effect on a child’s academic performance, educators praise the programs’ capacity to engage parents.

But the implications aren’t always positive:

…sometimes there is collateral damage: exacerbated stress about daily grades and increased family tension.

The information parents receive means the likes of the seeminly terrifying Mrs Dobbins, featured in the article, can harangue their children as soon as they get home for poor grades or not showing up in class, even if the reasons are perfectly innocent. As a result, some students are getting stressed, and expressing that through the medium de nos jours – Facebook. As one student put it: “I get yelled at bcuz I failed a test.”

Is this an issue that requires further investigation? Of course – we don’t want Maths-Whizz students terrorized by parents for failing an exercise or not meeting allotted targets. After all, we know that students sometimes learn most effectively through reinforcement and correction of mistakes.

Many of our customers are active parents, but we’d like to think that they are still a long way from the helicopter cariacature. In fact, the driving force in Maths-Whizz is really the student, and many customers attest to this.

A little parental prodding and cajoling to study is no bad thing, especially when the weather’s as good as it is now in the UK, but we find that it is the students who are instrumental in deciding when, and how, they use Maths-Whizz. The reporting tools we offer parents allow them simply to keep track of this and give them starting points to talk about their children’s studies.

It’s likely the DCSF and news outlets yield more such findings about parents evenings, student tracking and the like. This is all grist to the mill for us, and valuable information that helps us shape our Tutoring programmes. Maths-Whizz Tutoring for Schools will be tested in Beta this summer and feedback from teachers, students and parents will help us shape it to perfection for release this autumn.