TES Awards
My first event of the summer season was the TES Awards. My school was nominated for a technology award, mainly for the huge amount of brilliant robotics we do (in robotics competitions we’re mainly competing with grammar and independent schools). As head of a STEM subject they kindly let me tag along to the event – I’m not directly involved in robotics so I really appreciated the invitation! We didn’t win our category but we had a lovely evening. It took place in a fancy hotel on Park Lane and was attended by over a thousand teachers in their finest attire. The event featured a performance from Hercules and a brilliant comedy set from Tom Allen. It was an unusual and enjoyable night out!
MathsConf
The day after the TES Awards I travelled to Birmingham for Mathsconf38. I always love a mathsconf – it’s great to catch up with friends and meet new people. I presented on some fun maths from old textbooks, mainly with a focus on surds.
On Tuesday my timetable was clear (I taught a lot of Year 11 and 13 this year!) so I had the opportunity to attend the AQA Maths Expert Panel Meeting in London. I very much enjoyed this day (not just because it took place in a delightfully cool office on the hottest day of the year, a welcome relief from the furnace that is my classroom). It was great to catch up with lots of people who I haven’t seen in a while including Julia Smith, who is writing a book about maths teaching, Danielle Bartram, Colleen Young, Jamie Frost, Peter Mattock and Tom Bennison. We had some excellent discussions about AI, GCSE Maths, GCSE Stats, A levels and All About Maths.
The MEI Conference is always brilliant. It’s my favourite event of the year. I was teaching on Thursday morning but travelled up after lunch, arriving in time for the excellent conference dinner on Thursday night. If you’ve not been before, you might not know that this conference dinner always has a free bar, paid for by the lovely people at Casio. A free bar is a rarity in education so it feels like a real treat. Dinner was great and I particularly enjoyed catching up with Anthony of thechalkface.net who I used to chat to loads on Twitter back in the day, and David Bedford who always has wise words and interesting stories to share. The after-dinner speaker this year was Rob Eastaway who did a brilliant talk on viral maths problems which I very much enjoyed.
but talked about how -4x + 6y = 0 is a linear approximation to the circle as you get close to the origin. This led down a rabbit hole that I won't attempt to explain here, but was fascinating.
We also looked at some interesting aspects of this question from the 2021 AQA A Level Paper 1:
Students found this question particularly challenging because it didn't tell them to solve the differential equation - they had to work that out for themselves. Again, Bernard took us down a rabbit hole of maths relating to this question.
We looked at a number of lovely questions in this session, and two of them stood out as being useful early in Year 12. When we have students who start Year 12 with a really strong understanding of GCSE content, particularly those who have studied Level 2 Further Maths, sometimes it can be difficult to challenge and engage them in the early lessons on indices and quadratics. So it was great to see a couple of questions that we could use in these lessons to get students thinking. This one is from the 2019 OCR(A) A level Paper 2:
And this one is from an OCR AS Paper. This was my favourite question of the day - there are at least six different methods that would work here!
My next session was 'Getting to grips with interviews' with Tim Honeywill. This was incredibly useful and well timed for me. At my previous school I didn't get involved in Oxbridge applications because we had a very wise and experienced maths teacher who specialised in supporting students with this. Now I work in a new school that's just had its first Year 13 cohort, and we have absolutely no experience and expertise in this area. This year I had to write two Oxbridge references - one for economics and one for engineering - and students asked me to help with both interview preparation and STEP preparation. Luckily the AMSP came to the rescue with the STEP support, and interview support was provided by someone in the MAT. But I realised that I seriously need to upskill in this area so I can support my students better. Tim's session was enlightening and I now have a far better understanding of what happens in these interviews and how to support students preparing for them.
In the next session I delivered 'Strategies for Challenge'. I had a lovely group of delegates who asked lots of good questions, so I enjoyed running this workshop.
After lunch there was an excellent keynote from Sarah Hart, writer of the book Once Upon a Prime.
In the final session of the day I learnt how to use the CG100 for statistical analysis. I have no experience with graphical calculators so it was good to have a play with Casio's latest model. We don't use them at my school - I really struggle with the idea that students who spend more money on technology have an advantage in their A level exams. It upsets me that this situation is allowed to exist. Maths should be a level playing field for all. It's such a dilemma - I don't believe that money should be able to buy you a better grade, but by insisting that I won't make my own students buy graphical calculators, I increasingly feel that I disadvantage them.
Ethical dilemmas aside, I enjoyed the session and it was good for me to finally make a start in understanding how to use these calculators. I now feel ready to explore my CG100 on my own. Casio were incredibly generous, giving a free CG100 to anyone who attend a Casio session. They were also handing out amazing goodie bag as always. I will take pleasure in sitting in my Casio hoodie, drinking from my Casio mug and using my Casio pen from my Casio pencil case!
Shout out to Integral too for the top quality goodies (I love the mechanical pencil!).
If you’ve never been to the MEI Conference then give it a go next year. It really is brilliant. It's fun to stay on a university campus, the facilities and catering are excellent, the sessions are always top quality and the people are really nice. There’s lots of A level stuff but there’s plenty for Key Stage 3 and 4 too. There are always lots of teachers there whose school or college have paid for them to attend – so it’s worth asking.
Talking Points
I may be quiet on social media but I’ve always got my ear to the ground so I can keep on top of what’s going on in maths education. Here are some of the things maths teachers have been discussing lately:
- Edexcel's A level papers caused a stir this summer. It seems that Paper 1 used very similar questions to 2022 (schools pay a lot of money for top quality original exam papers to be written every year so this is disappointing). It meant that students could easily predict what would come up on Paper 2. Edexcel reacted by using their back up replacement paper for Paper 2. This meant it wasn't a match with Paper 1 - there were topics like Binomial and Integration by Parts that didn't come up on either paper! But it also seems that Edexcel may have screwed up - though they haven't admitted to an error - the modified papers for visually impaired students were not replaced (did they forget about them? or was it too late to make modified versions of the replacement paper?) meaning this small group of students did the originally intended Paper 2. So Edexcel will need a separate set of grade boundaries for this tiny cohort. This has caused distress - I heard of a student with a reader who read different questions to those on the paper in front of her. What a mess. Read more about this in Schools Week.
- We've known for a while that students can use AI to do their online maths homework for them, and we are starting to develop ways to identify who's doing this and address it as best we can. They key is to help students understand the value and long term gain that comes from completing their homework themselves, which is harder than it sounds! This is a frustrating issue for maths teachers. Read more about this in Craig Barton's Eedi newsletter.
- A similar issue is that the improvement of search engines using Google's AI has made it incredibly easy for students to find secure mock papers online. We have always experienced problems where students have got hold of secure mock papers through tutors, but the problem seems to have become much more widespread this year. We used Edexcel's Mock Paper 4 for our End of Year 12 assessments (that's the super secure mock set that's not even on Emporium) but when we marked Paper 1 we felt that many of our students had seen the paper before. It was hard to tell who'd done well because they'd worked hard and understood the content, and who'd done well because they had predicted that we would use mock papers and found them online. As we need robust data for UCAS predictions, we did an emergency re-write of our Paper 2 (a bit like Edexcel did!), ensuring we used questions that students can't find online. This worked, but made us realise that if we can't use mock papers anymore, we will have to write every internal A level exam ourselves going forward which is a huge workload - and very difficult to do (every school independently writing A level Further Maths mock papers from scratch every year...? No thanks!).
- Another interesting issue for us in our End of Year 12 assessments was a fake Casio calculator. We had a student who'd bought one from eBay to save money, but discovered in the assessment that it can't handle Binomial probabilities for large n. To me it was obviously fake when he showed me his calculator after the exam - it was shiny and felt lighter than it should - but he had gone the whole of Year 12 unaware of this. What a weird world we live in - who would have thought there'd be a market for fake calculators.
- There was a lot of chat this year about 'teachers' (often not really teachers) claiming they know exactly what's going to be in exams, selling 'predicted' GCSE papers to students and making a lot of money from dodgy YouTube videos that are full of errors. This issue affects all subjects - it's worth reading this Schools Week article, and follow 1st Class Maths for more on this.
- I spoke to Dr Jen Shearman from the NCETM about the EEF's evaluation of the Specialist Knowledge for Teaching Mathematics (Secondary Non-specialist Teachers) Programme. This is done using a Randomised Controlled Trial which works by comparing the outcomes of a group of trial participants to the outcomes of a similar group which was not involved. So schools apply to the trial and evaluators randomly assign them to either an ‘intervention’ or ‘control’ group. At the end of the academic year, pupils in both groups are assessed: if the pupils in the intervention group achieve higher assessment scores than the control group, then the programme is said to have a positive impact. I find this really interesting - it's so important to assess the effectiveness of these programmes and schools need to be supportive of this. The NCETM are looking for more schools to be involved in this trial - there's more information here so please have a look.
- People keep asking me where all the maths teachers from Twitter have gone. My answer is that they are now on Bluesky. The chat on Bluesky is dominated by a small group of maths teachers, and can feel a bit intimidating at times. But it's early days. At the moment it's nothing like the glory days of Twitter (like when we ran #mathsTLP on Sunday nights) where there used to be hundreds of teachers discussing a wide variety of topics and sharing loads of resources, ideas and advice. So yes, we have lost something that I think was very powerful in maths education and I think it's going to take a while until we get back there again, but we just have to be patient. I think the best thing I can do is encourage my readers to not just join Bluesky but also start posting on there. If you have a question, or you're looking for a resource, feel free to tag me and I will help if I can.
With two weeks left until the summer holidays I’m very pleased we’re nearly there. I feel like I say this every year, but I think this was my busiest work year ever. I’m very much in need of a rest.
Enjoy the end of the school year! Thanks for reading.
