5 Maths Gems #203

Welcome to my 203^rd gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers. 

1. Diagram Builder

I absolutely love this game changing diagram builder! mathfigures.com is the best I've seen. Thank you to @harryzafar for drawing it to my attention. 

It's incredibly easy to use. If you want to make a diagram for a lesson, resource or assessment, you can create one in seconds. 

I like the way the box plots update automatically as you add data, which means it can be used as a teaching tool too.

Built by the team at teacher.dev, there are also versions for chemistry and physics so share these with your science department. And the physics diagrams will come in handy for A level mechanics.

2. Two Minute Math

Colin Foster is incredibly good at explaining maths concepts. His new videos at Two Minute Math present mathematical concepts in bite-sized videos, mostly around 2 or 3 minutes long. You could show these videos to students, but they are also brilliant for teachers' pedagogical subject knowledge development. If you're about to teach, for example, significant figures or perpendicular bisectors or bearings, then watch Colin's videos so you know how to introduce these concepts really well. There's a wide range of videos, including some for A level topics like logarithms. I wish I had time to just sit down and watch all of Colin's videos! They are excellent. I plan to use them in department meetings this year. 

3. Maths Habit

@themathshabit.co.uk is a secondary maths teacher who has built a free website themathshabit.co.uk featuring Key Stage 3 and GCSE resources: full lesson decks, worksheets built on faded scaffolding, puzzles and end-of-unit tests. I think there may be a lot of useful resources on this website so do check it out. 

There's so much content I can't list everything here, but it includes 'Aiming for the next grade' exam questions.

And Key Stage 3 Assessments...

The walkthroughs are a clever idea - students could stick them in their book before starting a practice task. 

There are loads of worksheets, like this Trigonometry Perimeters Codebreaker.

There are resources for formula sheet practice.

There are also loads of tools like an exam timer and printables. So much to explore!

There's been a large number of new websites and resources appearing recently - this is definitely one of the best I've seen.

4. A Level Resources

Two of my favourite task designers - Amanda Austin and Nathan Day - have been busy making A level Further Maths resources.

On @draustinmaths.com's Further Maths page there are new resources for Maclaurin, momentum and complex numbers.

And @nathanday shared some CP1 vectors questions and a method guide, plus a great Core Pure 1 revision mat.

I found a task in Heylings that helped me introduce Matrix Transformations. 

@jamiewoodmaths made a really good tool for understanding the order of operations for combined graph transformations. Try it - it's so clear! I have a related resource on combined transformations that I made back in 2014.

And finally, some challenging questions from @andrewmaths1 on surds and indices (and many other topics) aimed at TMUA/ESAT candidates but suitable for others too.

5. New Websites and Tools
It's ironic that I'm a huge AI-sceptic (mainly because it pains me to see people increasingly unable to write a letter or plan a lesson by themselves) but I receive a lot of emails telling me about free AI-built websites and tools for maths teaching. I know there's value in a lot of this so I'm sharing some of these websites here for my readers to explore and decide what they find useful:

• School Ninja - past papers, mark schemes, revision notes and topic questions, plus cute little jokes. It includes papers from AQA, Edexcel, OCR, WJEC, Eduqas and Cambridge.
• Edexcel IGCSE 4MA1 Past Paper Solutions - full worked solutions for IGCSE papers.
• From @Pencil201, a lesson explanation generator for Key Stage 3. Download this one to access it.
• Wonderlattice.com - a set of 27 small interactive experiments with big mathematical ideas.
• eclassroom.org.uk - a collection of free GCSE and A-Level maths revision resources including printable PDF topic worksheets with full worked solutions, interactive practice engines for online practice, an exam paper builder and an interactive starter of the day. It also has a Maths Skill Tree system which almost 'gamifies' learning maths - the goal is to master all topics.
• milomarwick.com - 3D spatial reasoning puzzles which may be helpful if you're teaching plans and elevations.

Update

I'm now off school on a two week half term break which is a great relief after a busy six weeks. I'm very much looking forward to BCME next weekend. Apart from that I'll have a relatively quiet couple of weeks in which I will mainly be catching up on school work, filming CPD videos for HoD Space, taking a short trip to Liverpool (my daughter is a big Beatles fan), and watching Traitors (still great, even after what happened to Hannah!). I'm also going to see Leslie Odom Jr at the London Palladium on 31st October for my daughter's 15th birthday. So lots to look forward to!

I'll be delivering a workshop at #mathsconf42 in Barnsley on 14th November. I'm excited that it's a new talk from my topics in depth series, this time on simultaneous equations. I've been doing a lot of research from old textbooks and I have loads of very cool stuff to share - way too much, in fact! So this is another job for half term: working on my mathsconf presentation. I'm really looking forward to sharing what I've found.

HoD Space continues to be a brilliant place to get support and share ideas and resources. Free trials are still available so join now at HoDSpace.com. Craig and I record podcasts every two weeks in term time where we share some of the things that are being discussed - listen to our latest episode here.

I had a lovely day out with my team at an Inset Day last week. I particularly enjoyed the keynote from Rob Eastaway 'Much Ado About Numbers' - if you haven't seen this talk, make sure you see it! Or buy the book. Then try his Elizabethan Maths Quiz.

Finally, I've been asked by Simon Singh's Parallel Academy to share their tutoring opportunity. They currently support 1,000 bright and enthusiastic secondary students at UK state schools (including students from my school). These students receive weekly online tutorials and they need strong tutors - you can apply via this link. 

That's it from me - I hope to see lots of you at BCME, or if not then at mathsconf in November.

And if you didn't watch Hannah Fry's video on the maths of Traitors, recorded before she went in, then do have a watch. 

September Update

In September I often write an update about some of the things I'm doing at school and outside of school, in case there's some ideas that might help other teachers.

 
In my 2024 post September Routines I wrote about launching homework platforms, corridor etiquette and communicating with parents. We still do all these things. We're also still running Papers Society (which I first ran back as a tiny 'secret society' in 2016, and has now been adopted on a large scale in hundreds of schools). It's going very well this year - our current Year 11s are great at asking for help. On HoD Space we've had some helpful threads about how to maximise its success.

This year I've not introduced any big new initiatives at school - the majority of my time is being taken up by re-making revision and assessment resources - necessary because of changing term dates and shifts in MAT assessment dates. For example we normally give a revision pack to Year 11 and Year 13 over October half term to prepare for their first set of mocks, but this year they are going to have to have different topics in their mocks which means the packs we've used previously aren't suitable. 

Although we haven't made any major changes to how we do things in my department this year, there are a couple of things we're working on that might be of interest.

Department Initiatives

1. Snapshot Improvement

We have a school policy of doing end of unit tests (which we would do even if it wasn't a school policy!). We call them 'snapshots' and in maths we're expected to do two every half term. Apart from formal mid and end year assessments, this is the only marking we do. We get to know our students and their misconceptions well from marking their snapshots. This year we're working as a team on improving our snapshot quality at Key Stage 3 and 4 - for example ensuring there's enough space for workings and ensuring the right level of challenge and accessibility. We're also working on improving what happens in the lessons when we return snapshots. I spent some time over summer making snapshots for the all the topics on our Higher Year 10 Scheme of Work. Here are links to examples of our first snapshot of the year on surds and indices - there are two levels of challenge: High (Grades 7 - 9) and Medium (Grades 5 - 7) (note that we don't have any questions on rationalising with a conjugate, as we don't do that on AQA). I'm always happy to talk more about how we do snapshots - over half term I will record a CPD video for HoD Space about this.

I've also been working on improving my A level snapshot review process to make sure A level students have the opportunity to learn from their mistakes. I gave Year 13 a short snapshot on parametrics last week (short because of the time pressure) and gave them a tailored improvement task afterwards, depending on the nature of their errors. This was the first time I've used this format and it worked well. I have written about this in a lot more detail on HoD Space so check it out if you're interested.

2. Axiom Launch

We offer a decent amount of opportunities for maths challenge and enrichment at my school, including Simon Singh's Parallel programme, so we've been a bit slow on the uptake of Axiom Maths - it's been around for a while but I didn't have capacity to introduce something new. But Axiom comes with funding which means I've been able to offer a TLR to a 'Maths Excellence Coordinator', and now really we're excited to get Axiom up and running. We introduced the idea to Year 7 and gave them a lovely task where they had to solve a problem and then tell us about their level of interest. We've now selected the students for our Maths Circle and I can't wait to see how it goes - their first session is next week. We've had a lot of very positive emails from parents about it. There was a thread on HoD Space with some great ideas for keeping the momentum going on this.

 

My Lessons

1. Year 10

I'm delighted to be teaching Year 10 this year as I love the curriculum. I have Set 5 out of 8 - they do Higher Tier (the set below does Foundation) and from this group we normally get mainly Grade 5s and 6s, with a couple of Grade 7s. We started the course with indices and surds - both lovely topics (surds is one of my all time favourites!) and now we're moving onto trigonometry. This allowed me to make a lovely segue from one topic to the other - my first lesson in the trigonometry unit will be on 'Pythagoras with Surds' which provides a great opportunity to revise Pythgoras, which they did in Year 8, and keep practising surds. There are a number of resources for this including some basic questions here and some more challenging questions here. 

2. Year 11 Further Maths 
I love it when I teach the annual indices lesson with my Year 11 Certificate in Further Maths class (this is a timetabled lesson - see my post The Option Block Experiment). The students in this class think they know indices really well because they've been taught fractional and negative indices in Year 10, plus they're already pros at changing the base, but then I give them questions like this and suddenly they're not in Kansas anymore:

Many thanks to 1st Class Maths for this example (from his video) and for the brilliant Equations with Indices resource on his Further Maths page. In my experience students find this set of questions challenging right from the first page - it's a great example of finding depth and challenge in a seemingly straightforward topic. This is hugely engaging for the strongest mathematicians in the year group who sometimes find maths a bit too easy.

3. Year 13 

I also delivered my favourite lesson of the year to Year 13 - integrating with trig identities. I always use an idea suggested by Stuart Price many years ago. I now call it my 'pink lesson' as I hand out pink paper - throughout the year when a student asks me how to integrate sin²x I will say "remember the pink lesson?" and they will magically remember the technique they need to use.

In Other News...
Outside of work, I've been receiving a lot of emails from maths teachers that are written using AI. When emails are written with AI the wording is always rather odd, and it's hard to tell whether they are spam or they are genuine requests for help. I've also been receiving lots of emails from people asking me to include AI-generated websites and resources in my Gems posts. The world is changing rapidly... I don't use AI myself though I appreciate it can bring advantages for some tasks. But being a huge fan of the immense craftsmanship that went into creating maths resources in the past, I'm concerned about the deskilling that's currently going on - we'll get to the point where no one actually knows how to write an email or plan a lesson. I suppose it doesn't matter because we've probably only got a decade left before humanity meets its doom anyway - I just don't know whether it will be Terminator-style or Matrix-style. And I don't know which one I'd prefer. 

Anyway, I must update you on the wonderful HoD Space, which is now my go-to place to have conversations with teachers. I prefer it to social media platforms because I can write longer posts with a lot more detail, and easily share resources, plus there's no trolls, no unpleasantness and no one trying to make me feel stupid. I love it.

Craig and I have recorded three short podcasts where we chat about some of the topics of conversations on HoD Space - do have a listen here. We originally said that from October the free trial would drop down to two weeks but we have decided to keep it at four weeks permanently as this has worked really well. So join now, get a four week free trial with no card details requested upfront, and see what it's like. We currently have questions that need answering and maybe you can help! We have questions about assessing students on iPads, booklets, mixed attainment, Year 6 taster days, how to get more Grade 5+ at GCSE, and how to support Year 7s who are working at Key Stage 1 level. Please join and help to answer these questions!

5 Maths Gems #202

Welcome to my 202^nd gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.

1. Visual Maths Builder
@mrallanmaths shared his new website visualmathsbuilder.com which helps teachers create clear, classroom-ready representations. It's free and no login is required - use it to create animated visual models that show how and why methods work.

2. Complex Numbers

Maths teacher Neil Kendall has developed another free resource to add to his incredible collection at korovatron.co.uk which includes Graphiti, Vectorama and Trimension. His new resource Komplexiti is for teaching complex numbers. Essentially it's an interactive Argand diagram designed for A level Further Maths but has graphing calculator features too.

You can enter complex numbers in any form and display them as points or vectors, solve any equation (e.g. roots of unity) and see the roots plotted, and plot loci in the complex plane including loci inequalities. View a gallery of its features here.

If you're teaching complex numbers then also check out Dr Austin's new resources for this topic.

I was recently asked if I could make a resource library for A level Further Maths. I mainly use MadasMaths, ZigZag and Integral in my further maths teaching, but as both Zig Zag and Integral are paid resources it's hard for me to make a comprehensive free resource library for this qualification.

3. Core Maths Compendium

I rarely get the chance to feature Core Maths resources in my Gems so I was delighted to spot new website edgarpoels.github.io/Core-maths-compendium/index.html from @edgarpoels. This free AQA Core Maths resource hub for teachers features slide decks, worksheets, mocks, revision booklets, end-of-topic tests and exam-style papers. This collection of resources is extensive - Core Maths teachers will be very grateful to Mr Pohl for pulling all this together and sharing it for free.

4. Website Summer Updates

I've seen some new websites and some website updates over summer, including:

• The incredibly useful PowerPoints on gcsemathsquestions.co.uk have been updated with November 2024 and June 2025 questions. The best thing about this site is that it features questions from Edexcel, OCR and AQA, which you don't get anywhere else. Because it pulls together three exam boards, there's a huge bank of exam questions for every topic. I use it all the time!
• Maths Rocket's question database has had a major update over the summer. Search a topic, get all the questions that have ever been asked on it, click through to the paper and mark scheme.
• Maths teacher Jon Glover contacted me about his new site mathsvault.uk. The site includes cover lesson packs and lots more. Jon is running a Countdown competition for teachers where you can win departmental access to the website. 
• I also received an email about mathorio.com which features over 300 free step-by-step maths lessons with worked examples, interactive graphs, and quizzes.
• MathsPad has some fantastic new resources for subscribers including Interactive Direct Proportion Bars, Cumulative Review Exercises and new resources for a number of topics including 'two triangle trigonometry'.

5. Mathsaurus Puzzles

My youngest daughter is now starting Year 8 - last year she used an excellent free course on mathsaurus.com to prepare for the UKMT Junior Maths Challenge. Because she's signed up to emails from Mathsaurus, which arrive in my inbox, I spotted that she was recently offered a free puzzles course.

There are 45 puzzles in the course, everything from chessboards and river crossings to missing digits, magic squares and overlapping shapes. Every puzzle is accessible enough for anyone to have a go at. The puzzles come in nine sets of five, with printable worksheets and animated video solutions.

These might be helpful for teachers running puzzle clubs. Alternatively, let parents and students know about the course so they can access it directly.

HoD Space
If you missed my blog post about my new project HoD Space then do check it out. Since I wrote it, HoD Space has really taken off. We already have nearly 300 members, which is amazing given it's been the summer holidays and a lot of people only engage with professional development in term time. I'm expecting a huge influx of new members over the next few weeks! We are still offering a completely free four week trial if you sign up any time in September, so join us now to see what it's all about - there's no obligation to join when your trial ends. I've missed EduTwitter very much since its demise a couple of years ago and I feel like HoD Space has brought that magic back! It's like Twitter but with longer answers... I'm loving it. I get to chat to maths teachers every day, and share ideas and feel inspired. And learn a lot! (the conversations about maths department budgets and about Ofsted are good examples! Join if you want to see them...). We're still waiting for responses to a couple of posts: one about Welsh medium resources and one about the exam structure in schools in Northern Ireland, so if you can help with either of these please join - you don't have to be a Head of Maths.

Update

The end of the summer holidays is fast approaching for me. I have mixed feelings about the year ahead: I'm very excited to be teaching Year 10 for the first time in ages - I get to teach surds, my favourite topic! - but I'm a bit nervous about next summer's early exam dates (two GCSE papers and one A level paper before May half term!) and the squeeze on teaching time. We don't start lessons until 8th September which is very late. I'm also worried about our Year 12 class sizes - we currently have 30 signed up for our A level Further Maths class which is a bit bigger than I'd like. 

This summer my department smashed our A level and GCSE results (we're a totally non-selective state school and we achieved 21% Grade 9 in GCSE and, coincidentally, 21% A* in A level!) which was wonderful. August was a great month! I got to celebrate the wedding of Sarah, a wonderful maths teacher who I've worked with for the last seven years, who married science teacher Sam in a beautiful wedding in Kent. 

And Jamie of drfrost.org married Esther in Taiwan, and a group of us enjoyed a lovely afternoon celebrating with them in Jamie's garden a few weeks later.

I love getting back in the classroom in September, but am always sad to say goodbye to the summer holidays. 

I'm looking forward to seeing lots of you at BCME in October half term. 

I'll leave you with cute Chrome Dinosaur Game shared with me by Alex Oliinyk. This is a free, ad-free, no-login version of the Chrome dinosaur game (the one everyone plays when the internet dies). Pupils play a 30-second round and instantly have real data to work with: site-wide, the median score is about 175 while the mean is nearly 590, so comparing class data against the real player distribution opens up skew, outliers, and why the mean can mislead. There's a printable lesson plan and pupil worksheet mapped to the National Curriculum. Enjoy!

Game by chromedino.com

HoD Space

When you get promoted to a new role in a school, whether it's as Key Stage Coordinator, Head of Department, Head of Year, or a Senior Leader, you probably don't get any training on how to do that role. If you're lucky the previous job holder is around to show you the ropes, but sometimes you just have to wing it, all by yourself. 

For the last couple of years I've been increasingly keen to offer training courses for newly appointed Heads of Maths. But in order to start a training business I'd have to stop being a Head of Maths, and that's not going to happen (I love my job!). I do already support Heads of Maths from across the country all the time - through my blog but also through email - over the last two months I must have received over fifty emails asking about my scheme of work. But it's very labour intensive for me keep sending advice and resources to individual Heads of Maths. So I was in need of a big idea to solve my problem - how to better upskill and support Heads of Maths - and along came Craig Barton, who always has good ideas. What if I delivered my Head of Maths training online, and provided resources to download directly, and we created a community where Heads of Maths could connect and help each other? Like Twitter used to be, with the constant sharing of advice and ideas and resources, but better - without the adverts and the politics and the hate. Craig introduced me to the Circle app, which is exactly what we need. We genuinely believe this is going to be a game changer, so we've invested in it and we're now ready launch our exciting new project: HoD Space. 

I've only been using the app for a week myself, and we only have a few members at the moment, but already I'm absolutely loving it! You can join too - the more members we have, the better it gets - and it will cost your school less than the cost of a training course. But it's so much better than a training course. You get my training, my resources, a weekly podcast where Craig and I will discuss the big topics that are coming up in the forums, and you get an entire year of expert support instantly available. Imagine being at work and knowing you have access to expert mentoring in your pocket. People who you can ask for help with difficult decisions, difficult conversations, or even the routine stuff - how do I decide on GCSE tiers, how do I set up my department tracker, how do I go about recruiting a new member of my team?  The impact is going to be huge.

Let's have a quick tour... I'll show you some screenshots from the app.

It's ridiculously easy to navigate. When you first join, read the welcome section then add a post in the introductions section and either me or Craig will say hello. Also complete your profile so we have information about your role and your school (this will come in handy later, when the community is large and you want to connect with people who, say, offer the same qualifications as you). 

There are various spaces where you can post questions. Sometimes there will be a quick answer, sometimes a lengthy discussion. If something causes a lot of debate, Craig and I will pick it up in our weekly podcast (we've just posted our first podcast episode). The space running the department is for the practical side of the job. Examples of questions might include:

• Where do you put your non-specialist teachers, and what support do they get?
• How do you structure TLRs in your department?
• How do you handle movement between sets during the year? 
• What's the best thing you spent money on this year?
• What do you do for Year 11 intervention?
• How do you handle a teacher whose behaviour management isn't working?

If there's something you'd rather ask without your name on it, you can send it through an anonymous question form, and we'll post it on your behalf.

There's a similar space for curriculum and teaching, where questions might be about schemes of work, feedback, marking, qualification delivery models, enrichment, and so on. With upcoming curriculum tweaks, and perhaps even more significant shifts in curriculum on the horizon as proposed by the new prime minister, there will be a lot to discuss here over the coming years.

There's also a space for recommendations and things to celebrate (I love this - a space where you can share things that have gone well at work - something most of us never do in public on social media).

There's also a surveys section where I will regularly gather information that we are all dying to know about each other's schools! Like the old Twitter polls that we all loved. I've started with two surveys on curriculum time (Year 7 and 11). Now I just need everyone to sign up to the free trial and complete my surveys!

In my video library I'll share two CPD videos each month, each one around 10 to 20 minutes long. I've already posted videos on planning September Inset meetings, setting Year 7, what to do on Results Day, and communicating with your team. I've also recorded videos on communicating with parents, setting up department trackers, scheme of work design, recruitment, and seating plans - these will all be published on the app soon. I have loads more videos in the pipeline, including assessment design, Year 11 intervention, running UKMT competitions and so on. 

Anyone can post in the resources to magpie section. I've already put some stuff here, and there's more to come from me in September. Soon I hope it's full of content shared by hundreds of Heads of Maths.

The members section is where networking happens - find HoDs in local schools, find HoDs who offer the same qualifications as you or have the same challenges, connect with them directly, maybe even visit them. There are literally thousands of Heads of Maths in the UK - imagine what we could do if we all joined forces. This is networking at its smartest. 

And what might come next for HoD Space? I can imagine in-person events (HoD Space conferences?), HoD Space for English and Science... So many ideas! So much potential.

I want join! What should I do?
Join today on a totally free trial. If you join now, you'll get full access for four weeks at no cost (free trials are normally only two weeks, but we're offering four weeks this summer only). We won't even ask for your card details up front. Then when you go back to school in September, ask your school to pay for your membership from the school's CPD budget. Given the impact it will have on the maths department, it will be very easy to justify. And if they won't pay, don't worry - you can take your career development into your own hands - we offer a cheaper membership if you're paying with a personal card. 

This isn't just for Heads of Maths - perhaps you're a 2ic, a TLR holder, or an aspiring Head of Maths. This is for everyone who wants to learn how to run a maths department, wants support for the department they already run, or just has an interest in what we're doing - join us on a trial to see if it's right for you.

Sign up today at hodspace.com. If loads of you sign up to the free trial and start posting questions or joining the discussions, it will start working really well. I need lots members so everyone can see how good it's going to be! Make sure you download the Circle app to access it - the app is brilliant. 

I'm really looking forward to chatting to you and sharing ideas on HoD Space. See you there!

 

5 Maths Gems #201

Welcome to my 201^st gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.

1. Volumes of Revolution

My excellent A level student Samarth made a website volumesofrevolution.co.uk. He has very kindly shared it so that A level Further Maths teachers can use it in lessons when teaching volumes of revolution.

The website is very easy to use. You can create piecewise functions to make some interesting solids, and there's transparency settings to allow two different functions to be seen one inside the other. You can play and pause an animation of the rotation being performed, and sign in with Google to save projects. 

To minimise Samarth's costs (he's heading off to university this September!), the website will only run on weekdays. He's also included a buymeacoffee link to help keep the website  running. I'm very proud of Samarth and hugely impressed by his level of skill and attention to detail in creating this website. 

2. Clumeral

Emma Lark showed me the lovely puzzle site clumeral.com made by David Lark and Jamie Evawin. You work out the three digit numbers using clues and a process of elimination. Once you do today's puzzle you get access to the archive. I think both maths teachers and students will really enjoy these puzzles!

3. A Level Resources

Because most of the maths teachers frequently posting on Bluesky are A level teachers, I always have loads of lovely A level resources to share in my gems posts these days! Here are some I've spotted recently:

• @mrlevmaths.bsky.social shared some ideas for introducing students to double angle formulae.

He also shared a resource for reciprocal trig functions. 

• @andrewmaths1.bsky.social found a great website with TMUA practice papers: jzmaths.com/papers. There's also a very cool Easter Egg hunt that students (or teachers!) might enjoy completing this summer. 
• @sxpmaths.bsky.social has shared a blog post about all the changes he's been making to the sequence in which he teaches A Level Maths. This post includes a link to one of Stuart's booklets - Unit 1 : Points and Lines.
• @markywillis63 on Twitter shared a new series of Year 1 A-level questions by topic with both answers and worked solutions. 

4. Riddle of the Day

Gabriel Sobrino emailed me about the website riddleoftheday.org. Riddle of the Day is an independent bilingual site publishing one logic or mathematical puzzle each day, with progressive hints and fully explained solutions. I thought this might be helpful for maths clubs and competitions in schools.

Riddles are classified by difficulty level. For example here's one of the easier ones:

5. Constructions
@giftedhko.bsky.social has started writing a monthly newsletter for her department. Her July 2026 issue focused on construction:

Helen has some fantastic construction resources on mathshko.com.

 

I also spotted some constructions tasks on Transum when reading their latest newsletter. Their updated constructions activities give students the chance to practise compass skills, with each task leading to a measurable result: students complete the construction on paper, measure a length or angle, and enter their answer online for immediate marking. 

Whilst on Transum I spotted this cheating poster, updated to mention AI - I think it's worth talking to students about this in September (particularly A level students).

Update
On the last two days of the summer term I had the privilege of attending an event hosted by XTX Markets and Purposeful Ventures. You may already be aware of XTX's generous charitable donations in the sector, supporting organisations such as UKMT, Axiom Maths, Maths Horizons and Dr Frost (if you're interested in finding out more, read mathsexcellencefund.org, and XTX's philanthropy page). Over the course of the residential event, which was held at the very quirky but beautiful Brockett Hall in Hertfordshire, we discussed how to build more future mathematicians. 

For me it was incredibly worthwhile to consider the whole 'talent pipeline' from primary school through to PhD. For example on Thursday we broke into small groups and I ended up spending most of the day in a pair with Tom Crawford (his YouTube channel is popular with my students!) discussing in great depth how we can get more A level students to choose maths degrees. I loved how intellectually challenging this event was for me - I had the opportunity to do a lot of deep thinking and generate solutions to big problems. I really enjoy this kind of thing. I also loved catching up with a number of people who I haven't seen in years, and meeting lots of new people with fascinating jobs. There were plenty of attendees who work closely with schools, including people who do some teaching in schools as part of their jobs, but I was the only classroom teacher at the event - I hope I did a good job of representing my profession. I'm very grateful to XTX for the invitation.

Exciting New Project

It was good to see Craig Barton at this event - we always have lots of ideas for how we can support secondary maths teachers, and this time we've come up with something which we think is going to be brilliant. I don't want to give any spoilers here, but watch this space because we'll be launching it really soon. It's aimed at Heads of Maths and aspiring Heads of Maths. I genuinely think it's going to be a game changer.

Future Events

La Salle's maths conference dates for 2026/27 are:

• 5th September 2026 - Maghull High School, Liverpool (tickets now on sale)
• 14th November 2026 - Trinity Academy, Barnsley
• 20th March 2027 - Penrice Academy, St. Austell
• 5th June 2027 - The Duston School, Northampton

I can't make the first one unfortunately but I hope to be at others!

I will definitely be at BCME, which falls in October half term for me. I hope to see lots of you there. Make sure you apply for a bursary!

As the weather has been so relentlessly hot this year, I will leave you with a great example of a misleading graph to share with students.