5 Maths Gems #198

Welcome to my 198^th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.

1. GCSE Question Distribution

Thanks to Jamie Frost for producing a detailed breakdown of skills that have appeared on past GCSE papers. Other websites have analyses by topic, but Jamie has such an extensive database of past exam questions that he has been able to produce a much more granular analysis, for all exam boards and including IGCSE. 

I teach AQA at GCSE and when I teach circle theorems I always say 'alternate segment theorem seems to come up a lot in exams' - this was just a hunch, but now I know for sure - it does indeed come up a lot! Of course just because something has appeared in exams a lot in the past, it doesn't mean it will continue to do so (in fact, the opposite could be true - perhaps this year's GCSE exams will contain a lot of topics that haven't been tested in a while) so this data can't be used to make predictions. It's still interesting though. Thank you to Jamie for sharing it. 

Each skill includes a link to a randomly generated example question. Schools subscribed to Dr Frost can generate worksheets from these which can be printed or set as online tasks.

2. E2E Revision Sheets

@ThtPedagogyGeek has created a nice set of resources called E2E (Example to Exam) Revision Sheets. The idea is that you model the worked example - students copy it down and take notes, then complete the three questions. These are designed for GCSE revision.

3. Diagram Creator 

There are numerous online tools to create diagrams but I often find them unintuitive or overly complex, or they require a login. Thank you to @TickTockMaths for sharing a tool designed for creating simple diagrams quickly. He made it so he could insert diagrams into lessons created with his Slide Creator (see Gems 197) but it can also be used as a standalone tool.

4. Corbett Maths Key Stage 1
Key Stage 1 teachers will be pleased to see that John Corbett has extended his popular 5-a-day range to Key Stage 1. He has made the first level (Ruby) with Emerald and Diamond to follow. 

I know that secondary teachers sometimes find these primary resources helpful too (I'm thinking of our Entry Level classes). 

5. A Level Resources

We had a difficult logs and integration question in our Year 13 mock this year that even our strongest mathematicians struggled with, so I'm pleased to see this lovely little task from ‪@mrlevmaths.bsky.social‬ for practising this specific skill.

Also thanks to ‪@karenshancock.bsky.social‬ for a resource on 'Power Equations' which is useful for Year 12 and also Year 11 L2 Further Maths students. 

Other resources on Karen's website that might be helpful for both Year 12 and L2 Certificate in Further Maths include Factorising with Surds and Graphical Solutions. Thank you Karen!

Also thanks to ‪@adamsfax.bsky.social‬ for his 'Edexcel formula sheet in a page'. We'll print these in September for all A level students to keep in the front of their book.

Big Mathematical Ideas

Colin Foster (one of the wisest men in maths education) has launched a new website: bigmathematicalideas.org. He has written a chapter on each of the five big mathematical ideas.

 

I believe this should be compulsory reading for every trainee teacher. No matter how good you are at maths when you train to be a teacher, the thing that everyone needs to develop is their pedagogical subject knowledge (not just how to do the maths, but how to explain the maths). But it's not just for trainees. I've been teaching for a long time now and I think my subject knowledge is pretty strong, but within a few minutes of reading this website I was thinking deeply about things that I haven't thought deeply about before (the big multipliers table in Section 1.5.2 had me wondering why I'd never shared this with students).

Reading this website will probably be my summer holiday project, or perhaps something I do in my gained time this term. I will use it to write next year's professional development sessions for my department.

 

Update

The first half of the summer term is very intense if you teach a lot of exam classes! I know that in some schools Year 11s have already started study leave, but I still have three weeks of lessons left with Year 11. I'm still doing topic-based revision (for example, next week we're revising surds and indices) and mixed revision (often using my revision mats). I always find that my students make masses of progress in our summer term revision lessons so I'm glad my time with them isn't cut short. If you're looking for good revision resources for Year 11, remember my GCSE Revision page has loads of hand-picked recommendations, and Adam Creen's annual 'Best Guess GCSE Dropbox' has been updated with the latest practice papers.  

I had a fantastic to response my last blog post (#mathsconf40) and to my recent conference presentation about Key Stage 3. I received dozens of emails from teachers asking for support on curriculum and assessments, including lots who said they find my gems posts helpful. Since most social media posts are now met with tumbleweed (a few likes and shares, but rarely a response), I often wonder if there's any point blogging for maths teachers these days - it's hard to tell whether anyone is listening. But after the flurry of lovely emails my enthusiasm for writing has returned, so thank you to everyone who got in touch. 💗

No doubt you saw that new research on setting in maths was published by the EEF. There are Year 7s in my school who struggle to add single digit numbers, or to multiply integers by ten, and others who find it easy to solve complex algebraic and geometric problems. Teaching these children in the same class doesn't make any sense to me, and I feel it would particularly let down the students who struggle the most and would benefit from being in a smaller group. Maths teachers are sometimes made to feel like they're evil or lazy for teaching in sets when they are actually trying to do the right thing for the students who need the most support. The narrative that schools often assign their 'worst' teachers to teach the lowest attainers is insulting nonsense. Most Heads of Maths prioritise the students who find maths difficult, and assign absolute superstars to teach them.

Here's a round up of some recent developments, in case you missed anything:

• Jonny Griffiths has updated his website carom-maths.co.uk which houses a collection of forty activities bridging from A Level Mathematics to University Mathematics. This is a great set of resources for a Sixth Form maths club. 
• Maths Genie has had a big update! Set up a free account to access useful resources, like the GCSE mini tests. 
• A few teachers have been in touch to ask about the RULER resources from Ben Tanner. These popular resources used to be available on Ben's website but it no longer exists. Helpfully, Tim Stirrup shared an archived version of the website, where you can still download the booklets.
• The QAMA is back - but this time, as an online version instead of a physical calculator. QAMA requires an estimation before it will work out an answer. It's great for developing number sense. If students don't have access to devices to use the online calculator in lessons, it could instead be used by the teacher in modelling. 
• Recently I've received a fair few emails from teachers who have either used AI to create tools for teachers or have created a platform where students can use AI to support their learning. For example, on gcsemathsai.co.uk students type in any topic or question and get instant step-by-step worked explanations. It covers the full GCSE syllabus and is free, with no account needed. One thing that stood out for me on this website is the misconceptions for each topic (e.g. look at 'common mistakes' for inequalities and arc length and sector area) which might be helpful for teachers planning lessons.
• Hannah Fry is going to be on the next Celebrity Traitors (our favourite family viewing - my daughter is obsessed with it)! Cue me telling everyone who will listen about the time Hannah bought me a drink and we hung out at BCME...

I'll leave you with these new 'squareas' puzzles from Transum. These are fun and come in multiple levels of difficulty. 

Thanks for reading!

#mathsconf40

Mathsconf40 took place in Derby yesterday. I thought it might be helpful to write a quick post to update my readers on some stuff I learnt.

I enjoyed Joe Berwick's (@berwickmaths) session on teaching statistics at A level. My degree was in Statistics at UCL (I actually did SORMS, which is similar to MORSE at Warwick - a popular course amongst our Year 13s) so I teach a lot of statistics, including FS1. Further Statistics 1 is a great choice of module for A Level Further Maths. It's particularly beneficial to students wanting to study economics at university (a popular choice) and numerous other courses. And there are many great career options for keen statisticians, such as Data Science and Actuarial Science. Our students who have studied GCSE Statistics (which they don't love) are always pleasantly surprised that they enjoy FS1. Joe also talked about the benefits of teaching FS2 - students get to learn confidence intervals which feature in many university courses. 

The majority of Joe's talk was on teaching the statistics content of A Level Maths. He talked about how the large data set includes the Great Storm of 1987 - I remember this very well (I was a very scared 6 year old living in an area with lots of big oak trees, many of which fell down). Coincidentally I'm telling my Year 12s about this tomorrow, and sharing some photos of me in the aftermath of the storm (in the first photo I'm with my mum and brother - we took these after the roads had been cleared of trees).

Joe talked about how he teaches correlation hypothesis testing first, before he teaches normal and binomial hypothesis testing. This gave me something to think about. He has very helpfully shared some of his lessons slides on berwickmaths.com. Joe made a lot of good points about things that I too have noticed - for example, that the Edexcel textbook has a single exercise on Discrete Random Variables but it comes up all the time in exams, and the questions are very different from those in the textbook (for example they include questions on the sum of two DRVs). I noticed this too and did a lesson on it with my Year 13s last week. I wasn't aware that OCR is a great place to get DRV questions for modelling and practice (see the OCR Paper 2s here - full of great questions that I can use in my Year 13 revision lessons in the next three weeks).

In the second session of the day I presented on how we engage and challenge Key Stage 3 mathematicians at my school. I think our strong GSCE results and the high uptake of our maths GCSE option (last term over one third of Year 9 students chose our course - which I blogged about here) are both down to what we do at Key Stage 3. I spoke about our curriculum, department professional development, and our assessment strategy. In particular I'm interested in research that suggests some students aren't exposed to 'novel' maths in Year 7, and I showed examples of what 'novel' might look like.

In the next session there were a number of fantastic talks on offer but I was still buzzing from running a session so I took the opportunity to have a break and catch up with my mate Dr Ed Southall. I also picked up some freebies from the exhibitors and enjoyed my bag of tuck from Rob Smith's excellent tuck shop. I learnt about the Unit Award Scheme offered by AQA which is great for schools who manage to teach students part of the L2 Further Maths course but not enough for them to enter the full exam.

Did you know that Ed is co-chair of the BCME 10 committee? BCME (British Congress of Mathematics Education) is a big research-based residential maths education conference, attended by lots of academics. I'm considering presenting at BCME this October, but only if lots of teachers attend the conference as my presentations always written for teachers. I had a great time at BCME 9 back in 2018 (blog post here) when I was lucky enough to receive a bursary. Teachers - I urge you to sign up to either speak or attend - the website is bcme.co.uk. 

After lunch I went to Matt Man's (@mr-man-maths) session on international exam papers. Matt was responsible for providing me with 'officially the most helpful bit of information I have ever picked up at a mathsconf' (see my post about mathsconf37) which was to explore different specifications on ExamWizard to find fresh banks of questions (I have recently found International A level very helpful for my Further Maths lesson planning). In Matt's session yesterday he talked about a range of qualifications and we had the opportunity to try some questions from those qualifications. 

Finally I went to Ed Southall's workshop on problem solving where he talked about what problem solving is (this will feature heavily in maths curriculum reform in the next few years). We also had a go at some different types of problems. This is part of the work Ed does at Maths Horizons which you can read about here. 

I missed Tim Dolan's (@timdolan) session on online maths tools. I often use online tools for demonstrating concepts - for example my daughter was practising for the Junior Maths Challenge last week and there was a question on rotational symmetry. She didn't know what that was so I used MathsPad's rotational symmetry tool (login required) to explain it to her. I also use a lot of animations in my teaching (gifs inserted into PowerPoints), for example when teaching constructions. I love it that Tim has collated loads of great online tools in one place on his new website mathsindex.uk. Tim invites teachers to contribute ideas for additions to the website. 

I had a nice train journey home with Megan Guinan and Jamie Frost. It was a great day overall, and it was delightful to see that there were many teachers attending mathsconf for the first time. As always, the best part was the networking, chatting about maths teaching, and catching up with old friends. Thank you to La Salle for running the conference and to City of Derby Academy for hosting it. Attendees of the conference will be able to access all the PowerPoints when La Salle shares the link in a few days. In the meantime, I'm always happy to share my schemes of work and/or assessments - just email me. See you at the next one!

5 Maths Gems #197

Welcome to my 197^th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.

1. Dr Austin A Level Revision
It's always great to see new Dr Austin resources. Latest additions include a Harder Reflections Practice Grid and a Negative Enlargements Practice Grid, plus some new A level resources on Logs, Hyperbolics and Polar Coordinates. An A Level Revision section has also been added, featuring revision grids for Year 12 and Year 13.

2. New Online Tools
I've seen a number of excellent new online tools recently:

• Vectorama - I featured Neil Kendall's free resource Graphiti in Gems 196, and now he has published Vectorama which is designed to help teach vectors, matrices and transformations in 2D and 3D. It is helpful for everything from introducing the basics of matrix transformations to teaching eigenvectors in Year 13 Further Maths. Worksheets have also been provided so students can investigate the concepts themselves. This is a fantastic tool - thank you Neil!

• Reflections - Callum Adamson created a tool for modelling reflections in Gemini (download the file and it will run in your browser). You can use the shapes in the drop down menu or upload pdf versions of slides or worksheets and use an interactive mirror on top. In the picture below you can see I've uploaded a page from an AQA topic test and it looks very cool.

• Slide Creator - @TickTockMaths made a Slide Creator which is designed to create maths lessons quickly. Lessons can easily feature example problem pairs, interactivity, fill in the blanks and so on, all using pre-built templates. Check out some examples of lessons: area of a circle, assigning probabilities and factorising quadratics (open these on desktop, not a mobile).

3. A Level Resources
Recently I've seen some new A level resources that are worth sharing.

@andrewmaths1 has been tweeting a series of A level questions on X (thread here).

I like this scaffolded logs resource from @mrlevmaths.bsky.social.

And this great parametrics resource from ‪@karenshancock.bsky.social‬.

Finally, this isn't new but I hadn't seen it before so thought it might be useful to share. Whilst looking for an A level resource online I found the website mathematicswales.com. It features A level questions by topic - always helpful!

4. Mr Barton Maths
In Gems 195 I wrote about some of the fantastic new features on mrbartonmaths.com. Since then even more features have been added so do spend some time exploring it. For example, there's a problem solving section with loads of fantastic lesson ideas.

You can choose a topic and see suggestions for rich tasks and questions that get students thinking.

5. GCSE Revision

We always see a flurry of new Paper 1s being shared at this time of year - it's really helpful to have access to new GCSE resources that our students haven't seen before. It's important to be clear with students that it's not possible to guess what will appear on GCSE Paper 1 this summer so while these papers are great for practice, they can not be considered 'predictions' (though after Paper 1 there is an opportunity to narrow down the topics and attempt to guess what might come up in Papers 2 and 3). Here are the new (free) Paper 1s I've seen:

• 1st Class Maths (Edexcel Paper 1 H and F are already published and AQA is coming soon).
• Hannah Kettle
• Bennett Maths
• New website luckymaths.co.uk has Foundation practice papers 

If you're looking for good quality GCSE revision resources there are loads of them on my GCSE Revision Page - I've added a link to this page at the top right of my blog so you can access it quickly at this time of year. It includes some resources I've made myself including revision mats, the original breakfast warm ups, and the revision quiz I made last year which I'm looking forward to using again (see this post). 

Update

March was a busy time at school, the highlight being our annual Maths Week. This involves a treasure hunt, a daily puzzle, a Sparx contest and an assembly about a mathematician (this year I did it on Turing). 

We are always delighted when we see students attempting to solve the daily puzzle as soon as they arrive at school, and students crowded around the maths office at break eagerly discussing their ideas. We find it difficult to find suitable puzzles for all year groups - this year we took some of them from this helpful resource. 

Delivering assemblies is nerve-racking enough, but to add extra pressure I had a researcher from the Department for Education observing me this year. My school was selected as one of sixteen schools nationally recognised for high engagement, attainment and attendance, so we are part of their research on 'how schools foster belonging'. It was convenient that they happened to conduct this research during Maths Week, which is one of the best house events in my school's calendar.

Did you see the latest comment on my Words to Avoid post? It made me laugh.

I'm very much looking forward to the MEI Conference in July. Bookings are now open. I highly recommend this conference - it's always brilliant.

I'm also looking forward to #mathsconf40. I'm concerned it's going to be a particularly exhausting way to start the busiest half term of the year (I have a Parents Evening on the Thursday and a trip to Derby for mathsconf on the Friday night, both at the end of six period days!) but at least there's a Bank Holiday a couple of weeks later to aid recovery. It's always good to see everyone at mathsconfs, and it looks like there's an interesting range of talks on offer. I've written a new workshop on 'Challenging and Engaging Key Stage 3 Mathematicians' which I'm looking forward to sharing. I hope to see you there!

5 Maths Gems #196

Welcome to my 196^th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.

1. Make it Full Marks

@acutelearning shared a great resource called 'Aiming for A*: Make it full marks'. This is an A level resource made using AQA papers but is relevant for other exam boards too. 

In this resource students are presented with partially correct answers. Each answer is worth some or most of the marks. However, in each case there's at least one error or missing component that means the answer will not receive full marks. Students have to find the error and correct the answer to make it full marks. This is a lovely revision resource to use in a summer term lesson with A level mathematicians. 

You can access the resource here and the answers are here. 

@acutelearning has also shared some other useful resources:

• hypothesis testing revision
• alternating exercises (covering topics from KS3/4/5) - with PPT and answers

2. Mr Hardy Maths
@jim-hardy has shared his website mrhardymaths.co.uk which contains question banks for GCSE, A Level and A Level Further Maths. There's a search box to help you find relevant questions:

Opening one of the topics let you practice this skill on screen with students:

Clicking print gives you a worksheet with answers:

3. Graphiti
Maths teacher Neil Kendall has developed a free resource Graphiti to easily demonstrate calculus concepts graphically. As well as functioning like Desmos you can very easily use interactive tangents and normals, calculate definite integrals, illustrate area between two curves and show numerical integration interactively - switching between trapezium, Simpsons and mid-ordinate methods. It will work with cartesian (implicit and explicit) as well as polar and parametric equations. It works on desktop, mobile and tablet devices.

Here's a short video demonstrating many of its features:

4. Mr Chapman Maths

@dalechapman has shared a number of new features on his website mrchapmanmaths.com. He's made Large Data Set Flashcards for the Edexcel Large Data Set. This is a fantastic revision resource for students studying Edexcel A level maths.

There's also a fun game called Target 1000. You randomly generate a digit and place it in the column addition with a target of 1000. Have a go!

There are also a lot of resources on this website for teaching Decision Maths.

5. Dr Austin Resources
@draustinmaths continues to share fantastic new resources. Recent additions include Hyperbolic Functions for Further Maths, Exponentials and Logs and 3D Vectors for A Level Maths, and Volume and Surface Area of Compound Shapes.

Update

Calculators

I've enjoyed playing with the new Casio Classwiz+ which is a massive improvement on the previous model. The brilliant company Science Studio very kindly sent me both a 85 and 991, engraved with my name, and Casio sent me one too. What lovely people. I've been using my old White 991EX since 2016 and my dependence on the SD button has made me reluctant to transition to the 991CW. But now I have a 991CW+ I've finally stopped using the old white model. The 991CW+ is my new first choice calculator. 

MathsPad

Have you seen the latest update from MathsPad? As well as new resources in their 'Building Blocks' series, which are aimed at students with big gaps in foundational knowledge, they've also started a new collection of cover resources. These are free to access. Also, Nicola has written a useful explanation of the logistics of using booklets in lessons.

Exercise Books

A teacher on Bluesky asked a question about treasury tagging books and I made a quick video for her (I recorded it in a rush before school, so it's not the best thing I've made! Please don't judge...!). In this video I show the layout of our A4+ exercise books and the way we set up our treasury tags. I know a lot of teachers complain that their exercise books are a mess so you might be interested in what we do. 

Conferences

You may have seen that mathsconf40 has been announced for Saturday 18th April. This is a first - mathsconfs have always taken place in March, June and October. A mathsconf at the start of the summer term has taken me by surprise. It's great to see that these conferences are still running. It looks like some people will be staying at the Premier Inn Derby South but for some reason that's £111 for a room so I'm not quite sure what to do about that - it takes the cost to well over £200 for train fare and hotels. I remember when I used to spend £40 on conference hotel rooms! Those were the days.

The MEI Conference is now taking bookings. This takes place in term time (Thursday 2nd - Friday 3rd July) but it's after exams when lots of teachers have gained time so hopefully doesn't involve missing too many lessons. I recommend asking your school to fund your attendance at this - there's no harm in asking! Schools often have untapped CPD budgets. It's a brilliant conference that I highly recommend. 

I attended an Inset Day last week where I went to three excellent sessions: a workshop on the CG100 which was delivered by Simon May from Casio, a workshop on A level marking delivered by Isobel Oakley from Pearson, and a workshop on university admissions tests delivered by Alexandra Hewitt from MEI. I've been to so many conference in the last twelve years it's sometimes hard for me to find sessions that are relevant and useful that I haven't been to before, but on this occasion all three workshops were genuinely helpful. Alexandra said something in her session that really struck me - she talked about who we should encourage to do maths degrees and it occurred to me that I only think of maths degrees as being suitable for the very best mathematicians. But a student could be on a Grade B or C in A level maths and it's their strongest or favourite subject, and maybe one day they'd make an excellent maths teacher. These are the students that I should be encouraging to take a maths degree. I don't do enough of this. This gave me something to think about.

Here's a photo of part of my team on the way home from our post-conference drinks. There were eight of us earlier in the day but we forgot to take a picture. I love my team - a group of absolute legends who support each other every day and work incredibly hard to make sure every child succeeds. 

I wish all of my readers a restful half term break.

5 Maths Gems #195

Welcome to my 195^th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers.

1. Maths Rocket

gcsemathsrocket.co.uk is a new website packed full of useful resources. 

There are over one hundred maths worksheets with answers and accompanying videos. For an example, check out this vectors worksheet. I really like the detailed atomisation of skills. There's everything from getting the direction of arrows right to simple vector routes to a gradual introduction of midpoints. There are lots of questions on each individual skill (extracts are shown below) before it's all brought together at the end in full exam questions. I haven't seen this topic broken down so carefully before. 

Choose any topic and you'll find a similar approach. For example, check out the range of different question types on the Sine Rule worksheet and look at the amount of practice available in the Box Plots worksheet. I think these are great and when I get time I'll add them to my resource libraries.

In addition to the large collection of worksheets, there's a Questions Database for Edexcel GCSE Maths. It looks similar to the very user-friendly website Examq.co.uk which I featured in Gems 158, but it's slightly different in that it takes you directly to a page in an exam paper.

 

There are also slides and YouTube videos which are designed to follow an 'I do, You do' structure to ensure students don't just passively watch the videos but get plenty of practice throughout. 

2. Mr Barton Maths
Craig Barton has updated his free website mrbartonmaths.com with some new features.

Super 8s are designed for consolidation practice of a current topic or for retrieval practice of previously taught skills. It's very easy to select topics. Teachers can project the eight questions on the board in full-screen mode, or print a one page worksheet. Students can also use the tool directly on their phone.

The Exam Papers page provides step-by-step worked solutions for SATs, GCSE, AQA Level 2 Further Maths and A Level questions. Each solution clearly explains the method, and the idea is students use this page independently when revising. If they get stuck on a question when revising, looking at a full worked solution is way more helpful than looking at a mark scheme.

There's also a Games section - some of my Year 7s were enjoying these games during a snowy lunchtime last week.

And there are some great little teacher tools like equipment trackers and noise monitors. 

3. AI and GCSE Stats

Thank you to @harryzafar for sharing two blog posts about how he uses AI to make maths resources. I know lots of my readers are interested in developments in AI and how they relate to maths resourcing so I recommend checking out what Harry has been doing:

• Using Artificial Intelligence to Enhance Mathematics Resources
• Using Artificial Intelligence to Enhance Mathematics Resources: Checks for Understanding

Harry has used AI tools to create some more resources to add to his GCSE Statistics collection at mathboardwalk.com. 

4. Hannah Kettle

Hannah Kettle has been busy making her website easier to navigate. There are lots of useful GCSE Maths resources at hannahkettlemaths.co.uk.

5. I Do You Do Exam Papers

Thank you to Muhammed Balal for emailing me about this simple idea - it seems obvious but I haven't seen it done before. He has taken exam papers and associated shadow papers produced by exam boards, and compiled them into combined 'I do, you do' papers. The idea is that the teacher models a question and then the student completes a very similar question on the next page, and this continues the whole way through the exam paper. This would be a great way to practise exam technique, with the teacher modelling how to set out workings and the students getting plenty of practice throughout the lesson. Muhammed has made papers for GCSE (both AQA and Edexcel) and A level, and GCSE Statistics. He has shared them at mathswalkthrough.co.uk.

Update

Two gems posts in quick succession! This never happens. Social Media has been very quiet over the last year so I struggle to find materials for gems posts these days. But a little flurry of activity online and in my inbox at the end of the Christmas holidays meant that I could write another Gems post only two weeks after posting Gems 194.

What this does mean is I have no new personal news to report, other than the fact it was my birthday last week, and my age is now a multiple of both three and five. Happy Birthday to me! My husband got me a mini Galton Board for my desk which I love showing to students.

My school has a maths teacher job vacancy going live imminently. Please get in touch if you're interested and want more information. We're based in South London. We need someone who can teach Key Stage 3 to Key Stage 5 (with a statistics preference at Key Stage 5). We're fully staffed with a very happy maths department, but we're increasing our staff numbers next year so we can meet the high demand for A level maths.

Did you see the news that Casio has tweaked their Classwiz calculators so they are essentially bringing back the much-missed SD button? I believe it's still labelled as the Format button, but pressing it once will automatically switch between fraction and decimal like SD used to do (and pressing shift + format will bring up the format menu). The new calculator model is the Classwiz+ - you can read more about it here.

At my school we have Year 11 mocks coming up in a couple of weeks. We've nearly finished teaching all the content of the specification and in preparation for these mock exams we will be providing our students with the 'Things to Memorise' resources that I made this time last year and shared in Gems 184.  If you didn't see this at the time, you may find it helpful. You can download these for both Higher and Foundation tier (including editable versions) here for your Year 11 students. Last year we handed them out before mocks and I was surprised to see students still clutching onto them on the morning of the actual Maths GCSE exams in May and June. 

Also, in case you haven't seen this before, it's worth knowing that @1stclassmaths has updated his GCSE Topic Appearance page. Although we can't use topic frequency to predict what will be in this summer's exams (you could say that topics that rarely come up are due an appearance, or you could say that topics that rarely come up are unlikely to come up... who knows), students always find this page fascinating so it's worth showing to your Year 11s.