5 Maths Gems #204

Welcome to my 204^th gems post. This is where I share some of the latest news, ideas and resources for maths teachers. 

1. MathsPad Updates

MathsPad has long been one of my favourite websites. It ranks in my 'top five' most used (alongside Corbett Maths, Dr Austin, Don Steward and 1st Class Maths). MathsPad's most recent updates include a new free interactive times tables quiz which is accessible to all, not just subscribers. As no login is required, the URL could be shared, for example with form tutors or parents.

Other new additions to MathsPad include resources for volume and surface, equations, two triangle trigonometry and direct proportion.

2. Mr and Mrs Maths

mrandmrsmaths.co.uk is new website featuring resources designed for secondary maths teachers. There are some resources on here that are worth checking out including 'order the working' for various topics:

There are also crosswords (which might be helpful for cover lessons?), spot the mistake papers and 45 minute papers.

There are resources for every topic, including a lot with scaffolding. Here are some extracts from a worksheet on surface area of a cylinder:

And an extract from a pack of eleven worksheets on equation of a circle and tangent to a circle:

There's also an excellent Key Stage 4 assessment builder.

3. A Level Resources
1st Class Maths now features a complete set of resources for Year 1 Mechanics, to accompany the existing Year 1 Statistics content. This is really high quality stuff so do check it out if you teach A level.

@dandraper shared a resource he wrote for modulus equations and sketching. See his blog post for more details.

@draustinmaths.com shared more A-level Further Maths vectors resources at draustinmaths.com/a-level-further-maths and Jonny Griffiths shared a story about tiles and tessellations called 'Mr Tessacadabra' which is aimed at A Level Maths students.

@marybourassa shared a fun little radians game.

And @cxmetcalfe shared an update to the STEP Support Programme website which is designed to help students prepare for university interviews.

4. Live Geometry
Thank you to @kirillosenkov.com for sharing livegeometry.com. There's so much to explore here.

One feature of this website is a page of @catrionaagg's brilliant puzzles, made interactive at livegeometry.com/CatrionaAgg. This is really lovely.

5. Puzzles and Games

Talented mathematicians of all ages (junior through to undergraduate) who want to have a go at Kangaroo and Olympiad style problems from all over the world can use World Mathematical Olympiads Bank to access over 70,000 problems. You can search by topic. Here are some questions from a national mathematics competition held in the Netherlands for Key Stage 3 students.

@nathanday shared the game allsome.app which I absolutely love!

If you want to play a really obscure game then try Intersection of Three Circles.

Finally, GCHQ's annual Christmas Challenge is coming on 10th December. Teacher resources are provided in case you want to look at this challenge in lessons or an enrichment club.

Requests 

I apologise to all the teachers and people working in education who have been devoting a huge amount of time and creativity to producing new websites and resources that I have been unable to feature in my blog posts. In my last post I implied that these new websites are wholly AI-generated. I've since been corrected (this geriatric millennial doesn't really know what's going on!). The design of these websites requires a lot of original thinking and a huge amount of (human) time, it's just AI doing the background work that makes them all have the same 'look and feel'. Since mid-2026 I have been sent websites on a daily basis, from contributors all over the world, asking me to share their new websites in my gems posts. Most of these websites and resources are great, and although I do share some of them in my gems posts I definitely can't share them all. It's overwhelming for my readers. So I'm really sorry if you've sent me something and I haven't included it. It doesn't mean I don't like it, it's just because there are so many new websites at the moment that I can't process them all. I still appreciate all your hard work. If you're currently working on a website, please don't rely on me for marketing - I've updated my requests page to clarify my position on this. If you want to tell me about something you've made and how you made it, why not come to mathsconf next weekend? I love an in-person chat.

Mathsconf News

Last week was a busy one - I had to attend prizegiving after school on Tuesday and it was my daughter's 15th birthday on Wednesday. In the middle of all that some surprising news arrived from La Salle.

After twelve years of wonderful Saturday maths conferences (I believe I've attended 37 of them), La Salle announced that the conferences, and the company behind them, will cease to exist. Given that I have a hotel and train booked for next weekend's conference in Barnsley, and I was hugely looking forward to seeing friends and presenting on simultaneous equations, I was deeply saddened by this news. I immediately started liaising with Rob Smith who set about trying to fix this situation (well done Rob!). Thanks to the generosity of AQA and the hard work of the team at Complete Maths, the conference is now back on. Phew! Well done and thank you to everyone who saved the day.

Please come! It's the last mathsconf of its form and we want to make it the best one ever. You can get a ticket here. There's a brilliant line up of workshops - something for everyone! I genuinely believe that mathsconfs (affordable Saturday conferences open to all, with teachers presenting to teachers) have had a huge impact on maths education in England. Yes, I have spent a lot of money on hotels and train tickets over the years - I see it as a similar hobby to being a football fan and travelling to away matches on Saturdays, but as it's only three times a year it has had much less of an impact on family life and finances! It has been worth every penny. Even teachers who haven't been able to attend mathsconfs have benefitted from the dissemination of ideas through the system. I think everyone should try to attend the last mathsconf next weekend, and thank everyone involved for making them happen.

You may be wondering what's going to happen next. I refuse to accept that this is the end for mathsconfs! It's essential that teacher-led weekend events continue in maths education - I won't have it any other way. I'm in discussion with Mel from JustMaths about making something happen so watch this space. We hope to run something similar to mathsconfs. Craig and I also plan to start holding HoD Space events. So don't worry - we are a strong community full of willing volunteers who think this is important and we will make things happen. 

BCME

Speaking of conferences, I was at BCME over half term. It was a well organised conference with lots of opportunity to hear from researchers. I like to keep on top of what's going on in maths education. Shout out to the lovely people at Maths Horizons who were the main sponsor of this event. And to Anne Watson, who provided the after-dinner entertainment. 

At BCME there was quite a lot of talk about the Review of Mathematical Education 2026 which had just been released by the Observatory. My readers might be interested in the recent TES article Fear of growing knowledge gaps in secondary maths which references some of this research. I found this article a bit frustrating for a number of reasons. For example, "Some 40 per cent of teachers reported that their most recent lesson focused on algebra, with just 11 per cent of Year 8 lessons focused on ratio" seems to imply that we're not teaching enough ratio. This makes no sense to me. If you ask me what I taught last week and I say algebra, how does that tell you that I'm not teaching ratio next week...? A lot of schools use the same scheme of work so this finding is highly dependent on the week in which the survey was completed. I think this might be an ineffective method of gathering information about school curricula. I can say with certainty that we are all teaching ratio at Key Stage 3 and 4.

Nathan Day wrote an excellent post after BCME "Why is no one talking about behaviour?" that is worth a read.

Did you catch my latest podcast? Craig and I discuss some recent topics of conversation from HoD Space. 

Remember we always welcome new HoD Space members from all over the world. You can use it to ask for advice, magpie resources and share ideas. You don't have to be a Head of Maths, and it's totally free for a month. 

Thanks for reading, and I hope to see you on Saturday 14th October at the last ever mathsconf.

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 websites and tools for maths teaching built with the help of AI. I know there's value in these websites so I'm sharing some of them 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