At my school Year 11 are in lessons until half term, but Year 13 went on study leave on 8th May, which means my teaching timetable has already lightened and will soon reduce further (this year I teach both Year 11 Maths and Year 11 Further Maths so I'll gain a lot of time when Year 11 leave). With all the gained hours in a day you would have thought the summer term would be relatively easy. But, surprisingly, it always feels like the busiest time of year. School work still extends into evenings and weekends in June and July in the same way it does in every other month. But, with my Head of Maths hat on, the summer term workload is distinctly different – fewer lessons to plan, but far more administrative tasks. A lot of the job becomes about preparing for the next school year.
As I’ve been Head-of-Mathsing for a good few years, I thought it might be helpful for inexperienced Heads of Maths if I share some of the things that they should be thinking about this term to make sure their department hits the ground running in September. If you’re an experienced Head of Maths then you will already have all of this on your radar, and perhaps other things I’ve missed. The idea of this post is just to give some ideas to Heads of Maths who are new to the role.
Curriculum Development
It’s a good idea to ask your team for feedback on whether your curriculum is working well. Perhaps there are times teachers feel rushed or the order of topics doesn’t quite work. Get this feedback now – if your curriculum needs a re-write it’s a big job. Also consider exams analyses from previous years. If your school’s A level or GCSE results showed underperformance in certain topics (compared to national performance) then you might need to make some changes. For example, one of the topics we were weakest on in a previous year’s GCSE was product rule for counting, so this year I’ve reviewed when we teach that and how long we give it, and I’ve done some department professional development on how to teach this topic.
If your scheme of work is working well then the only thing you need to do is adapt the timings to fit next year’s calendar. I usually need to move a couple of topics around to make things work, but changing the placement of topics has knock-on effects on resources and assessments which is a pain. The timing of the 2026 August Bank Holiday means a lot of schools are going back later than usual this September - for us, the first half of the autumn term is going to be a week shorter than it was this year, and the first half of the summer term is a week longer. So everything still fits but some rearrangement is needed. My schemes of work look like this (each link on the schedule takes you to a topic page where a possible lesson breakdown is provided, but teachers don't have to follow this exactly - they adapt it for their classes):
I can’t do any work on curriculum timings until my leadership team confirm the dates of next year’s assessment windows (they in turn have to wait for the MAT to confirm the dates – I never understand why the MAT waits until so late in the school year to decide the following year's assessment calendar). It means I can’t do all my curriculum work until the last couple of weeks of the summer term. And it’s not just rewriting the scheme of work – website documents have to be updated too, and I need to load the curriculum for each year group onto Sparx which is a big job.
Sparx will look a bit different for our Year 11 next year - previously we’ve set normal Sparx homeworks right up until Easter but we’re going to change that. We like the new GCSE revision tool on Sparx so we're going to set that from February half term of Year 11, instead of topic-based homeworks.
Assessment Writing
We write new mid and end year assessments for Years 7 to 10 every year. This is partly to ensure students don’t get hold of the previous year’s assessments and memorise the answers. An advantage of writing new assessments every year is that we can use previous years' papers as revision material. I enjoy writing assessments, particularly searching for (or creating) novel questions to challenge students. But it’s such a huge job that it’s hard to get in done during the busier periods of the school year, so I try to make a start in the summer term where possible (I try to – but it requires a lot of focus which is hard to achieve at school, so I normally end up doing most of it in the summer holidays or October half term).
This year we wrote Year 13 mocks from scratch for the first time. Last year we used Edexcel’s secure mock papers (which are excellent) but students had clearly managed to find these online, or perhaps through tutors, so we ended up with lots of inflated predictions. It was so frustrating to waste time marking mock A level papers for students who had clearly seen the papers in advance. One boy got 100% in his mechanics mock (!) – his solutions were flawless, seemingly written by a mechanics genius – but he went on to score 62% in the mechanics paper of his actual A level exam in June... We’d had enough of all this cheating so this year we gave up on the secure mocks and instead made our own A level mock papers using questions from a variety of sources. It worked very well, so we’re making one more set. My colleague Linda will do this during her Year 13 gained time – this is an excellent use of time in the summer term.
Resource Improvements
We use warm booklets for retrieval practice at the start of our lessons, and at the end of each topic we give a test (we call these ‘snapshots’). All of these are teacher-made - sometimes they were made in a rush six years ago but get re-used every year. The summer term is a good opportunity to review and improve these resources. For example our snapshots are sometimes a bit short of space so some re-formatting is needed. Here's an example taken from one of my own Year 11 snapshots - in the top image there wasn't enough space for students to present their work clearly. The bottom image is an improvement.
Sparx will look a bit different for our Year 11 next year - previously we’ve set normal Sparx homeworks right up until Easter but we’re going to change that. We like the new GCSE revision tool on Sparx so we're going to set that from February half term of Year 11, instead of topic-based homeworks.
Assessment Writing
We write new mid and end year assessments for Years 7 to 10 every year. This is partly to ensure students don’t get hold of the previous year’s assessments and memorise the answers. An advantage of writing new assessments every year is that we can use previous years' papers as revision material. I enjoy writing assessments, particularly searching for (or creating) novel questions to challenge students. But it’s such a huge job that it’s hard to get in done during the busier periods of the school year, so I try to make a start in the summer term where possible (I try to – but it requires a lot of focus which is hard to achieve at school, so I normally end up doing most of it in the summer holidays or October half term).
This year we wrote Year 13 mocks from scratch for the first time. Last year we used Edexcel’s secure mock papers (which are excellent) but students had clearly managed to find these online, or perhaps through tutors, so we ended up with lots of inflated predictions. It was so frustrating to waste time marking mock A level papers for students who had clearly seen the papers in advance. One boy got 100% in his mechanics mock (!) – his solutions were flawless, seemingly written by a mechanics genius – but he went on to score 62% in the mechanics paper of his actual A level exam in June... We’d had enough of all this cheating so this year we gave up on the secure mocks and instead made our own A level mock papers using questions from a variety of sources. It worked very well, so we’re making one more set. My colleague Linda will do this during her Year 13 gained time – this is an excellent use of time in the summer term.
Resource Improvements
We use warm booklets for retrieval practice at the start of our lessons, and at the end of each topic we give a test (we call these ‘snapshots’). All of these are teacher-made - sometimes they were made in a rush six years ago but get re-used every year. The summer term is a good opportunity to review and improve these resources. For example our snapshots are sometimes a bit short of space so some re-formatting is needed. Here's an example taken from one of my own Year 11 snapshots - in the top image there wasn't enough space for students to present their work clearly. The bottom image is an improvement.
Improving the quality of shared resources is a good task to direct my team to complete after Year 11 have left.
Subject Knowledge Development
The summer term is a good time for teachers to prepare for any new courses they're teaching next year and to develop their subject knowledge in the courses they already teach.
The day after GCSE and A level exams have taken place I hand the spare papers out to teachers of those qualifications and expect everyone to complete the papers themselves. We become experts in the qualifications we teach when we regularly complete exam papers.
As well as completing exam papers I also hope to spend some time this term reading Colin Foster's new website bigmathematicalideas.org.
Timetabling, Groupings and New Staff Induction
I’ve already done the class allocations for next year (i.e. deciding who will teach each year/set) and now we’re waiting for the timetabler to run it all through the system and we’ll see what comes out the other side. My hope, as always, is for minimal split classes. I have a rule that no classes of low attainers should be split between two teachers, so when the timetable comes through I’ll probably have to make some tweaks to ensure this happens (I don’t like any class being split but it's less of a concern for classes of high attainers).
We’re lucky that every year our timetable is ready for new staff induction day, which is on 29th June this year. On this day I run a department meeting after school (joined by new members of staff) where I hand out provisional timetables and set out the big picture and expectations for the next academic year. It's important that new staff go home from their induction day knowing exactly what they're teaching in September.
Another one of my big jobs in the summer term is allocating students to maths sets for next year. It’s important to get this right (particularly when it impacts GCSE tiering) so it takes time – it’s mainly spreadsheet work but I also need to get input from teachers. Our setting is based on performance in formal assessments (mid and end year) but we also take into account classwork throughout the year. I have to wait until Key Stage 3 assessment results are ready before I can get started on this job, and I have to wait for SATs results before I can start grouping the new Year 7s (these are released on 7th July but there’s always a delay getting all the UPNs we need - so this is another job that ends up being completed right at the end of term). I also get heavily involved in groupings in other subjects (careful allocation of students to bands is a key strategy for behaviour management) - all of this happens right at the end of term when there's lots of school events going on (I'm leading two Year 7 trips in the last week of term!) so it gets a bit crazy. Don't ever let anyone tell you that the summer term is quiet!
Preparation for September
There’s a lot of preparation for September that needs to be done in advance. In August I have to spend a lot of time checking papers for A level and GCSE candidates who were close to a grade boundary so I've learnt from past experience not to leave my September planning until August.
I encourage my team to start preparing their resources for September in July (as soon as they know their timetable then they can get started). This includes hole punching exercise books, printing warm up booklets and preparing first lessons. I do this for my own classes too – September Inset Day is always very busy so I know I won’t have time to plan lessons then.
There’s also stuff to prepare for September as Head of Maths – the big one is the maths department meeting on September Inset Day. This is the most important meeting of the year so I always spend a lot of time preparing it. I also need to produce and update posters and slides for my team to share with students in September – for example slides on how to use Sparx (there are new features we need to tell them about) – see my post September Routines for more on this. And of course there’s loads of housekeeping to do in the final weeks of the summer term – updating corridor displays, tidying classrooms and offices, and placing the annual ‘big stationery order’.
This isn't meant to be an exhaustive list of ‘things to do in the summer term’. In all schools there's a lot going on at this time of year (for us it's things like Year 6 transition interviews, Year 10 work experience calls, vast quantities of UCAS references, Open Evening, trips, induction days, assessment marking and plenty more). This is just a post about ‘things Heads of Maths should be thinking about at this time of year’, in case you’re new to the role and not sure where to start. I hope it helps!
Timetabling, Groupings and New Staff Induction
I’ve already done the class allocations for next year (i.e. deciding who will teach each year/set) and now we’re waiting for the timetabler to run it all through the system and we’ll see what comes out the other side. My hope, as always, is for minimal split classes. I have a rule that no classes of low attainers should be split between two teachers, so when the timetable comes through I’ll probably have to make some tweaks to ensure this happens (I don’t like any class being split but it's less of a concern for classes of high attainers).
We’re lucky that every year our timetable is ready for new staff induction day, which is on 29th June this year. On this day I run a department meeting after school (joined by new members of staff) where I hand out provisional timetables and set out the big picture and expectations for the next academic year. It's important that new staff go home from their induction day knowing exactly what they're teaching in September.
Another one of my big jobs in the summer term is allocating students to maths sets for next year. It’s important to get this right (particularly when it impacts GCSE tiering) so it takes time – it’s mainly spreadsheet work but I also need to get input from teachers. Our setting is based on performance in formal assessments (mid and end year) but we also take into account classwork throughout the year. I have to wait until Key Stage 3 assessment results are ready before I can get started on this job, and I have to wait for SATs results before I can start grouping the new Year 7s (these are released on 7th July but there’s always a delay getting all the UPNs we need - so this is another job that ends up being completed right at the end of term). I also get heavily involved in groupings in other subjects (careful allocation of students to bands is a key strategy for behaviour management) - all of this happens right at the end of term when there's lots of school events going on (I'm leading two Year 7 trips in the last week of term!) so it gets a bit crazy. Don't ever let anyone tell you that the summer term is quiet!
Preparation for September
There’s a lot of preparation for September that needs to be done in advance. In August I have to spend a lot of time checking papers for A level and GCSE candidates who were close to a grade boundary so I've learnt from past experience not to leave my September planning until August.
I encourage my team to start preparing their resources for September in July (as soon as they know their timetable then they can get started). This includes hole punching exercise books, printing warm up booklets and preparing first lessons. I do this for my own classes too – September Inset Day is always very busy so I know I won’t have time to plan lessons then.
There’s also stuff to prepare for September as Head of Maths – the big one is the maths department meeting on September Inset Day. This is the most important meeting of the year so I always spend a lot of time preparing it. I also need to produce and update posters and slides for my team to share with students in September – for example slides on how to use Sparx (there are new features we need to tell them about) – see my post September Routines for more on this. And of course there’s loads of housekeeping to do in the final weeks of the summer term – updating corridor displays, tidying classrooms and offices, and placing the annual ‘big stationery order’.
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