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What could the future of primary education look like? How we can take things from where they are now and improve them to make the situation better for the pupils, for the teachers and for everybody involved in primary education?
In each episode, Ed Finch will be talking to guests within the educational field to talk about how things are, how we want them to be and the actions we can take to get them from here to there.
[00:00:00] Ed Finch: You're listening to the Primary Futures podcast from Hamilton Brookes, a podcast about the big ideas and big questions in primary education, brought to you in partnership with Oxford Brookes University.
How can we bring purpose, autonomy and joy into our maths lessons? These are key points my guests Jo Skelton and Professor Ruth Merttens tackle in this episode. Ruth is passionate about creativity in teaching maths and has authored many materials to support teachers in adopting an exploratory approach to curriculum. Jo is equally passionate about maths creativity and is particularly interested in building educators confidence in teaching mathematics.
Let's join the conversation where I ask Ruth and Jo what they're seeing in maths lessons that makes their hearts sing.
[00:00:50] Jo Skelton: Well, the thing that makes my heart sing is when I see children really enjoying and engaging in their mathematical learning and there are pockets of that, you know, there are challenges, there's no doubt there are challenges for us. There have been challenges over a number of years, though. So I think we have to hold on to those pockets of excellent practice where we can see creativity and flexibility in the pupils learning and to see children really excited about what mathematics is doing for them. That's the bit that keeps me going personally. When you see the excitement and the pleasure of discovery and I think that's what we need to hold on to.
So that comes on to the challenges in that, you know, making sure that our maths curriculum has space for creativity, for problem solving, for exploration and to really develop the fundamentals of mathematical thinking, being able to spot patterns, being able to notice things, that it's not about process and procedure, it's very much about, you know, the underpinning structures and strategies.
[00:01:55] Ed Finch: I remember those you know, the four day maths course and the five day and all those great courses we had with the strategists and I remember not, I mean, as a child, I was not a maths-y child, it didn't sing to me. I remember sitting in those rooms on those training days, learning stuff at such a rate that was exciting to me. I remember figuring out how a cone will rotate around its point when you roll it and if you truncate the cone, it's still going to rotate around that point, it was thrilling, I was like, this is great. That was me as an adult in my thirties, learning the value of play and going, Oh, good maths is good play.
[00:02:32] Ruth Merttens: Yes and I think that what makes my heart sing when I go into a classroom is the sense of excitement in learning maths. If I go into a school and I go into many, one of the first things I look at is, are the children enjoying their learning? Not just in maths, but in everything and we know that when it comes to reading, we can teach children to read, we can do all the phonics that Michael Gove loves, and we can teach children to read, that's fine, phonics is definitely a part of teaching children to read. It's been a part of teaching children to read in my life for 50 years before they even got the bandwagon going. But the fact of the matter is we can teach the children to read, but if they cease to read at about age 10 or 11, we've lost the war. We may have won a few battles, but we have lost the war and the problem is that children are ceasing to read and so we need to actively promote reading because it's super critical that children read between the ages of 11 or 12 when they enter secondary and 16, that's the key time, that's the time when their brains are developing, that is the time when the synapses form, that is the time when reading narrative is critical.
[00:03:38] Ed Finch: And we have a big movement in this country and overseas as well for reading for pleasure. I've run conferences on the subject myself and we've spoken out and we've done that. Do we need a math for pleasure?
[00:03:50] Ruth Merttens: We do and that's the thing I'd come back to is that problem in England, that problem in England is recognised as an issue for reading. We need to recognise the same for maths. It's all very well, headteachers who themselves feel disempowered and feel like they are, you know, subject to instructions and prescriptions on the great god of consistency so that across an academy, a school, the schools will be told, the head teachers will be told, this is what we do in every school across the academy. There is not one shred of evidence that consistency here is a good thing. Almost certainly it is a bad thing, but in any event, head teachers have little autonomy now, teachers have little autonomy and so it's not surprising that head teachers say, look, I don't care if they enjoy their maths. Actually, what I'm interested in is ticking these boxes, because these boxes are what I'm being judged on. I'm not being judged on the children's excitement and their passion for their learning, I'm being judged on these boxes. Until we turn that around, until we recognise that it is precisely those things that you cannot quantify or measure that make the difference in education and that every single parent in the country knows that.
[00:05:12] Ed Finch: And you don't have to be an educational genius to think that possibly if a child enjoys something they might try a bit harder and do some more learning. I mean, that seems pretty basic.
You, Jo, part of your role is working on overseas training. So I'm really interested to know if you see some of the problems that we have here overseas in your experience there, or are there systems which are doing it better which we could take a wise look at?
[00:05:34] Jo Skelton: Yeah, so the majority of the work that I do internationally is with international schools and many of those are adopting elements of teaching for mastery. So, I would say to anybody contemplating that, think about what's working well in your school. So as Ruth was talking, I was thinking about one of the fundamental elements of good mathematics education is around the Connectionist model. So thinking and seeing those connections and understanding those as a teacher yourself and therefore helping the children to do that. So I think for me, the most effective models are those which really help children to see the connections within and across mathematics and to other elements such as science and so on, geography and there's many connections to other curricular areas. So I think we need to help children to understand the purpose of maths. So I agree about the purpose and pleasure and I was thinking about this because my daughter at the moment is studying a science degree, which has lots of mathematics in it and thinking really about what's the purpose of our teaching of mathematics, and I think that's what we have to come back to, what's the reason for teaching mathematics.
[00:06:47] Ed Finch: I think in all our learning, we're coming back to thinking, you know, if young people understand the purpose of what they're being asked to study, then there's a chance they might be engaged and they might get on a bit.
[00:06:55] Ruth Merttens: And the purpose is not necessarily utilitarian.
[00:06:58] Ed Finch: Quite.
[00:06:58] Ruth Merttens: The purpose, so for example, you might argue, well, why do we bother to teach poetry? Some of those in the DfE have argued that, and I've been in rooms where they've definitely argued that. Teaching of poetry at the moment is not particularly highly valued. I think that's a dreadful shame, actually, in education, one of the lessons that history teaches us is that, as you say, Ed, very simple, if children are enjoying their learning, if they are excited, if they are motivated, they are actually going to do better, but also they're going to go on doing it and the point is, there is no point whatsoever in teaching a child to read if they never read. There is no point at all in teaching a child maths if they never do maths, if they avoid it, if they hate it.
There is literally no point and so that motivation is a critical factor and one of the things I've seen in international schools is that they are highly aware of that and because they have autonomy, each international school has much more autonomy than each school in England, because they have that autonomy, they can make curriculum decisions which prioritise those things that they feel are going to bring highly motivated children to their learning and I think working in the international section and also working in the private section in the UK, one sees that the autonomy that teachers have in those two sections makes a big difference. So we need to get back to that autonomy within the state sector. I am passionately a supporter of state education, absolutely, all my children have been in state education, I have worked in state education all my life, I wouldn't be anywhere else. But the fact of the matter is that at the moment, teachers working in state education are disempowered and so it is not surprising that some of them leave to go either to the international schools or to the private sector. That is not surprising.
[00:08:52] Jo Skelton: But I do also think that part of that autonomy is giving them the basic understanding and supporting them in subject knowledge development and giving them the, you know, the pedagogical content knowledge to know how to implement effective maths. It's not enough, and I slightly disagree with the comment you made earlier about consistency. I think in mathematics, we do have to have an element of consistency, a consistent approach, for example, to the use of terminology or the use of certain pictorial representations to really help children understand that. But I think it comes back for me to teachers understanding why. Why do I need to use that pictorial representation in that context with that mathematical structure? And that's the part for me that's missing. So to come back to your question around effective models, that's where teachers understand the maths that they are teaching and why they are using that strategy in that context.
[00:09:49] Ed Finch: Yes.
[00:09:50] Jo Skelton: That's what we need to get back to.
[00:09:51] Ruth Merttens: I totally agree. My comment about consistency was not within school, it was across school. So I think that's a very important point, consistency in models and images through the school is absolutely critical to good mathematics teaching.
[00:10:05] Ed Finch: That was a strength of the old numeracy strategy, we had that lovely concrete representations and pictorials resource and you could say, I see for this piece of calculation, this is going to make sense and I understood why I was using it and it was really handy.
[00:10:18] Ruth Merttens: But Jo's right, that training. I think Ed, Jo is right, training is critical here because you talk about models and images in mathematics. Some models are linear, some are not linear. Some images are linear, some are not and the distinction between a linear model and a non linear model is very important when you think about the precise thing that you are actually teaching. So a linear model may be very helpful in doing counting and subtraction, but it will not be helpful in doing decomposition subtraction.
So, actually choosing which model you're using and having consistency through the school is critical, but that depends on teachers understanding, and that depends on training and so we come back to training. Again, I'm appalled at the lack of training offered to many teachers who are now teaching in our schools, and they have had training which has not been anything like the training that we used to take for granted. Well, certainly when I became a teacher but even from when my daughters became teachers or my sons became teachers, the training they received was out of all proportion more thorough, more robust, better than the training that teachers are now being offered because the time has been cut, the time for actually pondering and reflecting on mathematics, for the theory, which is very important, because if you don't understand the theory, you cannot do the practice and those things have been cut. They've been cut and now what's happening is many people are coming into schools to teach with precious little training, and they will be the first sitting here to say, I want the training, send me on some training, I'm happy to have it!
[00:11:56] Ed Finch: So I think if a colleague is trained through a university route, if they come through Westminster College up the hill, then they might have had some of this stuff and there's really good practice in ITT in those areas. I think it's when you get these school based things, you can find yourself a teacher who's been trained to deliver this package and their understanding of maths is the delivery of a certain online package, there's quite a few of them, so I'm not blaming anybody for that, but it means you've got colleagues with limited understandings. How would we break into that? We're not quite onto that bit of the show yet, but it's interesting, I want to pursue it. Is there space in the early career framework or do we need to pull them out?
[00:12:38] Jo Skelton: So sadly, that idea of our trainees coming out with all this wonderful subject knowledge enhancement is is reducing. The amount of time we actually have to work on subject knowledge enhancement in ITT context is reducing and is now quite limited. There is much more of a desire to get our trainee teachers, our novice teachers into school very quickly doing their placements, learning from models of practice, so there's two things to that really. A few years ago, one of the highlights of my teaching with those trainee teachers was that aha moment when you're unpicking a particular model of mathematics and they suddenly realise that all of those years, for example, a very common one, long multiplication, long division, multiplying fractions, they suddenly understand why. They understand why and that is fundamental because that links not only to their own knowledge but also to their enjoyment. What we want to do is we need to have a generation of teachers who are confident with their mathematics and enjoy mathematics so they can pass that knowledge on to children. Unfortunately, the model that we're having is where we're quickly getting the trainees into school and then they are effectively learning from the models that are already there. So if those models, this perpetual cycle of this is the PowerPoint, this is what we use, this is how we do it. So it becomes very much a routine and a procedure about teaching mathematics without that fundamental understanding of why.
[00:14:13] Ed Finch: So in that old model, you were asking them to actively question what they were doing and in the new model where I go in, I'm based in this school and this is how we do maths, I'm probably actually discouraged from asking any questions because this is how we do it and starting to ask questions about why it is, well, it's not going to help anyone.
[00:14:30] Ruth Merttens: No, but also you can't ask the questions because you don't know what the questions are to ask. Because the point about learning is that actually, when you're learning, especially with maths, you may have a procedure like long division or long multiplication, or multiplying and dividing fractions is a very classic one. I agree with Jo. When you're, when I'm working with students, teachers with adults, it is very common for them to say, oh, I knew that you'd turn the fraction upside down and multiplied, but I have no idea why and it is very interesting when people do have the aha moments, how they're teaching improves, because that's absolutely critical and I think that we're shortchanging everybody at the moment. We're putting teachers into schools. It's hard to find schools to take the trainee teachers. The schools that do take the trainee teachers may not have excellent models to show those teachers. So, we're perpetuating bad practice, that is definitely the case and also, we're not allowing those Trainee teachers to have time to make that knowledge their own. Unless you make knowledge your own, it isn't actually knowledge and we would never train doctors like this. If I said I'm going to train a doctor by sticking them in the operating theatre and letting them operate on a couple of people, and then that'll be fine, I won't bother to teach you. I'll just put them in there because they don't really need all that theory, that's just nonsense. We wouldn't do that because we'd be worried a few patients would die along the way. But we actually do that with children and this actually, education is more important.
[00:16:05] Ed Finch: Well, I think this sounds like the great time to take a break because we've identified a few issues and in the next section I want to really focus on positives and on how we can make this thing work. So let's take a quick break and then we'll come back and talk about how we can make maths work for everyone.
So before the break we were talking about how things are now in our schools and maybe a little bit about how they got to be the way they are but right now I'd like to attack the world with a bit more optimism and say how could it be? And I want to imagine a world, I'm imagining five years from now when we've really cleverly made representations to the right people and pushed on the right door. We haven't found a huge amount of money because there isn't a lot of money running around but let's do that and in five years how could it be?
[00:16:52] Ruth Merttens: I think you could make changes quicker than five years, I'm really optimistic, Ed. One of the things that you could do is look at the systems because we need systemic change and so I'm going to go back to consistency and talk about consistency, not within school, which is obviously vital. You have to have consistent math teaching through the school, but consistency between schools. My argument is that in England, Each school is different. Each school has a different catchment area, has a different constituency, has a different makeup, has a different feel factor, the staff are different and all these things mean that a school is a local community, a little hub, and it's got to be particular to itself, true unto itself and actually, when you have a system which says I've got 15 primary schools in one academy and across those 15 primary schools the scheme for English, the scheme for Maths, the scheme for History, the scheme for Geography, the scheme for Science are all going to be the same. Two reasons for that. One is economics, you get a deal if you're buying 15 of the math schemes and the other is that for some reason, although there is not one shred of evidence, for some reason the bosses seem to assume that consistency across all the schools will be better and they'll say, well it'll please Ofsted, there's no evidence for that either, because I've spoken to Ofsted and that is not the case. But it is a powerful belief and I see it all the time. As I go around schools, it is the constant complaint. It comes in two forms, it is the class teacher on the ground saying, I have to use this scheme because it's in all the academy schools, we all hate it here, but it's in all the academy schools that we have to use it, that's the first thing. The second thing is the head teacher who is leaving and who says, I'm leaving because it says headteacher above the door, but actually I make no curriculum decisions.
[00:18:52] Ed Finch: So in our optimistic world, we're going to somehow uncouple their sort of steamroller.
[00:18:58] Ruth Merttens: Yeah, we, I would just uncouple it. I would simply say it's very easy to do, you simply, you don't have to spend any money. You just say, actually, we are not looking for consistency across 15 schools in an area. We are looking for each school to be its own thing and the most important thing and Ofsted do say this, but it's not really policed. The most important thing is that teachers buy into the resources that are being used, through understanding those resources, they buy into them, and so teachers in a particular staff room will have a meeting and say, we think we'll use this for our maths because it'll suit our children and we can adapt it.and that's about the teacher agency, the head teacher agency, to decide which scheme they have, but it's also about training.
[00:19:38] Ed Finch: So that's an honesty thing there, isn't it? So when I'm inspected and the inspector says, so tell me Mr. Finch about, you know, the maths scheme you're using and I say, Oh, we use this one. And they say, are you happy with it? I suddenly have to be quite brave to say, I actually don't think it's the right one for our children because I'm worried that we're going to go into a category as we used to say. So are we talking here that in our model five years down the line, our inspection regimen, it's going to be such that people can have these honest conversations and not believe it's going to mark them down.
[00:20:09] Ruth Merttens: Yes, but also that they, that comes before you, preempt that because you actually say actually the first question we're going to ask you is how did you select the scheme you're using? And Ofsted aren't stupid. If you look at 15 schools and they're all using the same school scheme, you know how they selected that scheme. It wasn't selected by the heads because that's not going to happen.
[00:20:30] Ed Finch: So they'll be talking to a maths coordinator in a school and the maths coordinator is going to be saying, well, everybody agrees that this scheme is the right one to go with. Within that world where it is very schemified in primary schools, like it's not how it was when I trained. You know, we do tend to have this project for this subject and that project. Not by itself a bad thing, because there's some resources that are going to save me some time making them myself. I used to draw my resources and then I had little frames. I had a book of things you could photocopy and put around the edge to make them pretty. It was marvelous and now I don't. I simply have this thing and I print it off and I put 30 of them in front of the children. It saves me a lot of time and maybe I've got time to think about how I'm going to make it land.
[00:21:11] Ruth Merttens: But I think that the schemes are, and you've got to come back to that. I mean, I wrote a math scheme. I wrote the math scheme, Abacus, it was the case that there were a lot of my colleagues in math education, jo's too young, but there were a lot of colleagues at the time who were a little bit horrified. They said Ruth, I think you're sort of selling out to the devil here, you're writing a math scheme. We don't want teachers to be teaching to a scheme because it's prescriptive and because it's removing their sort of choices and I said, Oh no, it's very adaptable, it's set up to be adaptable, we have word documents rather than PDFs because we want teachers to change them. There was a big fight with the publishers over that, but I won it and actually we set it up to be adaptable in exactly the same way as Hamilton has got Always been adaptable. It's always been plans for you to adapt. That's the absolute mantra of Hamilton.
[00:22:02] Ed Finch: I first came across Hamilton many years ago when I was working in a middle school up in Blackbird Lees and I remember that. I remember I would download them and I would go to, for those pupils in that school, I would delete a lot of content. I said, there's only so much this I'm going to get through and in fact, I was sort of being given more than I needed. So I could make those choices, I understand now.
[00:22:23] Ruth Merttens: You were being given a lot to make those choices. Nowadays, the schemes are not like that. Nowadays, the schemes are totally different to that. They are not for you to adapt, they are for you to deliver and that will be what is said. This is about delivery.
[00:22:37] Ed Finch: So Jo, in five years from now when, will you get some more time back in each initial teacher training so you can spend a bit more time on this? And how will you be working with young people who are becoming teachers to encourage them to adapt and find space and find creativity?
[00:22:52] Jo Skelton: Yeah, so I would love to have more time with my trainees because I think that really, for the reasons I've said already, but also to have some enduring contact. So either through the Early Career Framework or through ongoing CPD opportunities, because I'm less worried about the resources, which particular scheme a school is using and whether that's consistent across an academy. For me, it's about the implementation of that scheme and how teachers adapt to the needs of their children. You're absolutely right, every school is different, but also every classroom is different. So we need to, for me in five years time, we would have a generation of teachers who had space to really think about the needs of their individual children and the groups of children within their class and the autonomy and the understanding of how to adapt their resource to meet the needs of their children. So it may be that for this particular class I can follow the scheme more closely, however for this class I need to make considerable adaptations because of the needs of the children in that class.
[00:23:59] Ed Finch: And I'm empowered to do that.
[00:24:00] Jo Skelton: Exactly and that's expected, not just empowered. That actually is what Ofsted are looking for when they come into my classroom, they're not looking for how I adhere to the scheme, but how I adapt to the scheme and I think the focus towards adaptive teaching and inclusive classroom practice needs to recognise the fundamental needs that teachers have to understand the why. Not just the how, but the why, why am I teaching this thing in this way, this concept, to these children in this way? And when the children are not getting that, having the time and the space and the support to unpick why that's not working, what are those barriers and how can we address them?
[00:24:41] Ed Finch: So I'm going to tell you, I found out my message from the future came back and apparently in five years from now they've got rid of the national curriculum as we would recognise it at the moment and apparently in five years time there's going to be this independent curriculum commission completely independent from government and I'm telling you it would be news to you but you were both put on the committee to inform the maths area of this new document. So what will you have been asking? What will you have been petitioning to put into this new document?
[00:25:07] Jo Skelton: So again, it's not necessarily about the content of what we're teaching, but the how, it's the delivery. So again, I'm less worried about having a list of concepts. We have to teach, you know, fractions, we have to teach multiplication. But having the autonomy to choose a range of different strategies so that children understand the mathematics that sit behind it. So using a different range of strategies and knowing why that's the case. So being able to apply that to a range of different contexts and to do problem solving and reasoning and all of the things that are fundamentally there in the National Curriculum at the moment. It's just about how that's delivered in the classroom and for me again, teachers understanding. about what that actually means. For example, fluency. Fluency is one of the key aims of the National Curriculum currently. That's a really good thing to promote, if you understand what fluency actually means. It's not rapid recall, it's not memorising and rote-learning your times tables, but being able to work flexibly, to think efficiently and to find ways around. So if my first strategy doesn't work, what else can I do? What do I have in my toolkit of mathematical thinking...
[00:26:19] Ruth Merttens: And also be able to use what you've learned. It's no good knowing, it's absolutely no good knowing that seven nines are sixty three, if you have no idea how to use that fact. For example, if you can do seven nines is sixty three because you've learned it parrot like, you may still not be able to do how many nines there are in six hundred and thirty and so actually being able to apply the facts you've learned is critical. But I would take issue, Jo, with the idea that the content in a sense, doesn't matter as long as we get to the why. I agree that we should get to the why, that's a baseline for me, but I would take issue with you on the content because when I was on the National Curriculum Committee, we did actually come up with a curriculum that we thought was quite moderate and it went in the bin and we got the curriculum we now have. But the fact of the matter is that one of the disagreements between the committee and the government was on the quantity of stuff in the national curriculum. If you crowd your national curriculum for maths, if you crowd what teachers actually have to do in maths with a lot of stuff that is better done at secondary, then what you're doing is making children go too fast, you're not allowing for the space to breathe as you do that and you're also introducing concepts which the children are simply not able at that stage to really grasp.
[00:27:37] Ed Finch: And they haven't been able to embed the building blocks that would give them access to that.
[00:27:40] Ruth Merttens: So for example with ratio. Ratio is a very tricky concept and you can put the building blocks in place. But if you have questions such as we have on the SAT, the test that eleven year olds do that are absolutely identical with the questions that turn up in the GCSE Maths. If you have those questions are the same, you are doing something wrong because actually in the primary curriculum we need to be getting the building blocks and in the secondary curriculum we need to be building on that really strong foundation and doing some new things that excite children. If they've been turned completely off fractions in the primary school because they haven't understood them, the teacher doesn't understand them, never mind the children, then they don't understand them, then what happens is they think, I can't do fractions. If I had a pound for every child who said to me, I can't do fractions, I would not be sitting here right now, I'd be somewhere very sunny and very warm with a drink. The fact of the matter is that actually we need to go slower. That means that we need to have less in our curriculum. We need to crowd it less. So I would be sitting on that committee saying, what are the essential building blocks in mathematics that we need to put on the curriculum?
[00:28:55] Ed Finch: So let's just for fun, let's go round the table and let's kick something out of this overcrowded curriculum. I'm going first. I'm getting rid of Roman numerals. I've never used them in my life and I've forced them into too many children now. That's gone from the national curriculum, five years from now, the joy will be palpable. Who'd like to go next? Right, Ruth, what are you getting rid of?
[00:29:14] Ruth Merttens: I'm not getting rid of a topic as such, but I'm going slow. So I wouldn't have multiplication and division of fractions, I would not have addition and subtraction of fractions, I would have the concept of a fraction and I'll just say a little bit about why, because it explains why I'd take out other things. Basically, I think the critical thing about a fraction is that if I have a quarter of a half, it gets smaller. So if I go home and I've got a quarter of the cake left and I'm really looking forward to that last quarter of the cake and I've got it on my plate and I'm just about to eat it, and then Ed turns up at the door, well obviously I've got to share it. So I always say to teachers when I'm training, I say, well when that happens, am I going to have less or more? And they look at me like I'm mad, and they say well of course you're going to have less and I'm saying, yeah, that's why I'm crying. So, you know, I'm going to have less. But one quarter times one half is going to give you a smaller answer. Once you understand that fundamental fact about fractions, when you multiply them, they get smaller and you understand why, because I've got a quarter of a cake and somebody's making me share it, then that is a very critical thing. Now, I need to have the time and space to get the concept of fractions, the understanding by playing with things, including cake, by doing things across. So what I want to do is not so much remove stuff as slow it down, is come back to the basic fundamentals.
[00:30:36] Ed Finch: If you've got a child finishing year six and they really understand that, then they're keyed up to...
[00:30:42] Ruth Merttens: Ready to go in the secondary and also it's nice for children to go into secondary and for some things to be new. Secondary colleagues were really upset when the National Curriculum came out, because they said, you've taken all the stuff we normally teach in exciting new ways, and...
[00:30:57] Ed Finch: ...and they say, Oh, we've done this.
[00:30:58] Ruth Merttens: And they say we've done this and I didn't understand it then and I'm not going to understand it now.
[00:31:01] Ed Finch: I get that. So Jo, would you like to take anything out?
[00:31:04] Jo Skelton: Yeah, well actually, I would like to offer a different perspective, because actually for me, that's the reason for keeping fractions in, multiplying by fractions in, because it gives children, or it stops children from developing false understanding that when you multiply, numbers always get bigger. Well, actually, they don't and it's helpful for children to know that in the way it is when early subtraction is taught and you're looking at say, seven subtract four. If a teacher's got four subtract seven, they say, you can't do that. Well, actually you can. So I think for me, this flexibility on this understanding of the manipulation of number is really helpful. I think the constraint and the ways in which you're testing are a completely different issue. So for me, I think I would see it more of perhaps lines of development of things that you might do within those concepts but the measure at which we're accessing whether a child is age related or not, that is the bit for me which would be unpicked further.
[00:32:00] Ed Finch: Okay. So let's look at that in five years with our magic wand and our, if I understand right, certainly in upper key stage two in years five and six in our system and maybe further down the road, the dead hand of the SATS test is very much upon the teacher's shoulder and so they go, they need to be able to do all these things that might turn up in the test. So let's get rid of that test just for a moment, or what should we do?
[00:32:27] Ruth Merttens: What you have to do is uncouple assessment of teachers and schools from assessment of children. At the moment, those two things are completely coupled and it's a disaster. So basically, at the moment, Teachers are judged by how their children do and that's judged by ticks on a box. So, we record children's progress in ways which are not really worth the paper they're written on, except they're not written on paper, they're written on screen, but they're not really worth the press of the button to get it on the screen. We record children's progress, and then people monitor that progress. Who are the people? Ofsted, monitoring the school, the head teacher, monitoring the teachers and the problem is, therefore, that children's are part of the teacher's own assessment and the school's assessment and that is the problem. We need to uncouple that. When I came into teaching, which is now in prehistory, I guess, it is the case that we used to assess the children, of course. I was teaching in the ILEA, so that shows how old I am and we used to assess the children through having a book which had a page for each child in which you wrote notes, and we also had little tick boxes that we constructed ourselves for what you were doing in maths that particular week and so I'd put, we had a traffic light system, so if Jo could do it, she got a green dot. If I thought that Ed couldn't do it, he got a red dot.
[00:33:47] Ed Finch: I did get a red dot, to be honest.
[00:33:48] Ruth Merttens: Yeah, Ed
[00:33:49] Ed Finch: That
[00:33:49] Ruth Merttens: was pretty much always a red dot. But then you'd look at those red dots and you'd think, where am I going to, what am I going to do about those? Because they've not understood it and you'd have a lot of children who were sort of orange, which meant they kind of got it, but you were going to need to come back to it. Now, that was a very simple system of recording. We called it record keeping. Our books were what we called assessment, because they were where we wrote notes and the notes would say things like, Jo had lost her pet hamster, it had died, so she wasn't really focused this week and that would be a note that would tell me that I wouldn't want take too seriously the fact that she hadn't done that well this week and so the notes were actually sort of quite useful in helping you form an assessment. An assessment being quite a wooly thing, not a number of a child. When we uncouple assessment from numbers because assessment of children is not actually fundamentally quantifiable and we uncouple those numbers from the assessment of teachers and schools, we'll get some sense in the system and actually it would cost you nothing to do that, you could do it, we could, many of the reforms we're talking about here could be done overnight to no cost.
[00:34:57] Ed Finch: So would you still want to use something like an end of key stage assessment, but keep that in a black box?
[00:35:03] Jo Skelton: It's useful to have, as Ruth is saying here, a more holistic view of what a child can do. So, for me, it's not necessarily about whether they can or can't do long multiplication, but what processes are they using. So, that opportunity to use your assessments to inform your teaching is a really strong link. Of course you need some measures, whether that's some kind of summative measure of where they're at this point in time. Not have they passed or not, have they achieved that or not, but where they are in time. So I think somewhere in between the rigour of being able to have consistent approaches to assessment so that one teacher's measure is similar to another's, but without that they've either got it or they haven't, I think is the way.
[00:35:48] Ed Finch: We worked really hard, didn't we, to campaign to get rid of national curriculum levels? And it's the point when I said, well, he's a 5A at the start of the year, so he jolly well better be a 6B by the end of it, or whatever. I think we haven't really found out what we're doing and as a result, people have fallen into maybe even less healthy ways of assessment as a result.
[00:36:06] Jo Skelton: Really we've just switched one way of measuring children for another.
[00:36:10] Ruth Merttens: And also we've, technology has a little bit of the blame to take here because as soon as the Fisher Foundation produced, and this was in Oxford, produced the ways of producing a score for children through their primary school, then you draw a line and you see where they should be at secondary and this is exactly what happens at the moment. What happens with your child at the age of five, six, and seven is predictive for what is supposed to happen to them at 15, and 16 and it actually has a deleterious effect because what happens is that a child may be having, maybe their hamster died, as I said. They may be having a bad time when they...
[00:36:49] Ed Finch: They saw a squirrel out the window.
[00:36:51] Ruth Merttens: It's, yeah, exactly. You know, they saw a squirrel out the window, or it's snowing that day and so they may do sort of something bad in a test, the SATs at the age of seven, at Key Stage 1 and that's a predictor for them at Key Stage 2 and so it means that teachers will put a lot of effort into making sure children achieve their predicted grades. First of all, they're not going to put a lot of effort into making sure they exceed their predicted grade and actually, if Jo was just on a bad day that day, maybe I should be putting effort into making sure she does a lot better than that, because she's capable of it.
[00:37:26] Ed Finch: We're getting towards the end of our time here and you know, I am seeing this golden future and I'm seeing teachers who are empowered and creative who are seeing the children in front of them as people, not as numbers. I'm seeing them recognising these schemes as great resources to jump off from or to use as they need to, or to sometimes put to one side because they need to go back and do something. But this is all five years down the line.
I would need to know what colleagues might do next week, which will just be the first step on this journey towards an empowered profession and empowered professionals. What do you think we should do then?
[00:38:02] Ruth Merttens: Take a step back from the scheme, because as Jo started by saying, her students come to her and say, you know, can I put down the PowerPoint? And I think the point is, yes you can. Actually, teachers are leaving the profession in droves. Nobody wants you to leave. Your school doesn't want you to leave because they cannot replace you. So, if you shut your door and you put away the PowerPoint and you are not going to lose your job, actually, you'll be fine. There's no risk here because nobody's going to lose their job because they put away the PowerPoint, so put away the PowerPoint. Actually, look at it at the beginning of the week and think, which bits can I use? If I don't want to use, if I'm going to get out the manipulables because I'm not going to use the PowerPoint, I'm going to get the children using a bead bar, I'm going to get the children using Numicon, I'm going to get them playing with the multi link of the Lego. That's absolutely fine, don't be scared of breaking the prescription because at the moment, you the teacher, are in a position where you can decide for yourself because nobody's going to get rid of you! You're not there's to get sacked. No,
[00:39:07] Ed Finch: A valuable commodity in your school.
[00:39:09] Ruth Merttens: Exactly and so just take the courage to say no and absolutely take your control of the PowerPoint. Take your control of the reading curriculum. Even more important, take your control of what real books you're using and how you're reading.
[00:39:24] Jo Skelton: And I would add to that to think, you know, really carefully about the needs of your children and put them first. So think about what do they need at this moment in time? What's the next step for their learning? And what can I do as a practitioner to really support them with that?
[00:39:45] Ed Finch: Yes, yeah, I've said in this podcast already, I wasn't a, I wasn't a maths y kid, it didn't sing to me, that doesn't mean it won't sing to the children in my class, but it does mean I need to take responsibility. If someone's listening to this and they think, yeah actually I kinda get that, I'm not, maths didn't sing to me and I want it to sing to my children. What could they do to take control of that? What would you like 'em to do?
[00:40:09] Ruth Merttens: Use more things that, there are models and images out there which really help. Look at things like on Hamilton we have misconceptions in maths, which are really fun because you look at them and you can see why the children are saying what they're saying and I, often teachers say to me, oh I have that, I have that too, I thought that and I think that's about trying to sort out the why for yourself. But in a way, the other thing I would say is go to Jo, go to the trainers, go to the universities. They do have courses. These things, they are extra time, but they're so worthwhile.
[00:40:45] Ed Finch: They will piggyback, yeah.
[00:40:47] Jo Skelton: Yeah, reflecting on your own attitudes to maths is really helpful as well. So, we know that there are a lot of teachers with maths anxiety and maths teaching anxiety, which is where you are fairly confident in teaching, in doing the maths yourself, but teaching that to a class is another matter. So there are some recognised ways in which you can start to build your own confidence in maths because the things that we are saying here relies on teachers having confidence in their own mathematics and that's definitely something to look at, so yeah.
[00:41:18] Ed Finch: Well thank you, Ruth. Thank you, Jo. Thank you for this time. It's absolutely beautiful work. I think I'm now entirely confident and optimistic about the future of maths education in our schools. That's a great gift. Thank you very much.
[00:41:30] Ruth Merttens: Thank you, Ed.
[00:41:31] Jo Skelton: Thank you.
[00:41:36] Ed Finch: So which ideas would you like to take away from this conversation? Download the Primary Pledge Card in the show notes to continue the conversation and note actions that you'd like to take. Share your Primary Pledge Card with us and fellow educators by tagging Hamilton Brookes on social media. At Primary Futures, we're on a mission to build a better future for primary education and you can help us to spread the word by leaving a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast to help more educators discover us and the inspiring conversations we have with our guests.