Coordinating Mathematics Across the Primary School

Tony Brown

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2003
• eBook ISBN: 9781135713171
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Specifically designed for busy teachers who have responsibility for co-ordinating a subject area within their primary school. Each volume in the series conforms to a concise style, while providing a wealth of tips, case studies and photocopiable material that teachers can use immediately. There are special volumes dedicated to dealing with OFSTED, creating whole school policy and the demands of co-ordinating several subjects within a small school. The entire set of 16 volumes is available.

Part one The role of the mathematics coordinator

Chapter 1 The background

Chapter 2 Three broad stages of role development

Chapter 1 The background

The subject leader’s job has developed into a front-line post. Conferring subject responsibility on a single person has created a job of great importance in most schools. Twenty-five years ago the curriculum ‘belonged’ to the headteacher. Some headteachers chose to appoint maths coordinators, but many didn’t. The coordinator’s work was often quite different in both scope and depth from the work done today. Twenty five years ago a headteacher would be proud to talk about ‘my’ school. Everyone, including staff, parents, local authority advisers and HMI looked to the head to explain and discuss the school’s curriculum, since it was the head, in most cases, who had chosen the content and form of the curriculum that teachers would follow. With relatively few externally imposed legal requirements, other than those relating to religious education, the headteacher was expected to have fashioned the curriculum from their own rich experience—and many of them did exactly that very successfully. In recent years the range and complexity of the curriculum has changed so dramatically that a single person cannot be expected to know in detail all the information that relates to all the subjects.

Until recently few children had the opportunity to study mathematics—the experience of most children in the 1950s and 1960s was of arithmetic. Few schools covered a broad science curriculum—nature study was the extent of scientific exploration for many children. RE seldom had amulticultural dimension. Design and technology, information technology, music and PE gave few opportunities for children to be creative and inventive. Children’s experience of arithmetic seldom included opportunities for choice, decision making, invention or creativity. The assumptions inherent in the using and applying programme of study were seldom evident; although the original Nuffield teachers’ books of the 1960s clearly show that some children were fortunate to experience mathematics as a creative and investigative activity that covered much more than arithmetic.

The curriculum no longer belongs to the headteacher. The head’s role of determining the range and content of the curriculum, and their position as curriculum expert in every subject, has been replaced by a system with which we are still coming to terms; and which is continuing to develop and change. In most schools today, the subject leader has the responsibility of being the curriculum expert. Managing this role is an extraordinarily challenging task.

The demands of inspection

When the National Curriculum was imposed on schools, the curriculum became much more extensive, more detailed and more complex than teachers had previously experienced.

Many schools moved quickly to appoint curriculum coordinators and to seek training for them. One of the most galvanising forces for change was the introduction of school inspection. In the brief time they are in school, inspectors need to discuss the mathematics curriculum in great detail.

The demands of inspection have emphasised the need, wherever possible, for a single person within the school to speak authoritatively about the mathematics curriculum. The inspection process has been part of the driving force towards more elaborate and formal procedures for assessment, recording and reporting, and establishing the mathematics curriculum within whole school procedures. The effect of inspection has been to profoundly influence the nature and scope of the work of subject leaders who find themselves key players in the inspection process. The production of a school inspection report depends in no small measure on the subject leader and the way their role has been developed. They need the ability to prepare the ground well before the inspection. They need to be good communicators. They often have only a single interview during the inspection during which to communicate the school’s strengths clearly and succinctly.

The inspection process has driven the development of the role of subject management in primary schools—and not always in a helpful way. School inspection has not been a very uplifting experience for the teaching profession in England. It is important to remind ourselves that the procedure in Wales differs from that in England and the experience of Welsh teachers does not entirely parallel that of their English colleagues. Inspection in Scotland is very different—no OFSTED—but a somewhat different inspection process involving HMI. One could speculate that after devolution in Scotland and following the introduction of a Welsh assembly, the teachers in England may find themselves the only group with a highly centralised, somewhat adversarial inspection process. There is a danger that the welter of national and LEA guidelines and instructions stimulated by these recent developments will smother creativity and invention completely. Their overall effect is an unnecessarily prescriptive and unrealistic series of demands.

Schools are the best places that our society has yet devised for the formal communication of social beliefs and ideals and for the transmission of the broad range of knowledge that we judge young people to need. There is an undeniable human dimension to schools that we ignore at our peril. This book seeks to address the human situation as an integral part of the process of schooling, and as an integral part of managing the mathematics curriculum.

The assessment and recording process has been badly managed by the various government quangos that have had involvement in it. Prior to the Dearing Review, many groups found the lack of clarity in the information to schools a useful way of putting pressure on teachers. The anti-teacher stance of several Secretaries of State encouraged this attitude.

Teachers were allowed to interpret the legislation in a way that implied that everything a child did in maths had to be recorded. The Dearing Review clearly identified that the only legal requirement was to provide evidence at the end of each key stage. Government departments subsequently denied having implied anything else.

Teachers are still coming to terms with the complexities of the assessment process. There are important needs to be met within the school: to inform future planning; to monitor individual children’s attainment; to assess equality of opportunity; to monitor the progress of the most and least able; to provide information to parents. It’s helpful to make a distinction between assessment as a process of professional judgment and record-keeping, which is an administrative task. Many schools are still over-burdening themselves with record-keeping; either because they record too much trivial and unhelpful data, or, as is often the case, by collecting and recording the same information over and over again and reproducing it in different formats. Many schools need to review their record-keeping procedures to find ways of reducing the burden and making the process simpler and more efficient. As part of their review of record-keeping, coordinators need to ask themselves whether information is valuable: i.e. will it lead to improved standards, is it legally required, has it been recorded before, why is it being collected and produced, is there any information that we need and which we haven’t got?

There are a number of national developments that are likely to have a major impact on the mathematics curriculum in the near future. Two in particular are likely to prove very influential. The first is the establishment of Numeracy Centres and the other is the almost inevitable emergence of a national training and qualification procedure for subject leaders. The curriculum currently provided by the Numeracy Centres requires a comparatively large amount of teaching time—an hour a day—and includes a high degree of prescription about how to teach the mathematics it contains. The new government is just as likely to adopt it as was its predecessor. If a ‘numeracy curriculum’ becomes a required part of a new National Curriculum then there will inevitably be intense pressure on the rest of the subjects taught in schools. At worst, Key Stage 1 will become a philistine 3Rs curriculum.

Draft proposals for training subject leaders and providing successful trainees with national qualifications were published late in 1996 by the Teacher Training Agency. The future of this quango is not particularly secure and its absorption into a General Teaching Council remains a possibility in the medium term. The draft proposals make some unrealistic demands on subject leaders, particularly when one reminds oneself that many people who are responsible for mathematics carry out the role unpaid, untrained and as an act of goodwill to the school.

The Cockcroft Report, published in 1982, provided a forward looking description of the work that a mathematics coordinator might be expected to do.

In our view it should be part of the duties of the mathematics coordinator to:

• prepare a scheme of work for the school in consultation with the headteacher and staff and, where possible, with schools from which the children come and to which they go…;
• provide guidance and support to other members of staff in implementing the scheme of work
• organise and be responsible for procuring …the necessary teaching resources for mathematics, maintain an up-to-date inventory and ensure that members of staff are aware of how to use the resources…;
• monitor work in mathematics throughout the school, including methods of assessment and record-keeping;
• assist with the diagnosis of children’s learning difficulties and with their remediation;
• arrange school based inservice training for members of staff as appropriate;
• maintain liaison with schools from which children come and to which they go, and also with LEA advisory staff.

(Cockcroft, 1982, para 355)

Becoming a subject leader can be regarded as having three stages; getting started, becoming established, being experienced. Although some subject leaders find themselves under pressure to do everything at once, there are some aspects of the role that are more realistically tackled at one stage rather than another. The next chapter looks at the three stages separately, but without losing sight of the whole picture.

Chapter 2 Three broad stages of role development

The three stages that are discussed here are:

1. Beginning as a coordinator.
2. Becoming established.
3. Being experienced—working on long-term projects.

Beginning

How well do you know the school? When you start out as a coordinator in your new job what you know about the school is very important. Getting promotion within your current school will feel very different from being appointed to a new school. These situations can give rise to very different demands. There are advantages in being able to say. Tm new round here. Tell me how you do…’. The opportunity doesn’t last long and it’s a useful strategy which can work for a lew weeks.

For the person who is promoted from within their school, there are lots of advantages that come from having insider knowledge. However, we all have our blind spots. Being well acquainted with the school might mean that it is difficult to see alternative ways of doing things. You may have been appointed with a brief to institute change and this can prove more difficult for someone already in the school than for a new arrival. If you change roles within a school some colleagues may see you in a new light and treat you very differently from before, others may not treat you differently at all, despite your changed responsibilities. This range of responses can be disconcerting. Also, in practice it can very difficult to give up some of the responsibilities you thought you would be shedding in order to take on responsibility for mathematics.

If you’ve recently started a new job, take a few minutes to write down a list of things you miss from your old job and a list of things you are enjoying about the new one. How can you maximise the advantages of the new situation? How can you minimise the disadvantages? Put the list away and look at it again after a term or two. Were there things that you needlessly worried about? How did you manage to make the most of your move?

You may have taken a post in a new school or changed roles in your old school. Some things can be done straight away and it can be an advantage to get...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Figures
• Acknowledgement
• Series editor’s preface
• Introduction
• Part one: The role of the mathematics coordinator Part one
• Part two: What mathematics coordinators need to know
• Part three: Whole school policies and schemes of work
• Part four: Monitoring for quality
• Part five: Resources for learning
• References