By now most teachers will have spent a week with their new classes. Inevitably some of you reading this have been throwing your hands up in despair about your new Year 7 class, complaining to colleagues that they are “the weakest you’ve ever taught/taught in years” and lamenting the fact that your primary counterparts have clearly fiddled the data and that the students must have been coached to death through their SATs exams without actually learning anything.
Sound familiar?
My knowledge of primary education is far too limited to even begin to comment on any of the above issues. However, what is indisputable is that a fairly large number of students, for whatever reason, arrive at secondary school ill-prepared for the demands of the mathematics curriculum.
Rather than trying to unpick why this is the case, I want to outline some of the considerations I find to be particularly important for these ‘low ability’…
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The Echo Chamber 