Supporting trainee teachers with essential numeracy

What's your experience of students’ relationships and confidence with maths?

We’ve got a lot of students who come in and they're really confident and they're happy; they've got GCSEs and A levels and they love maths. Some students think they're better at maths than they really are and the National Numeracy Challenge identifies that.

Then we have a lot of students who really lack confidence. The first words out of their mouths will be: “I hate maths,” “I can't do maths” or “I hated maths at school.” We always have those conversations saying: “Well it may not be a favourite subject, but you're going to have to teach it.”

What I love is that so many of them come back to us towards the end of their training, saying: “It's still not my favourite subject, but I really enjoy teaching it,” which is always good.

A lot of the mature students are worried about the fact that they've had that gap between GCSEs, A levels and then they’re coming into teacher training. So there's always that worry there and that ‘maths mindset’ – there are people that believe you're born with a ‘maths gene.’

Using the resources National Numeracy provides helps us with the students’ maths mindset and developing it to become: “I might not be the best at it, but I can do it.” I think our experiences are a lot about maths mindset and confidence.

Has the National Numeracy Challenge delivered on your expectations?

Absolutely. It serves the purpose for replacing the skills test. What is brilliant for us now is that we can track that data and so not only can we track their score, but we can track how confident they are with maths. We have put 3,293 students through the National Numeracy Challenge since we started using the resource and so it is really interesting to be able to analyse that data.  

Around 55% of students achieved the “Essentials of Numeracy”* on their first attempt. Others are not so confident, with around 11% of students scoring below 60. The resource also tracks their confidence levels too so we can see where students are struggling and may need more support. From those who scored below 80 on their first check-up, 25% chose a confidence score between 0-4 demonstrating low confidence as well as skill. 

What has been the benefit to the university?

Tracking the data has been absolutely brilliant – it supports us with them being compliant at the end of their course so that we can say they've met all the requirements of getting qualified teacher status. 

We used to have what we called a ‘maths audit’ before we used National Numeracy’s system, which was about 40 questions that we'd created on our learning environment. We got a score and we could go through and look at each area and what people were stronger in. 

Ours was very much a set of maths questions, but what we love about the National Numeracy Challenge is the fact that it's very much putting maths into a context. Many people can't see the point of maths, but it actually demonstrates that we use maths all the time every day. 

What are the benefits to the students?

Definitely identifying the gaps in their own subject knowledge, then from there, what their next steps need to be. That may be independent study, but we also signpost them to lots of different resources. It’s also about getting them ready for teaching and talking to their school mentors about areas they feel they need more practice and experience of.

We publicise National Numeracy Day to our trainees for when they're out in school and promote your website for them to use when they're on placement and when they've got their own classes when they graduate.