Teach-Secondary-Issue-14.5

Laying the FOUNDATIONS If your Y7s are struggling when presented with the secondary maths curriculum, it may be a lack of foundational skills that’s letting them down, advises Paul Jenkins ... T o some degree, secondary teachers have always been faced with students who have limited skills when they arrive in Y7. The 2025/26 intake may encounter more challenges than previous cohorts, however, since they’ll have missed a full year of the curriculum in Y1 and Y2, due to the COVID lockdowns. This is a critical period, when foundational concepts are taught and consolidated, particularly inmaths. So what can we expect, and what can we do about it? The importance of number fluency Ofsted has identified foundational skills as being key to success in secondary, since without these in place, teachers are essentially building on sand when it comes to teaching more difficult concepts. The priority for maths teachers thus becomes helping Y7 students who lack basic processes and understandings that should have been secured by the end of primary to catch up. Just as schools have become more cognisant of how teaching reading fluency can improve reading comprehension, there’s growing support in the maths community for teaching fluency in basic arithmetic, in order to provide the foundation for more complex mathematics later on. Many teachers will be familiar with the sight of students in their class using their fingers to add or subtract. Others may use the longhand method of adding double digits together on paper, as it’s safe and reliable – but neither of these calculationmethods are particularly efficient, quick or fluent. This lack of fluency impacts what comes next. A dysfluent student will put a disproportionate amount of time and thought into the underlying arithmetic, before reaching more complex operations. The outcome is that these students will have had insufficient practice at more advanced calculations – not because they aren’t capable of doing them, but because the time they’ve wasted on low-level work has resulted in them failing to consolidate new learning effectively. Lessons fromprimary Breaking this cycle is challenging. Lower performing maths students will typically have low confidence in their mathematical skills already, meaning that a negative symbiotic relationship will encourage them to play it safe when learning their basic maths techniques. This is the great challenge of developing maths fluency, because without fluency, the subsequent load on a student’s working memory will erode their ability to hold on to the newmaths skills they’re learning – which in turn risks having a corrosive effect on all new knowledge they acquire, however well it’s taught. Teachers could teach them the same topic year after year, with the student still never quite getting to grips with it. To get past this, secondary teachers should lean into the expertise of primary maths practitioners and build up the bravery to go ‘back to basics’ by teaching techniques that could supplement the lengthy, frequently labour-intensive approaches that struggling students will typically fall back on. When secondary teachers identify that a student’s fundamental skills are lacking, what they’ll often do is performwork on their times tables in an effort to ensure that at least those are definitely secure. Yet whilst this is the right starting point for some, there’s perhaps an earlier intervention point which may well need to be addressed before that effective foundational learning can actually be delivered. Working at speed In the process of learning maths, a firm grasp of number is the absolute starting point. Almost all students will arrive at secondary understanding how to count and the relative size of numbers. The next phase of learning should involve additive and subtractive work, as for many struggling learners, this is when their overreliance on specific methods and gradual slowdown will start to take root. They can do some of what’s needed, but not with fluency. This is where the most effective interventions will begin. Fluency is, after all, about speed. As such, students will need opportunities for working at speed so that they can build up the pace of their calculations, and better appreciate the value of successfully identifying time-efficient study methods. This is what lies at the heart of becoming a fluent mathematician. Most adults will have developed various maths strategies that they use each day – be it consciously or unconsciously – to perform mental calculations. Whether it’s counting on, substitutions or adding 0, they’re the patterns and simple techniques everyone uses to make numbers that little bit easier to juggle in our heads. For true fluency to become embedded, students will need to master a range of such techniques, along with the ability to match the best “Teachers are buildingon sand when it comes to teaching moredifficult concepts” 62 teachwire.net/secondary