Practical Advice for Improving Your Child’s Maths - Part 1

Why your child needs your help with maths (and why you don’t need to know any maths to do it)

We’re going to work on the basis that your child’s maths education from school is inadequate - a dramatic statement that needs some serious justification. Let me back it up. At the end of 12 years of education, over three quarters of students scored less than 40% on GCSE maths. You read that correctly: the vast majority of students are nowhere near achieving even half marks. 42% of students scored below 17%. That is to say that almost half of students got more than 4 out of every 5 questions wrong. On paper, a score of 56% sounds decidedly average but this was only achieved by 7.4% of pupils. This is very bad.

It would be very understandable for a student who knows these statistics to just give up. In fact, lots of students who are not aware but have a vague sense that “this is pointless” do give up. However, some good news can be dug out of this. If a student makes a small personal improvement, it can sky-rocket them through the cohort. As the data above indicates, most of the student population is crowded toward the bottom end of the percentages, resulting in very narrow grade boundaries. A change of only a few percent score could launch a student up across two grade boundaries (or more). In the case of GCSE maths, a little goes a long way.

I hope this series can help your child make that improvement.

What I would like to do in a series of blog posts is outline a realistic, practical strategy that you as a parent can use to help your child do the best they can in a system that is stacked against them. And the best part is none of this will require you to know anything about maths. I’ll try to present guidance and structures that you can pass onto your child that give them the best chance of succeeding. Once again, you won’t have to do any maths.

Why do I think I can help?

Let me start by saying there is absolutely nothing special about me and I don’t have access to secret knowledge or data. The only thing that makes me dare to think I might be able to help is the thousands of hours I have spent working with students on a one-to-one basis to improve their maths. I have spent more time teaching maths (and in a more intense way) in the last 5 years than almost anyone else on the planet. So the only thing that qualifies me to give any sort of advice is that I’ve been there and done it, over and over, for a long time. I have tutored as a hobby since I was 18 but started my own tutoring business in 2016, which saw me teaching full time (for almost 5 years at time of writing). What began to emerge were patterns between the students that are holding them back. And as I (often fruitlessly) endeavoured to help these students, other patterns emerged that could help them overcome their common barriers.

Desperate Times

What I am going to propose is quite dramatic, but desperate times call for desperate measures. In many students’ cases there is literally nothing to lose: they get very little out of maths at school. You might as well try something; I’ll describe exactly what in this series.

In my first posts I’m going to describe what I perceive as the barriers against students, and a lot of those come from the education system itself. I want to make clear at this point that I am not attacking teachers at all. We must praise our state school teachers for doing what I would not: diving into the chaos of the maths curriculum and fighting to help students regardless of its crippling constraints (and maybe the most courageous try to change the system from within).

The British education system is a complex beast and exists in its current state for many economic, political, ideological and historical reasons. I’m not blaming anyone who is part of it, and especially not teachers, but I am going to say: it’s not working for your child (because for the most part, that’s true). Just wanted to get all that clear.

We’re getting on for a thousand words in this post so I’ll leave it here for now and follow up with the next as soon as I can. Thanks for reading and I hope this can help someone.