A new school year: support for secondary maths teachers new and old

The start of a new school year brings some new teaching groups for most teachers, and also a chance to try something new in the classroom, in planning or in working with colleagues. So we thought it’d help to provide pointers to some of the resources on the NCETM website, as well as the activities available through your local Maths Hub. We hope there’s something here that’ll make your teaching a tiny bit more effective or rewarding this year.

For everyone in the department

The resources on our website are best used for medium term planning—particularly if that’s accompanied by discussion with colleagues. But across all our resources, there are also questions, activities and tasks that can be grabbed and used to augment any lesson at any time.

Almost everything can be found via our Secondary Mastery Professional Development Materials section, which is broken down into six themes and 17 core concepts. On each of the core concept pages, you can find PowerPoints covering Key Ideas linked to the concept and, in many cases, Checkpoints, to help you assess the understanding students have brought with them from primary school. Both these resources are rich in tasks and slides that can be put in front of students in your classroom, but always enhanced by materials which support a teacher’s professional learning or can be used in collaborative planning.

Other resources are brought together on a page complementing the mastery professional development section—all of which is wholly aligned with the DfE’s guidance for teaching maths at KS3, which came out at the start of 2021/22.

For those new to teaching

If you’re in your first year or two of maths teaching, in addition to the materials mentioned above, you may find our Secondary Subject Knowledge Audit page helpful. This holds 17 separate documents exactly matching the core concepts in the professional development materials. You can use these to measure your own understanding of a topic area, and your confidence in teaching lessons around it as well.

For those in leadership or mentoring roles

If you’re new to the HoD role, there may be something for you in our new article with that focus. In addition, if you have new arrivals to the profession or trainees in your department, you may like to use our secondary ITE materials to look at areas of pedagogy with them. Colleagues from other subject areas with some maths on their timetable, or transferring to maths teaching more permanently, can sign up for a programme of specialist knowledge workshops run by their local Maths Hub. And if you need to plan a more formal, longer session on an area of maths teaching with the whole department, one of our Departmental Workshops might fit the bill.

What Maths Hubs offer

The range of professional and school development activities offered by Maths Hubs across England includes opportunities to collaborate with colleagues in other schools, whatever stage of your career you’re at. A consistent theme of all these opportunities, which entail prolonged work over a large part of the school year, is an emphasis on individual participants having an influence on maths teaching across their entire department, as well as deepening their own knowledge and teaching skills.

We hope something in the above list is of use to you. But, that aside, we hope you and your department have a rewarding year.