[keithpeter]

In my opinion: Gove's main change in Maths was in the exam syllabus that is taken at age 16. The new syllabus will be examined for the first time this summer, most schools started teaching the material in 2015. It will take another 3 years or so to see the effect of that on the GCSE classes (basically age 14 to 16) and then another five years for earlier years to shift what they do.

Change takes a bit of time when it is 700,000 children in each year group moving through 10 years of compulsory education. Politicians know this but the news cycle requires changes on top of changes...

[pbhjpbhj]

Which all means changes have to be made at a slower rate than the parliamentary cycle; which politicians won't heed.

But then Gove hadn't a clue and seemingly doesn't care either. Each parliament IMO should get chance to make one change - presented to parliament with optional amendment suggested by third parties (unions, parent groups, students). Let them go the Lords to win the right to make a further proposal to parliament.

That should at least slow them down enough to allow teachers to weave something useful out of the crap that they can enhance over a couple of years before the next half-wit comes along and arses it all up.

[Myrmornis]

Can you say a few words about the direction he took the new GCSE syllabus in?

[keithpeter]

Well, there is plenty of stuff on t'web about the current state of play [1] [2] [3].

My recollection is that Gove's original idea was to scrap the GCSE completely and replace it with a new 16+ qualification consisting of a single 3h exam for each subject. Maths represents a difficulty of course as the range of ability encountered at age 16 for all 700,000 children each year is huge. Maths and science subjects differentiate by topic, wheras Humanities subjects differentiate by response to a brief.

As a concrete example you can ask a group of 30 students to write two sides about the best learning experience they have ever had. Everyone can leave the room feeling they gave it their best shot. Some will be excellent and creative with a good range of vocabulary and demonstrating some self-knowledge and analytical ability. Others will produce a description description, possibly with limited vocabulary, possibly with deficient skills in punctuation, grammar and spelling.

Now ask the same group of 30 students to take a single Maths test. Some will finish in 5 minutes with full marks (it wasn't the right test for them) and some will take an hour and score close to zero (it wasn't accessible to them either).

'The Blob' (the education establishment in the UK, i.e. the people at the sharp end) managed to head this one off together with the QCA and the House of Commons' select committee on education lead by Graham Stuart - a conservative but with experience of work in education unlike Gove. The result was a re-vamped GCSE Maths in which the Foundation tier has some topics previously only found on the Higher tier such as trigonometry, surds, rules of indices with fractional indexes, simultaneous equations, quadratics: solving by formula, factorisation and substituting into to plot graph. Much of the more useful statistics has been removed (graphical presentation &c) and replaced with harder probability. Much more emphasis on technical algebra and difficult fractions/ratio questions.

This lot is working its way down the school system now. If they stick to it the result might be OK in 5 years but my guess is they will get stick for the atrocious pass rates for the next couple of years (or fiddle them somehow) and then fudge it.

[1] http://qualifications.pearson.com/en/qualifications/edexcel-...

[2] https://bettermaths.aqa.org.uk/2014/06/28/gcse-maths-topic-c...

[3] https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web...