Subject Specialism Consultation

Preliminary Remarks

The Mathematical Association welcomes the recognition that the consultation document gives to the importance of subject specialism and the need to provide support and encouragement to specialist teachers. The Association is a membership association with about 5000 members across all sectors of education. It is self-funding and it has a perspective spanning 130 years. It aims to enhance and enrich the learning of mathematics by supporting teachers at all levels through its journals and other publications and by providing opportunities to meet with other specialists through its local branches and its annual conference. As an independent organisation it seeks to represent its members' views by contributing constructively to national debate about mathematical education and it is increasingly involved in providing high quality professional development courses for teachers.

Two implications follow from our position as an independent organisation with a long history of constructive involvement in mathematical education:

• It is not clear why the government should be trying to define the role of subject associations any more than we should try to define the role of government. Indeed one could argue that a proper definition of the limits of government's role in mathematics education is a more urgent need! Our main duty is to support mathematics in education by representing the interests of our subject area and to provide our members with ideas, materials, professional development activities and opportunities to meet with other members.
  
• If government wishes to consult with the Association it should as a minimum always pay expenses and it ought to offer a consultancy fee when members give time and expertise. Sending one delegate to a London meeting costs roughly three member subscriptions. It is not fair to expect hard pressed subject associations to provide government with free consultancy.
  

The Association strongly supports some government initiatives for mathematics, but it has not always been met with a positive response from government agencies:

• The Association and individual members have provided substantial support with successive revisions of the National Curriculum, the development of the National Numeracy Strategy and the Key Stage 3 Strategy and the recent review and revision of AS and A level criteria. We have also provided some materials on a contract basis.
  
• The Association has contributed extensively to the Post 14 Inquiry on Mathematics and has offered its enthusiastic support for the National Centre for Excellence in Mathematics Teaching.
  
• The Association has offered to provide wider support with algebra, which has been a curiously neglected aspect of the Key Stage 3 Strategy to date, and able pupils, where current advice from the Strategy is little more than rhetoric. So far, these offers have met with obstruction or indifference.
  
• The Association notes that attempts at working in partnership with the DfES have sometimes met with a very negative response. Subject associations have offered to host a conference to help in replacing the current seriously flawed assessment system with something constructive and manageable which will encourage rather than hinder good teachers. This offer has been totally rejected.
  

The Mathematical Association remains willing and committed to helping to develop initiatives that will raise standards of teaching and learning and we will look constructively at paragraph 24 of the consultation document, but that commitment means that we must be able to challenge vigorously certain aspects of government policy. In particular the current regime of tests, targets and league tables is having a severely detrimental effect on mathematics in schools. This is most apparent in year 6, but it is also true for all other year groups. Recent announcements by the Secretary of State, whilst welcome as an acknowledgement of some of the problems, do not offer an acceptable solution. Good mathematics teaching is not the same as cramming children to pass tests. The Association believes that the tone of the consultation document does not capture well the essence of excellent teaching.

Responses to Consultation Questions

1. How do you assess the adequacy of the current sources of subject specialism support?

There is a wide range of sources of support for teachers of mathematics, which vary greatly in quality and effectiveness. There is no shortage of potential providers of good quality resources and courses: the major difficulty is that teachers do not have the time and energy to take advantage of the good material that is currently available. Schools are not able to release teachers because of insufficient funding and the fact that lessons usually have to be covered by non-specialist teachers to the detriment of students' education. This, together with the obsessive concern with assessment driven demands, which seriously distort priorities, is a major constraint on further developments by providers.

2. How best can we further enhance subject specialism, and are there different approaches needed for different subjects.

The most helpful contribution in the long term - both for subject associations and for government - would be to provide support which respects the importance of the core business of the main subject associations. Teachers with a passion for their subject are the ones who are best able to engage and inspire pupils. This passion cannot be manufactured to order, but needs to be nurtured over an extended period by helping each subject teacher to share in the life and work of the larger community of like-minded professionals.

All forms of support can only be effective if teachers have sustained periods of time to use them and the quality of the support is good. Priorities for support need to be clear and independent advice should be available to discriminate between the good and the bad amongst the proliferation of providers and products.

The National Centre for Excellence in Mathematics Teaching should have a central role in identifying priorities for mathematics education and in doing so it should not add to the proliferation of competing sources of advice. Equal weight should be given to the contribution that all schools and colleges with good mathematics departments can make and should not be confined to those who are represented by the Specialist Schools Trust, which does not represent many of the excellent mathematics teachers in a wide variety of institutions. The National Centre should co-ordinate the subject advice coming from a wide variety of government agencies - DfES, QCA, TTA, National Strategies, BECTa - so that teachers receive more coherent and succinct messages. Similarly, for the whole range of providers and materials, it should seek to provide some indication of quality of teaching materials (star ratings or kite marks?) and of professional development courses, including accreditation linked to salary enhancements. It will not, however, be successful unless its advice is seen to be independent of government and is sensitive to teachers' concerns.

Subject associations, as independent bodies with many of the best teachers as active members, could have a valuable role in offering advice about these and many other matters, provided suitable funding was available to them for this purpose. However, in the current climate teachers have very little spare energy to devote to anything beyond the immediate demands of their classroom work. The most useful thing that government could do to support subject specialism would be to reduce centrally determined demands so that teachers have greater freedom to innovate and more time to become involved voluntarily in the work of subject associations and curriculum development groups.

3. Is there scope for the subject associations to work together more, for example, to share good practice or to develop guidance on ways in which one subject can be used to reinforce teaching and learning in another?

Subject associations do work together: for example, their Executive Officers meet on a regular basis to discuss issues of common concern. However, this cooperation was undermined when the DfES unilaterally cancelled the February joint meeting (and all subsequent joint meetings) with subject associations at a week's notice. It would be valuable for subject associations to work together more, but further activity is hindered greatly by the lack of time for teachers to engage in the sort of voluntary activity involved and by the dominance of concerns across all subjects about government policies on testing and targets, which are seen by most good teachers as detrimental in their present form to good educational practice. However, the first priority should be to look for ways of strengthening and extending the specialist membership and activity of individual subject associations.

4. Is there scope for subject based programmes to be more closely related to wider themes, eg behaviour and attendance?

Behaviour and attendance are whole school issues, although there are obviously implications for classroom management in all subjects. The Association is always interested in involvement in wider themes: for example, we have published a book on numeracy across the curriculum and we have recently set up a joint project with the Association for Citizenship Teaching (ACT). However, we wish to emphasise that the major priority should be to improve the quality of mathematical learning and that we would not welcome national initiatives that have the effect of distracting teachers in general from that essential core task.

5. How can the needs of adults other than teachers for subject specialist support best be met?

The specialist classroom teacher is the key to successful learning in any subject area. Classroom assistants working in mathematics classrooms alongside specialist teachers can have a useful role, but they require extensive subject based support, which is something that the National Centre should investigate. They must not be seen as a cheap replacement for subject specialists.

Programmes for adult numeracy are obviously related to mathematics and those involved in providing them, particularly mathematics teachers in FE colleges, should have access to the same sources of support as the rest of the mathematics teaching profession.

6. Would cross sector networking (for example, across schools, colleges and universities) bring benefits to front line teachers?

Subject associations do already provide a valuable forum for cross sector networking and there are many examples of cooperative working at both local and national levels. However, a significant increase in this is not realistic unless all the parties involved have substantially more time and are less preoccupied with pressing immediate problems. There are much higher priorities for using what time is likely to be available in the foreseeable future.

20.6.03.