Pearson Edexcel GCSE (9-1) Mathematics A case study with Queen Elizabeth Grammar
School, Penrith, Cumbria
I’m Nadine Ford, and I’m head of Maths here at Queen Elizabeth Grammar school in
Penrith. I’ve been teaching 8 years, we’ve been a hub for Edexcel for 3 years now and
we’ve been using Edexcel as an exam board for at least 10 years.
What challenges did you face with the 9-1 GCSE?
The main challenge really was trying to get the content, the extra content taught in time,
by the time that we were realising how much needed teaching it was quite late in terms
of our planning, so for last year’s cohort that was quite a mission to make sure we taught
all that. The second issue was the increased problem solving, the students weren’t used
to the level of questions that the difficulty and how they incorporated lots of different
topics at once. One of the main things we did was in lessons we focused on trying to
get the content taught and because we didn’t have that much time to do problem-solving
in lessons, we started a problem-solving club at lunchtime. We’re very fortunate in our
school as we have a lot of very diligent students, and quite a large number attended this club,
and in that we let them sort of attempt exam style questions and practice that and that
built their confidence.
What did you do differently at KS3? We didn’t do so much differently for last
years cohort but we are definitely doing things differently now. We’re doing a lot more
problem-solving in those early years, in years 7 and 8 a lot more problem-solving in lessons.
We’ve also taken a step to move to a more mastery type curriculum, we’re very much
focusing on trying to teach for deep understanding, so that the students can tackle those problems
because they really understand the topic, rather than teaching them methods to try and
and repeat the processes. We also started teaching a little bit earlier now, we now
start the GCSE in year 9, just to give us that extra time to teach the content. Teaching
for deeper understanding in KS3, I think will have a really huge impact on the results going
forward. I think it’ll enable the students to really tackle those unusual, slightly differently
phrased or asked questions much more than they can now.
What did you do differently at KS4? In year 10 whilst we spent a lot of the lesson
teaching content, we did dedicate some of our lesson time to problem-solving, and we
tried to come up with problems that mixed topics, so weren’t just topic specific to
allow students to get used to that idea of combining ideas together. In Year 11, we have
some content left to teach, but we also spent a lot of time doing practice papers, Edexcel
produced a lot of those and it was really really helpful and enabled the students to
get a lot of extra practice.
How did you tackle problem-solving? To tackle the increased problem-solving and
to get students to practice that aspect, we introduced a club at lunchtimes. We had a
big supply of practice questions that had a lot of AO3 content and kind of mixed topics
together, and we asked students to come along and they worked in pairs or on their own,
picked a question and had a go at it, discussed it if they needed help and got another question,
so they were working through quite a lot of questions over a lunchtime, and getting that
extra practice outside of lesson time, so it allowed us a lot more time in lessons to
focus on the content.
How did you use mocks? We used both the mocks that were produced
by edexcel. We used the first one in December, we hadn’t quite finished the content of
the course at that point, so although we gave them the full paper, they weren’t able to
access all the questions and because of the increased difficulty, the students found that
first mock quite a challenge, so we felt it was important to give them another chance,
just before the exam, so more in March time, to do the second mock. This helped us to see
how much they’d improved, and gave us some more confidence, but it also gave them extra
confidence to see that all that practice they’d been doing in lessons and outside, could really
improve their grades as well.
How did you make decisions about tier entry? Due to our cohort, we don’t generally enter
people for the foundation tier, and we haven’t entered that many people over the last few
years, foundation so, I had to think a little whether that decision was the correct one
last year, but having talked to other people at the hub meetings and discussed the decisions
that they were taking, I felt fairly confident that our decision of doing the same thing
was the right one, so we did enter all our students for the higher tier.
How would you rate the support offered by Pearson?
Pearson’s support has been excellent throughout all of this curriculum change. They’ve provided
so many resources, for staff and students to use, its made it a much more of a smoother
transition for everyone. We had six practice papers, for the students to use, the two mocks
enabled us to have a really good indication of where our students were at. I really liked
the idea of entering the mock results on ResultsPlus after the first mock, and it was great to
be able to see how our students compared to other students nationally and it gave me a
much greater feel for where the grade boundaries might be as well, so that information was
invaluable to all students and staff really last year.
Were you pleased with your students’ final results?
We were really pleased with our final results, everybody got a 4 or above with most students
getting a 5 or above and two thirds of our students got a 7 and above. We had a lot of
grade 9s and 8s which was really pleasing to see, I think about a third of our students
were grade 8 and 9 so really really pleased because the students did brilliantly.
Have you made any changes since the first 9-1 exams?
In terms of thinking about how we go forward after that first set of exams, we’ve definitely
started to teach slightly differently. We’re no longer thinking it’s ok to teach procedures
and try and get students through with sort of rote learning of methods, and we’re teaching
very much for understanding now. The questions don’t test whether you can do a process
anymore, they’re testing do you understand the process and can you think about the process
in different situations, and that’s what we’re trying to develop in our students.
So with that in mind we’re teaching less in year 7, and we’re covering it in a much
much deeper way, trying to get students problem-solving early on and really thinking about the topics
in much more depth.
What do you stay with Pearson Edexcel for GCSE (9-1) Mathematics?
We’ll be staying with Pearson Edexcel, just because of the support we get from them, the
amount of resources that have been produced, the emporium has such a lot of great things
that you can use for students, and it’s been invaluable to staff and students in terms
of that support. It’s great being a member of the hub, because we get to hear about things,
and hear first hand what’s going on and also opportunities to discuss with other schools
what people have experienced, so that’s been a fantastic support to me as head of
maths to be able to support the students as well.
To find out more about Pearson Edexcel GCSE (9-1) Mathematics visit: quals.pearson.com/gcsemathscsqeg
You can also email us at TeachingMaths@pearson.com