Financial education and the Secondary curriculum Equipping newly qualified teachers with the skills and confidence to teach financial education.

Financial education and the Secondary curriculum

Equipping newly qualified teachers with the skills and confidence to teach financial education.

The ‘new’ maths,curriculum changes

Maths for all, post-16

OA world class education for all our young people - 2011 (Vorderman, Porkess etc al) strongly recommended post-16 compulsory mathematics

O July 2011, Michael Gove ambition: “….we should set a new goal for the education system so that within a decade the vast majority of pupils are studying maths right through to the age of 18.”

OAdvisory committee on Mathematics Education (ACME) was asked by the DfE to produce a report about Core Mathematics qualifications.

‘New mathematics qualifications should provide a recognised and valued path for students to gain a Level 3 qualification in mathematics. They should be clearly distinct from, and complementary to, AS and A-level Mathematics, and be motivating for students for whom the current GCSE qualifications are not the right choice at age 16”

ACME’s report

“Core mathematics qualifications should be designed to ensure that students can use and understand mathematics to model real situations and solve problems. During a core mathematics course, students should use their general and mathematical knowledge and skills in a broad range of realistic situations.”

ACME’s learning outcomes

• Core Maths qualifications for first teaching Sept 2015 – designed for those students who have GCSE grade C+ but are not doing AS or A level Mathematics.

• Will be equivalent to an AS but taught over 2 years.• Some schools became ‘early adopters’ of Core

Maths from Sept 2014. Others can start from 2015.

Core mathematics post-16

Specifications and sample assessment materials are now available:• Edexcel:

Level 3 Mathematics in Context • AQA:

Level 3 Mathematical Studies• OCR:

Quantitative Reasoning (MEI)All boards have pre-release source materials to study available at various times before the exam.

New specifications

Financial Mathematics Content

• Edexcel - 2 papers - finance features in 2 out of 4 compulsory topics. 50% about house prices in sample pre-release materials.

• AQA - 2 papers - Part of its spec entitled Maths for Personal Finance. Personal Finance is one of only 4 compulsory elements.

• OCR(MEI) - Part of spec entitled ‘Finance’ and heavy emphasis on financial problem solving

Changes to theGCSE curriculum

From the information available, this is what we might expect for numbers of students attaining each grade – grades and boundaries specifically detailed by Ofqual are in red, others are ‘intelligent’ guesses. Sept 2014

Old and new grading

Old G F E D C B A A*

New 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

New key content at both tiers• Solving problems in financial contexts• Using inequality notation to specify error intervals• Using Venn diagrams• Working with percentages• Use compound units such as speed, rates of pay

Higher tier: Calculating or estimating gradients of graphs and areas under graphs (including in financial contexts)

New key content at foundation tier

• Simultaneous equations - including finding approximate solutions using a graph

• Interpret and construct tables and line graphs for time series data

• Set up, solve and interpret the answers in growth and decay problems, including compound interest

• Where would students make mistakes?• Any misconceptions?• What area of maths?• What area of financial education?• What ability?• What general problems might they have?

GCSE Questions about money

Sample Assessment MaterialsEdexcel foundation tier

Edexcel higher tier

Sample Assessment Materials

Big changes in A-level too

Substantial increase in mathematical content for other A-levels such as:•Biology•Business studies•Chemistry•Computing•Economics•Geography•Physics•Psychology

Key changes

• Consultation responses with Department for Education (DfE)

• A-level maths now has compulsory mechanics and statistics - no decision maths

• A-level further maths is likely to remain modular• A-level maths exams to be linear - all taken at the

end of the course• AS and A-level to be ‘decoupled'. However;• New teaching specification from 2016/2017• Increased emphasis on use of IT

Key changes

Implications for financial maths• More emphasis on problem solving in the exam• AS and A-level mathematics specifications must require students to:

‘become familiar with one or more specific large data set(s) in advance of the final assessment (these data must be real and sufficiently rich to enable the statistical concepts in the specification to be explored)’

‘interpret real data presented in summary or graphical form’

‘use data to investigate questions arising in real contexts’