Strategies for Increasing Numeracy Skills

September will be my second year in my current role as Numeracy Co-ordinator, a role which I have found both challenging and exciting if a little daunting developing the numeracy skills of our students across the school. The role was brand new last year and in a year I have managed to write our numeracy policy along with resources to help support the numeracy skills of staff, co-ordinate our 1:1 intervention sessions and establish a weekly Maths challenge for KS3 tutor groups. To be honest I have sometimes found it challenging to know what direction to take with the role and how to make an effective change. A lot of this past year has been a matter of 'trial and improvement', some things have been successful and others have taken a total nose dive (such as the weekly staff numeracy challenge!). My husband has just taken on the role of Literacy Co-ordinator at his school and it seems to me there is a lot more published information about what to do and how than with numeracy (possibly something to do with the literacy basis of the job?!) and from my experienced seems to be a policy much more established in schools than numeracy which is comparably in its infancy.

So this year I have got a lot of ideas to develop, one of which I am working on at the moment. I have spent some of my Year 11 gain time last year (and some holiday time) developing our KS3 assessments and as a part of that I wanted to include a numeracy assessment. I have focused on the basic numeracy skills; operations, decimals, percentages, angles and a few other aspects and created (well in the process of!) six almost identical and substantial "Challenge" papers which the KS3 students will sit every September and February. All students with the exception of the bottom year 7 nurture set will sit these papers across their KS3 school experience, and will hopefully see an improvement in their key skills. I have already created a tracking spreadsheet which calculates their percentage change from one assessment to the next and from there I am hoping to rank them to see who is the most improved. This will hopefully also help highlight students across the ability range who struggle with their basic numeracy skills but more importantly put more of an emphasis on the key skills and give students a sense of progress and therefore confidence before they reach KS4.