News

Mayors Maths Fund – Count on Us – Parental Engagement Project

If you are a parent or carer of a child in Year 1-4 you should be receiving a letter this week and a ‘Maths Scrapbook’. In case you have misplaced the letter you can find the text below explain what the ‘scrapbook’ is for. Thanks again for taking part in the survey and sharing your thoughts and ideas with us. We hope that you will enjoy the activities that are sent home for you and your children to do together as part of this project.

Dear Parents/Carers,

As you may be aware, this year we are involved in a project being run by the Mayor’s Office to support parental engagement in their children’s maths development. This project is for families in years 1-4. Many of you completed surveys for us during the parent conference week recently and for that we thank you.

 I wanted to share with you the findings of that survey as well as introduce you to the support materials that the Mayor’s Office have provided us with.

 Survey Results:

 97 parents answered the survey.

  • Nearly all parents are positive about the need for maths throughout their children’s life with 69% in strong agreement with this statement and 78% believing that those who are good at maths have more opportunities to do well. Notably, just over half of parents believe that “you can’t change how good you are at maths”. This suggests too great an emphasis from parents on innate ability leading to maths success rather than effort and support.
  • Maths makes the majority (84%) of parents feel very happy or happy and 68% are always positive about maths around their children. However 43% feel unable to help their children with maths with the most common reason being difficulty in understanding current methods (22%) and others mentioning not being able to find the time, not knowing how to help when their child gets stuck and their own confidence.
  • In terms of current engagement, the majority of parents (87%) found the school welcoming and most always felt able to talk to teachers in parent’s evenings about their child’s progress but 43% found this more difficult at other times. While 32% of parents had taken up the school’s parent sessions offering support and advice on maths, 46% indicated an interest in getting further help with understanding their child’s maths learning. The few barriers to talking about maths with their children’s teacher were; believing “it’s the teachers job to talk to me about maths”, English as a language barrier and not knowing how to talk about maths.
  • 78% of parents indicate that they always look at their child’s homework but only 40% help their children with maths homework. Just over half (55%) indicated that they find it easy to talk about maths or maths homework however this falls to 23% when it comes to parents who always talk about everyday maths when they are out and about. In terms of enjoyment of maths homework parents believe they are as enthusiastic as their children with just over half “always” enjoying it and this drops with the whole family experience where only 30% always enjoy doing mathematical activities together.
  • 66% of parents are interested in improving their own maths and may benefit from being directed to the National Numeracy Challenge www.nnchallenge.org.uk. While 79% wanted more ideas on how to enjoy maths with their child.

As well as completing the survey we were able to record a number of recommendations from you about what you would like to see the school do, to encourage further parental engagement in maths. These included the following:

  • Let them know the current strategies/area the children are learning in the classroom
  • To offer more maths homework, so we can work together as a parent.
  • Apart from face to face meetings with the teacher, the school needs to think of more ways of communicating of weak points in child’s performance at maths, so that parents could help their child sooner and ensure their confidence.
  • Open day for maths
  • Parents and kids workshops
  • By giving more maths homework so children can get the parents to involve
  • Homework club would be great for maths.
  • Parent and child quiz
  • Parent collaboration
  • Help learning English
  • Regular info in hand-outs- parents and teachers are time poor
  • Games and tools to help teach maths
  • Courses, maths family days.
  • I would like them to give some work and another sheet to the parents and they can see what they need to improve on
  • Possibly provide more info for parents or links to websites we can get help with their homework
  • Maybe provide a webpage where parents can get help and support with maths
  • Learning support sessions during school hours
  • Family maths
  • Create a maths club for parents
  • Advise parents who don’t have the confidence. Circulate ideas to make maths fun, like maths games.
  • We need more information about maths and more homework, minimum 3 times a week homework in maths

 

It is heartening that a number of these suggestions are things we were already actively planning for this year, such as parent and child workshops, homework club, and parent support sessions on strategies being learnt in school. We are also in the process of reviewing our homework policy and will be canvassing parent opinion about this very soon.

These results also highlight were we have obviously failed to get the message across about things we already do to support learning at home. We already signpost, but clearly not well enough, to useful websites where parents and children can find work to support home learning. These web links can be found under the school info section for the website in ‘Educational Links’:

http://www.brecknock.camden.sch.uk/school-info/educational-links/

We also regularly include a reminder the link to ‘Mathletics’ in our weekly newsletter and remind people that if your child has lost or forgotten their username and password to please ask the teacher and we will get a replacement for them. Mathletics is a very useful resource for practicing the work being covered in class and often has work-throughs for the strategies needed to solve the questions.

In terms of support for parents to learn English we have weekly English as an Additional Language classes running in the school every week. These are advertised in the newsletter at the start of the year. These classes are run by the Working Men’s College but held here in school. If you missed the information about these back in September than contact the community learning manager for more information on 0207 255 4733 or email pkar@wmcollege.ac.uk.

Project Resources

The main thrust of this project is to provide you with simple, fun and engaging activities you can work through together with your children at home.

Along with this letter you will have received your Family Maths Toolkit ‘Scrapbook’. This is for you to keep all the maths work that is sent home as part of the project. These activities are designed to be short and fun and develop your child’s maths confidence. You can adapt these to suit your family’s interests and use whatever items you may have at home or out and about. You can record what you do together in the scrapbook however you like, for example you might want to take photos, draw pictures, write calculations or create diagrams – it’s up to you. Talking about maths is important so we included in the worksheets are ideas for questions you can ask each other to support learning. The activities are designed to be open-ended so you can explore everyday maths together.

Each week the scrapbook will be sent home with the next weeks activity stuck in ready for you to do with your children. While this is not ‘compulsory’ homework, we would encourage you to support your children and work through it with them. The feedback from the survey is that families would like to have more work to do at home and to be able to support their child’s learning and we believe these activities will do this.

If you have any questions at all about any of the information in this letter or relating to the scrapbooks and homework activities, please don’t hesitate to ask me.

Yours sincerely,

Don McGibbon

Deputy Head Teacher & Count on Us Project Lead