In our first investigation, we were exploring teachers’ views about children and young people’s attitudes and attainment in maths. We used key statements from the purpose and aims of the National Curriculum in England.
We asked 2,884 teachers, of both primary and secondary school children, whether 80% of the children that they teach held these attitudes or had achieved these capabilities to a reasonable level for their age.
Among both primary and secondary teachers, fewer than half thought that most (80%) of their students held the attitudes or had achieved the capabilities set out in the National Curriculum to a reasonable standard for their age.
The data suggest that there are areas, particularly when it comes to reasoning and problem solving, where secondary teachers are far more optimistic about their pupils’ abilities than primary teachers; 45% of teachers thought that most could think, reason and apply their knowledge to solve problems, where 29% of primary teachers said the same about their pupils. Primary teachers were, however, more optimistic when it came to their pupils’ sense of enjoyment and curiosity about maths (39%) which appeared to drop off among secondary-age pupils (16%).
Views of these skills were also not necessarily distributed evenly across pupils in all areas of the country. In fact, there was a distinct trend emerging when we looked at these results by deprivation level, measured here by the number of children at the school who receive free school meals, which places schools into a deprivation quartile.
In the diagram below, we tracked teacher perceptions of skills across these quartiles, averaging responses across primary and secondary teachers.
Teachers in the most affluent schools report higher frequencies of competence in all of the five areas that we tested, compared to teachers in the most deprived areas.
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