Schools invited to take part in maths trial programme

Secondary schools in England are being invited to join a national Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF) trial for a new maths programme aimed at supporting struggling Year 7s to develop faster and more agile number work.
 
Making Fluent & Flexible Calculators from HFL Education, formerly Herts for Learning, is one of 11 research projects chosen as part of a £10m investment by the EEF to investigate new and innovative approaches to education that boost outcomes for students.
 
HFL’s Fluent & Flexible Calculators is a whole-class intervention that aims to develop students’ knowledge and understanding of a range of mental calculation strategies. Focusing on foundational learning around addition and subtraction, the programme aims to improve the maths attainment of Year 7 students with low prior attainment.
 
Watford Grammar School for Girls was one of 15 schools which ran a pilot of Making Fluent & Flexible Calculators for HFL Education. Teachers there are now urging schools to sign up to the EEF trial and try the impactful programme for themselves.
 
“Without a solid base of number sense and with so many gaps in knowledge, we are essentially “building on sand”, teaching some of our weaker students the same things year after year, but without the skills becoming embedded,” said Watford Grammar maths teacher Emma Clay, who believes numeracy skills have declined thanks to Covid disrupting primary learning and the recent changes to the way maths is taught.
 
“To help support our struggling learners, we used the Making Fluent & Flexible Calculators programme as part of our wider curriculum once a week for two of our Year 7 maths classes. We don’t have data to quantify the improvements made, but as teachers who know our students and their abilities well it was very clear to see that they have definitely become better at calculations and we can see they are using strategies more often to solve numerical problems, which they weren’t doing before.
 
“We have some students that still count on their fingers, but with this programme, we are providing them with the skills to complete calculations faster, mentally, but also to understand how and why those calculations work so they can apply the same strategies to more complex problems. This is helping push them forwards in their maths studies.”
 
Sue Harris, head of maths at Watford Grammar School for Girls sees the potential for Making Fluent & Flexible Calculators to be used for all abilities at the school as well as Year 8 and 9 students: “Even the best kids in the class will get something out of this as it teaches and refreshes underpinning concepts and ideas.
 
“I’m not easily won over, but I have been impressed with Making Fluent & Flexible Calculators. What comes across is that this programme was written by people who understand maths.”

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