It’s an exciting time in the world of mathematics at the moment. Last week, I attended the NCETM annual conference where Lord Andrew Adonis formally accepted on behalf of the Government all the recommendations that Sir Peter Williams laid out in the launch of the Primary Mathematics Review. This included key recommendations such as a specialist maths teacher in every primary school in the country…, and paying teachers up to £8000 in incentives and rewards to train towards gaining a Masters in maths teaching. £24 milion will be invested over the next 3 years to fund this major training programme for 13,000 existing primary school teachers.

There was a great buzz at the NCETM surrounding the launch and the feedback was extremely positive with everyone welcoming the new initatives. Sir Peter’s vision for bringing improvements and change to primary education, is rooted in best practice with a greater emphasis on play. The message is about collaborative learning and pupils being active which should make for a lively atmosphere in the classroom!

The conference also saw the official launch of Bowland Maths.

Hooray! Alien Invasion, the interactive classroom resource we’ve been developing over the past 18 months for the Bowland Trust, is about to be launched alongside 22 other case studies, at the annual conference of the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM) held at The Royal Society. Alien Invasion has been selected to be showcased… as part of the Workshop programme.

The Bowland Initiative was set-up to help to address the drop in the rate of progress and in attitudes to Key Stage 3 mathematics (critical in the maths development of many pupils) by making maths fun. Alien Invasion contains a set of four interactive lessons about a full-scale alien attack that coincides with a class visit to a fictional city. To set the scene and support the lessons, live TV news bulletins, radio broadcasts and telephone messages help to develop the story line. The invasion leads to a series of non-routine problems for pupils to solve as the narrative unfolds. The problems are on the theme of mathematical communication and are intended to promote discussion, reasoning and creativity.

Trials, testing and evaluation took place at each main stage of development. We worked closely with maths education expert, Anita Straker, former head of the government’s national numeracy strategy, and now Education Consultant. Several teachers from schools across Devon and Cornwall acted as impartial advisers and trialled the project in their classrooms.

The case studies will be available to schools for the 2008/9 school year.