Last year, 23 per cent of children in England failed to achieve the expected level in mathematics at the end of the Early Years Foundation Stage, the same level as in 2014. An All-Party Parliamentary Group for maths looking at how to raise standards of teaching in pre-schools that year heard that many working with under-fives lack confidence in the subject.
The year 2014 was also when the DfE brought in the new early years educator qualification, which came with a new requirement for Level 3 students to have maths GCSE at grade C, resulting in 30 per cent fewer students finishing courses between July and September 2015 than the previous year, a Nursery Worldand CACHE investigation found.
In response to this, the National Day Nurseries Association (NDNA)’s Maths Champions Programme was born. According to Paula Dunn, lead early years adviser for the programme, the focus is on how children learn maths rather than any lack of practitioner skills.
Maths is too often ‘number and counting’ for a lot of practitioners, says Dunn, but the course thinks in terms of number sense, which includes the relationships between numbers, and uses research on areas like spatial reasoning (understanding how objects move in a 3D world), which is now mentioned in the EYFS.
‘The aim is to raise confidence across the whole staff team – then they will be able to create a quality environment,’ she says.
The programme focuses on embedding maths in everyday activities and routines, rather than taking children away ‘to do maths’ and ‘firing lots of questions’ at them, Dunn says. ‘We talk around the Characteristics of Effective Learning and really engaging in play and discussion with children. Once practitioners have a knowledge of how and what children learn in the early years, then we can talk about fun ways that they can integrate that.’
For example, during snack time, children can help share out and divide up fruit, with staff encouraged to make deliberate mistakes, such as put out the wrong number of plates, to help prompt spontaneous discussions about number with children.
‘Things like subitising (seeing how many of a number there are without counting, e.g. dots on a domino) is not a new concept, but a lot of people hadn’t heard of it. What we find is a lot of people are actually doing things, but don’t understand the terminology behind it,’ Dunn adds.
BEING A MATHS CHAMPION
To take part in the programme, each setting picks a maths ‘champion’, who must be a Level 3 or above, and a deputy, so they can share knowledge and cover if the other leaves or goes away.
‘The idea of the master champion is not to do everything, but to lead and disseminate the programme,’ says Dunn, adding, ‘Sometimes you’ve got some really confident staff members who other staff can shadow, or they can model things to staff.’
Following an online induction, the champion and deputy access two two-hour online training modules written by maths expert Sue Gifford, of Roehampton University on children’s mathematical learning and development. Dunn also devised an optional coaching course to help champions without management experience disseminate the training to the team and help staff have productive conversations about their maths challenges.
‘Sometimes you need to have hard conversations about maths anxiety – but if they’ve had the opportunity to talk about it, that can help them move forward,’ says Dunn.
Each member of staff, including the champions, will be asked to complete an audit about their confidence. The champions then audit the learning environment, giving a rating between one as confident and four as not confident. Anything which is graded three and four is picked up by an early years advisor from the NDNA, such as Dunn, and put into an action plan.
Audits and action plans are ‘live documents’ which can be changed if a setting over- or underestimates its maths competency in an area. The advisor helps them rate their actions, starting with quick fixes to keep momentum going.
Settings are also provided with access to an online platform. There is a requirement to use a set of ten core activities from here for two- to three-year-olds and three to fours.
These are designed to support all key areas of maths learning and include a mix of planned activities (such as cars down the ramp) and those which can be embedded into routines, with suggestions for the way they can be adapted, resources and ideas to share with parents.
‘The idea behind these is just to help staff identify the maths that is there naturally every day and the way they can include maths within an experience,’ says Dunn.
No special resources are required. Dunn adds, ‘We specifically say that you do not have to buy anything – we look to use recycled resources such as different sized containers to fill up to explore measures.’
She would like the Maths Champions programme to be ‘a way of life’ in settings. ‘We recommend doing things like repeating the audit when new children come in because the environment will change and new children bring new experiences,’ she adds.
WHAT AN EVALUATION REVEALS
An evaluation conducted by Education Endowment Foundation found that children in settings receiving the programme made an average of three additional months’ progress in maths compared to children in settings who did not receive the programme. This was up to six months for pupils receiving Early Years Pupil Premium, though the findings were based on a smaller sample. Further analysis found that positive impacts were maintained to the end of Reception year, with children who received Maths Champions obtaining higher EYFSP results than pupils who didn’t receive the programme. The study looked at 134 nurseries and 1,034 children.
Maths Champions
What: An online training programme devised by Sue Gifford and NDNA.
What’s involved: Nine-step programme includes online training, access to online resources, an optional assessment tool, learning journal, two audits (on staff confidence and the learning environment) that are repeated at the end of the process, and an action plan.
Support: Settings are allocated an early years advisor, who does the induction, provides at least six one-to-one support sessions and helps them complete the programme within the year timeframe. Each cohort can also access five live webinars based on frequently emerging themes from the audits, and online social media network.
Maths content is focused on six key themes:
- cardinality
- counting (which includes subitising)
- comparison
- composition (knowing numbers are made up of two or more other smaller numbers)
- pattern
- measure.
Duration: One year; then attendees lose online access/personalised support.
Cost: Free.
CASE STUDY: Pennywell Early Years Centre, Sunderland
Lead teacher Nicole Hunt says at the start of the programme, in 2021, children found it hard to see differences in pattern. ‘I was saying “red, blue, red, blue, this is a pattern”. But by the end of the project children were doing ABB pattern, vertically, with 3D objects. It was phenomenal to watch.’
A maze-building activity also turned into an exciting project, but only after it was adapted to meet the needs of the cohort, who are from an area of high disadvantage.
‘The majority of our children did not know what a map was, so to just start with that activity was too much for them. We had to go back and do map work with small-world characters. We ended up exploring our locality. At the end of it, children had their own miniature version of Pennywell [a local authority housing estate where the nursery school is situated] with roads, paths to their houses, to the local shops, to the local schools; it linked with transit,’ Hunt says.
To help children understand what this small-world play looked like scaled up, she arranged for a double-decker bus from a local company to be driven into their car park to explore. ‘We probably wouldn’t have done that without those core activities – they made us think what do we need to do for spatial reasoning and what do we need to do for directional language,’ she says.
This summer, the map idea was revisited again with the current cohort. ‘We used it to support transition, and we built a giant map of our local area with the children taking themselves to their feeder school.’
Of 13 staff who completed confidence audits, five gained confidence in all areas at the end of the programme and the remaining eight staff recorded increased confidence in 60 per cent or more of the areas.
Pennywell is now part of an early years maths group to discuss and share good practice with other local early years settings. ‘My head teacher knows I am passionate about maths – which is ironic for someone who didn’t have a lot of confidence in maths at school – but I feel really confident now. I think that’s why the programme had the impact that it has, because we really invested in our own subject knowledge,’ Hunt says.
