Company profile

BEAM (which simply stands for Be A Mathematician) was set up in 1987 as part of the Inner London Education Authority large maths group. Its aim was to produce resources that would complement the training given by maths advisers in the authority. When ILEA ceased to exist the Borough of Islington agreed to fund BEAM for a while on the understanding that it would eventually become self-funding. Sheila Ebbutt, who had worked as an ILEA primary mathematics adviser for ten years, was appointed managing director when BEAM became an independent company in 1990. She directs all aspects of BEAM's activities, which include writing and running courses, acting as a maths consultancy, publishing books and other teaching material and, latterly, producing CD-ROMs. She is also a member of the Early Years Maths Group which was set up as a pressure group to try to prevent maths teaching becoming too formalised at the early stages. The intention, as BEAM proclaims, is to make mathematics 'fun, creative and fascinating'. 'We feel almost evangelical,' Sheila says. 'Our aim is to improve teaching techniques and to get the very best resources. There is a proliferation of teaching materials nowadays - publishing is so much easier and we all have computers. But so much of the material is not well written or thought out, because it has not been tried out with either teachers or children.'