GCSE Maths curriculum and assessment: time for change?
12 February 2025
Charlie Stripp, Chief Executive of Mathematics in Education and Industry (MEI)
I’m Charlie Stripp, Chief Executive of Mathematics in Education and Industry (MEI), Director of the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM), and 2024/25 President of the Mathematical Association. In this guest blog post I will focus on reform of the current maths curriculum and assessment at GCSE level.
As a charitable expert organisation aiming to improve maths education for all, MEI has long been concerned about how to improve curriculum and assessment in maths at GCSE and A Level. In 2020 MEI published a report A new mathematics GCSE curriculum for post-16 resit students, funded by the Nuffield Foundation. This was followed by a discussion paper on assessment in mathematics in England and a position paper on curriculum and assessment at KS4 and KS5.
The aim of this work was to propose how maths curriculum and assessment could be improved to:
- help more young people to master the maths they need to meet their aspiration for future study and employment
- equip young people to use and understand maths and statistics with confidence in all aspects of their lives.
All of us at MEI and NCETM believe passionately that curriculum and assessment reform in secondary maths is vital. Whilst secondary school maths education seems to be working reasonably well for higher attaining students, as evidenced by record numbers of students choosing to study maths at A Level, the lowest attaining third of the cohort is not well-served by their secondary school maths education.
Most of this group do not achieve a standard GCSE “pass” in Maths, and many of those who do have not mastered the fundamental maths needed for work and life. I have also written about this, and its wider negative impact on public attitudes towards maths and maths education, in my role as current President of the Mathematical Association.
The findings of OCR’s Striking the balance report chime strongly with MEI’s work on curriculum and assessment reform in maths, as does the Royal Society's Mathematical Futures report, which identifies that serious change is needed to address the sheer number of students leaving education with poor numeracy skills and a sense of failure.
The government’s Curriculum and Assessment Review
The government’s curriculum and assessment review has provided a welcome stimulus and opportunity for a national discussion about how to improve maths education. There is a growing consensus that the priority is to ensure that, as OCR’s report states:
‘…almost nobody reaches the age of 16 without the basic mathematics that they need for education, work and life.’
In November, inspired by the Curriculum and Assessment Review, I wrote three NCETM Director’s blogs with my MEI colleagues, Carol Knights, the NCETM’s Director for Secondary Mathematics, and Emma Bell, the NCETM’s Director for Post-16 GCSE/FSQ Maths.
The key themes of these blogs – reducing curriculum content, ensuring mastery of the fundamental maths everyone needs for life and work, and structuring assessment so that students are able to demonstrate what they know and can do, echo OCR’s Striking the balance report.
While I strongly welcome the review, I would also sanction caution. Education in England often seems to suffer from the unintended consequences of good intentions. Changes to the curriculum and assessment should be piloted wherever possible. Resources and professional development to support the implementation of reforms should be developed and made available in advance, rather than rushed through as an afterthought as the implications of changes become apparent. As Cambridge Assessment’s Tim Oates has written, Curriculum coherence is crucial, meaning ‘all elements of the system (content, assessment, pedagogy, teacher training, teaching materials, incentives and drivers etc.) should all line up and act in a concerted way to deliver public goods’.
The crucial importance of maths teachers
If we want to teach good quality maths that is relevant to the lives of young people and gives them the skills they need, we cannot ignore the growing crisis in teacher recruitment and retention, that is especially stark for maths. In 2023-2024, recruitment of Initial Teacher Trainees for maths reached only 63% of the target. The National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) has recently found a 15% shortfall in specialist maths teachers.
I welcome the government's intention to increase the number of teachers in the system, but this will take time. Given that 13% of all employment in the UK is in professions that depend on mathematical sciences, it is an economic priority that the country’s workforce is well taught in maths at school.
A good start would be to reinforce pre-existing programmes supporting maths teachers, such as the Advanced Maths Support Programme (AMSP), which provides expert professional development for teachers of Level 3 Maths (A level Maths, A Level Further Maths and Core Maths), and the NCETM Maths Hubs programmes, which bring together maths education professionals across England to develop excellent practice. Properly recognised, subject-specific career structures for expert maths teachers would also help to improve the recruitment and retention of talented maths teachers.
MEI’s discussion paper: Recruiting, developing and retaining he mathematics teaching workforce in England, published in July 2024, explores the issues in detail. Ensuring a skilled workforce of secondary school maths teachers that can provide the maths education our young people need and deserve is a challenging problem; solving it is crucial for national success.
National Key Stage 3 mathematics assessment?
OCR’s ‘Striking the balance’ report refers negatively to the TIMSS 2019 outcomes in Key Stage 3 maths. However, since the OCR report was published, the 2023 TIMSS results for KS3 maths were released in December 2024, and showed an encouraging increase, building from the improved TIMSS outcomes in Key Stage 2 maths from 2019. This suggests that progress is being made in improving teaching and learning in maths at both Key Stage 3 and Key Stage 2, though there is still much room for improvement.
I have sympathy with OCR’s view that ‘In both Maths and English, we need to look at a national approach to assessment at Key Stage 3. Many problems begin at this level, but because of a lack of benchmarking are not picked up until students don’t achieve a grade 4 at GCSE. A benchmarking assessment at 14 would help to identify where students are falling behind before it is too late.’
This would be valuable, but as Striking the Balance notes, it must not be a high-stakes, formal qualification, and must not be used as a school accountability measure. Too much high-stakes assessment encourages the view that picking up marks on an exam, rather than mastering maths as a tool to make sense of the world, is the purpose of maths education. This squeezes the joy and meaning out of teaching and learning maths.
Stay connected
OCR is looking for teachers, leaders, parents and young people to join the conversation on the future of maths curriculum and assessment. We have our wonderful Maths Subject Advisors who would be delighted to hear from you about how Maths GCSE could be improved for your students.
Sign up to our maths teacher advisory panel to be included in upcoming round tables, maths forums and surveys.
You can also reach out to us on social media at @OCRexams or LinkedIn and sign up for our subject updates.
To address the needs of students and society, enhance educational standards, and prepare the future workforce, it is essential that we make targeted changes to GCSE Mathematics – and OCR is excited to take you on this journey to make maths add up for our students.
About the author
Charlie Stripp has been Chief Executive of Mathematics in Education and Industry (MEI) since 2010; since March 2013 he has also been Director of the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM). Charlie was awarded an MBE for services in education in 2015.
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