Supporting your child with Maths

Leena Clark is a mother of 2 and founder of Educate and Learn. With more than 15 years experience teaching Maths in an outstanding secondary school, Leena is passionate that education should be inspiring and engaging. She has worked as a GCSE examiner, as well as a Head of Sixth Form and Pastoral Care.

We can probably all agree that maths is an essential life skill, but supporting your child in their learning can be daunting. Having taught maths for over 18 years, I’ve particularly enjoyed helping parents and carers develop ways to support their children at home. Here are five of my top tips which I hope will help your child in their maths learning:

1. Create a positive environment

Some adults like to share stories of how they struggled with maths as a child. “Oh, I hated maths at school,” can be an easy throwaway comment but it might negatively affect your child’s perceptions. Instead, try and show genuine enthusiasm for the subject and find moments to celebrate your child’s progress. It’s also helpful if you can create a quiet, comfortable space away from screens and distractions, and set aside a regular time for homework and practice.

2. Encourage independence

It’s normal for children to get frustrated at times. Try and be patient and offer help without doing the work for them - a useful way is to break down complex maths problems into smaller, manageable steps.

Encouraging independent problem-solving is proven to be effective for learning and building confidence. Don’t forget that we all learn and develop at different paces: recognise your child’s individual strengths, set achievable goals and celebrate their successes.

3. Relate it to the real world

Showing how a subject relates to real life can be extremely motivating for students . Try and show how maths is needed in daily activities (for example, working out how much change they’ll get after paying for a train ticket, or weighing ingredients for a family dinner). Are there any games, hobbies or projects you could enjoy together? For example board games or sports such as golf, snooker and darts. Museums and science centres are also fun ways to explore concepts, and there are plenty of online maths resources and educational apps, for example TopMarks, Oak Academy and Corbett Maths.

4. Encourage resilience

Over the years, I’ve seen a lot of my students become fixated on their grades. While entirely natural, it can cause unnecessary stress and encourage students to attach their identity to a certain outcome. Instead, try and show that it’s okay to make mistakes and that it’s often a necessary path to learning. As the saying goes: “If we don’t make mistakes, we don’t make anything!” Get them into a habit of asking questions when they’re stuck. Patience, practise and persistence are the keys to developing great resilience.

5. Connect with professionals

Communication is a powerful tool and no less so when it comes to parent-teacher relations. Keeping an open dialogue with your child’s maths teacher is a positive way to work together to support your child’s learning. Parents’ evenings are a great opportunity to do this. If your child struggles significantly with maths, you might want to consider seeking a tutor or additional help.

We can't overstate how important maths learning is for children. Not only does it support logical reasoning and analytical thinking, it prepares your child with the fundamentals needed for whatever they choose to do in the future.

Leena Clark

Helping your child to learn

Michael Goves is an experienced teacher with two decades of senior teaching experience in both state and independent (private) schools. He is currently the CPLD and NPQ Lead at the River Learning Trust/ Oxfordshire Teaching School Hub and is expert on Cognitive Science and Learning. He is also a parent.

How was school? What did you do? What’s your homework? These are all reasonable, well meaning questions to ask as a parent, but the answers might not be what we’re after. Instead of a great chat about learning, with some anecdotes about friends thrown in, we might get something like, ‘ok’, ‘lessons’, and ‘a worksheet’.

As a parent and a teacher, my advice would be to keep questions about the social side of school and learning separate, at least to begin with. For the former, I go with ‘Did you enjoy your day?’, ‘Who did you play with?’, ‘What was the best thing about today?’. Followed by a request to ‘tell me more’…common sense, delivered in a caring, supportive way.

But being supportive and constructive to help with learning involves things that are more uncommon sense. Left to our own devices, whether children or adults, people usually choose/prefer the least helpful approaches to learning. Here’s some guidance - which would also be shared with students (and teachers) - about what to do vs what to avoid, with a brief description of why…

1. Doing doesn’t mean learning: it’s tempting to ask about what your child ‘did’, but actually we’re interested in what was ‘learnt’. I hear this too much in schools too. Students could ‘do’ lots of ‘work’ but learn very little. So, don’t focus on what they did; do ask about what they learnt. This matters because it shifts the thinking onto what lessons are really for - learning, not just doing.

2. The process matters most : too often students fixate on their score/mark and not on the process used to get it. This slows down progress. When presented with a mark and a comment to improve, students usually only focus on the mark, being less likely to make the improvements suggested. Worse, they use the mark to judge themselves. The mark doesn’t just become a judgement about that question/test, it becomes how good they are at that entire subject. This catastrophizing is bad, not true or fair. So, don’t focus on what score/grade/mark was given; do ask questions about the process. For example, ask, ‘How could/should you answer question 2?; or, ‘what steps do you follow to solve the problem in question 3?’; or, ‘What is question 4 asking?’. This matters because it’s essential to separate the person from the process. The process can be learnt/improved over time. Learning the answer to a question without knowing where it came from is not much use. This shows up to teachers as blank answers, or comments like, ‘I can’t do suggest or long answer questions’. And if there are blank faces or ‘I don’t know’ answers to these questions, this is where your child can start when asking their teacher for help, or to revisit in conversation at Parents’ Evening.

3. Learning takes time and effort: I do a lot of research in education and you can’t measure learning in a lesson, a day, even a week. Learning happens over weeks and terms because learning means making long term memories. Also, if it isn’t hard along the way, learning probably wasn’t happening. I explain to students that if questions are always answered correctly, they probably didn’t learn much (or anything) because nothing was new. Making mistakes is good, finding things hard (but just do-able) is good. So, don’t reinforce that you found something hard/impossible as so a reason to opt out; do celebrate that if it’s hard, it’s likely going to result in learning. This matters because the key will be using the right processes (being shown worked examples, models of how to answer questions, model answers).

4. Revising needs to be learnt: this is huge - brains try their best to save energy, not use it up - great revision can seem counterintuitive, for example, we need to forget a little and try hard to remember in order to strengthen memories. Some strategies teachers recommend avoiding include: re-reading, re-writing loads of notes, highlighting, copying answers/information from one place to another, busting out hours of work in one go (late at night). The thinking effort needed to do these things is low. Better strategies include: making flashcards (one fact per card - question on one side and answer on the other; a picture prompt can help); quizzing to recall answers from memory; quizzing to recall how to answer a question (not just the answer itself); summarising notes; practising questions in timed conditions; taking away the notes/model answers over time; working in short bursts (with short breaks); spacing out revision over time. So, what can you do to support? Help make flashcards; be a quizzing partner; set a timer for 30 mins of effort, and 10 mins of break; hear explanations of your child’s understanding (it doesn’t matter that you don’t know all the answers yourself); ask how you answer the questions they’re answering (again, it doesn’t matter that you don’t know it yourself - you’re helping reinforce the all important process). Finally, make a spaced revision timetable. For example, rather than spend 2 hours in one block the night before a test, plan out 4 x 30 min blocks in the 5 days before the test, leaving the night before completely free.

5. The environment matters: learning requires attention and multitasking is a myth. Practising and revising in a place free from distraction matters. Distractions divert brain power. So, don’t advise working on a bed (associated with relaxing/sleep); don’t have a TV on or music with words. Do turn notifications off; keep the reward of that box set until after the work is done; definitely prioritise at least 7 hours of sleep - this is the most important factor for learning and memory.

6. Research keeps updating: how you learnt a subject might not be how it’s advised to be learnt now. So, don’t enforce your way of answering questions because this may be counter-productive; do follow the methods being learnt in school (even if it means learning them too) and help your child to understand and use them. And watch out for myths. Being a visual/auditory/kinaesthetic learner for example is not supported by research. We have our preferences, but the truth is the more ways we use information (see it, hear it, do it) the better it is learnt.

I hope you found this helpful. Above all, I can assure you that what you say and do matters. A lot. A parent/carer is a child’s first and most important teacher. Don’t underestimate the influence you have. Be positive. Support the process and the outcome will happen.

Michael Goves

Introduction to About Schools

Welcome to About Schools! The ongoing purpose of these blog posts is to provide parents and carers with a real insight into how schools work, written by the people who lead and work in education. We are all parents or carers ourselves and are all passionate about the importance of parental engagement to a child’s academic success in English schools. All of us have been classroom teachers, alongside a myriad of other roles in schools, academy trusts and other education-focused organisations. Rest-assured we know how schools work and how best we can support parents and carers in engaging with them. The blog posts you will see over the coming weeks, months and years will reflect this experience and provide you with some up-to-date information on how best to support your child.

We feel there is a genuine need for this. In our experience, too frequently schools and parents are not collaborating effectively. More often than not, this is due to a lack of understanding or an absence of key information. A gap that we hope to fill.

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Sural Bhanshaly

Founder of About Schools