Maths at Groby
The maths department comprises a hard working and friendly group of staff who work well together in
an atmosphere of mutual support. The department benefits from having experienced teachers who are
able to offer help and support as well as staff who are relatively new in the profession, who contribute
new thinking. Our results at KS4 and 5 continue to improve with 65% of students achieving A* to C
grades at GCSE and 78% achieving A*/B grades at A level. There are good links with Brookvale High
School with whom we share a campus as well as with South Charnwood, our other main High school
partner. Two Year 9 maths groups are currently taught here at Groby in a drive to improve links between
the two schools.
Staffing
There are 6 full-time members of staff in the department as well as 2 part time. The staff are strongly
encouraged to develop and share their expertise in teaching and learning and are given support and
encouragement with this process. A strong emphasis is placed on CPD. The department has worked with
the Centre for Research in Mathematics Education at Nottingham University on a research project aimed at
developing problem solving skills as well as with Loughborough University on assessing problem solving
skills. We are always looking at ways to improve the teaching and learning of mathematics.
Accommodation
We have a suite of 5 classrooms (5, 6, 7, 8 and 35), a small maths staffroom and 2 additional. All rooms
have ceiling mounted data projectors and promethean interactive whiteboards. We have worked hard on
the display over the last few years to improve the learning environment. We also have a bank of maths
laptops which staff use based on a departmental timetable.
Courses
Pre 16: Set 1 students follow AQA Linear and GCSE Further maths. Sets 2 to 4 follow Edexcel Linear. We
also offer Edexcel GCSE Statistics as an additional, voluntary GCSE for our higher ability students.
Post 16 we offer AS and A2 courses in Maths and Further Maths following the MEI specifications through
OCR. We also run GCSE Maths one year classes for AS students.
Years 10 and 11 have four lessons a week; Y12 resit two; Y12 AS four and Y13 five.
Two teachers share the teaching of each A-level group.
Resources
There are extensive resources in the Maths area on the college VLE. All GCSE students are also expected to
access this from home and make use of powerpoints of model answers to exam papers and the short
revision video clips there.
We have sets of textbooks for Foundation, Middle and Higher ability students in each classroom. There are
also Further maths and GCSE Statistics textbooks.
A full class set of Casio graphical calculators is available for use in Key Stage 4. We expect AS students to
buy their own.
We have an extensive bank of AfL resources; loop quizzes; matching activities; and millionaire questions.
We have sets of graphic calculators and the department are developing ideas for use with a set of Ti-nspire
graphic calculators and a set of Activote devices. We also use the activeslates to enable greater interactivity
in lessons.
Each class has regular access to laptops (usually one lesson in four). We subscribe to MyMaths, making full
use of its online testing, and we use other sites for tutorial and revision opportunities.
May 2014
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