Recommendation 49

HM Government Accepted

We know that teachers already work tirelessly to deliver high-quality maths education. Rolling out maths to a substantially larger post-16 cohort will require a larger workforce trained and equipped to teach young people the maths skills they need for their future careers. We will work closely with schools and colleges to do this. As a first step, we will launch a new, fully funded mathematics National Professional Qualification (NPQ) for those leading maths teaching in primary schools, teaching participants how to train other teachers to embed mastery pedagogy throughout their schools. We expect to make this available to all primary schools from February 2024. We will offer an updated Targeted Support Fund for the 2023–24 academic year, providing additional funding to incentivise primary school teacher and leaders, including in the smallest schools. We are also launching an expansion of the Taking Teaching Further programme, delivering funding for Further Education (FE) colleges to recruit and offer early career support to those with relevant knowledge and industry experience to retrain as FE teachers. We will launch a financial incentive pilot this year for up to 355 teachers, targeted at some of the most hard-to-fill subjects, including maths. We already provide significant incentives to boost the recruitment and retention of maths teachers: • We provide a £27,000 tax-free bursary or £29,000 tax-free scholarship for trainee maths teachers starting in 2023/24. • In addition, we have introduced a Levelling Up Premium worth up to £3,000 tax-free annually for teachers in their first 5 years working in disadvantaged schools. • We provide tax-free bursaries of up to £26,000 to support further education teachers training in priority subjects, including maths, for 2022/23. This will increase to a maximum of £29,000 from 2023/24. • We are supporting the development of a high-quality apprenticeship route into further education teaching. Since 2010, we have made significant progress in ensuring pupils have a strong grasp of the basics by transforming the way maths is taught in schools. We have also seen a marked improvement in our position on the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) league table. To ensure the curriculum is taught effectively, we introduced the mastery pedagogy used by top performing East Asian countries. Mastery aims to ensure that pupils secure a deep knowledge and understanding of mathematics. To support teachers to deliver this approach, we introduced the Maths Hubs programme coordinated by the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM) which is now working with a network of 40 maths hubs to help local schools improve the quality of their teaching based on mastery approaches. On 17th April, the Secretary of State for Education set out plans to expand Maths Hubs. The £100 million Teaching for Mastery programme exemplifies mastery pedagogy supporting high quality maths teaching. In 2021, we introduced the Mastering Number programme as part of Maths Hubs, through Accelerator Fund budgets. This programme provides professional development to participating teachers, enabling them to help all children in Reception and Key Stage 1 to develop their understanding of number through short, daily teaching sessions. The programme has proved universally popular: over 5,000 primary schools were involved in its first year.