Next month will see the start of an academic college year like no other. Firstly, our resitters will not be resitters at all. They never had the chance to cram all that last-minute revision in and show off their mathematical genius in the June 2020 exam series.

They may have a calculated grade that they’re not too happy about. Secondly, they needn’t even change out of their PJs to attend classes. Thirdly, we are expecting an influx of new students as a result of Covid-19, both for GCSE maths and functional maths – there are no bounds on class size online, and you can reach a much wider audience very effectively. The keyword here is "effectively".

Background: Could GCSE resits be taught exclusively online?

News: Should FE expect 120,000 extra resit students?

GCSE resits: How can we prepare students for September?

Virtual maths

Welcome to the wonderful world of virtual maths. Quite what this new online delivery will look like is anybody's guess. At one end of the spectrum, it could be an all-singing, all-dancing maths extravaganza with bells on...Kahoot quizzes, Quizziz quizzes, video topics, Triptico card sorts, online whiteboards and visualisers. These may be the only reason the tutor has to bother visiting the nail bar.

At the other end of the spectrum, maths provision online may simply be a dull as ditchwater, death by PowerPoint slideshow.

I am not a Luddite. I even devised and delivered teacher training for digital maths a couple of years ago. But, working with a digital master very recently to upskill and faced with Trello and Sutori and Thinglink, I was beginning to feel I’d landed in an episode of Blake’s Seven, half expecting to encounter Serbillon as we live out an actual scene from Survivors (yes, I am that old!)

So what could a great maths resit curriculum look like online? It could literally be anything you want it to be...and that is tremendously exciting. However, you must keep the principles of great maths teaching at its core.

So here are the forget me nots: 

• Do not forget the eight effective principles of maths teaching from Malcolm Swan...nor the wisdom of Dylan William, making the student the architect of their own learning, nor the concrete, pictorial and abstract representations through bar modelling and algebra tiles that help clarify the maths to be done; the principles of spaced and interleaved practice or my own tweetings on @tessmaths – if it looks, feels and sounds like school, you’ll just get the same result.

• Don’t forget to get students to do maths, every day, give them easy access to maths tools where they can practice maths and get immediate answers. Another @tessmaths tweet: "Practice until you cannot get it wrong; not until you simply get it right."
• Do not forget the wonderful work that’s already been done for us maths teachers. We have an armoury of online maths tools already, our weapons of maths instruction, mathsbot.com from the talented Mr Hall, Corbettmaths from the clever Mr Corbett, Diagnostic Questions from the brilliance of Mr Barton, Onmaths from the awesome Onmaths team – and there you have it, the start of the list I wasnt going to write.
• And don’t forget gamification. When I walk 10,000 steps in a day, my wrist buzzes, not unpleasantly, and a fanfare of trumpets sound, fireworks light the sky and my Fitbit unlocks a badge telling me...congratulations, you have this week walked the length of Lake Titicaca. Translate that into online learning and you have a reason to do the maths, right there, because you can collect badges like Pokemon, just for sitting there in your pants, doing maths. If you’ve never tried You can’t do simple maths under pressure and got to level 10 then that, my friend, is your homework.
• And finally, do not forget that no one gets left behind. That means that effective measures must be in place if they can’t sit at home working online because they have a baby drawing on their face. What will you do for them? You must give them all of the care and attention, too. Traditional distance learning approaches with those principles still at the heart of that curriculum design.

Nothing is normal and won’t be for some time yet. So it’s time to have a exceptional curriculum that engages and motivates resitting and non-resitting students like never before. It needs to be flexible enough to stand up and sit down with face to face teaching possible, or not, in the future or heavens above, another calculated grades situation. But give them a real reason to come to class virtual or not.

Now excuse me whilst I commence my walk up Kilimanjaro, starting in the lanes of Essex.

Julia Smith is a maths teacher, trainer and author, and 5Rs project lead