“I just can’t do maths. I’ve never been able to do it.” These words are depressingly familiar to any teacher. Whether in school, college or during adulthood, a fear of mathematics often translates into avoidance and even a hatred of the subject. This is no small issue either. Five million adults in the UK lack basic literacy and numeracy skills, and numeracy rates for British 16- to 18-year-olds are among the lowest in the developed world. This is an issue that clearly needs more focus and funding.

When it comes to GCSEs, secondary schools receive much of the attention, but we should be considering issues at further education level, too. After all, a devastatingly low number of students achieve GCSE maths in FE. Specifically, the GCSE maths grade 4-plus national average for 16- to 18-year-olds sits at just 17.4 per cent for 2019.

While we don’t know exactly what will happen with exams come September now that this year’s GCSEs have been cancelled, this is a problem we still need to address long term.

The policy change that led to post-16 students having to resit their GCSEs if they fail to achieve a grade 4 or better in maths and English has brought with it a range of challenges for FE. Students are often absent, disengaged when attending and apathetic towards content and staff. This is all before considering the anxiety and mental health issues caused by repeatedly having to sit high-stakes exams.

There is a lot here that colleges need to think about. Thankfully, though, they are not alone in tackling this issue.

In my previous role at Hartlepool College of Further Education, I worked with a charity called SHINE to help us boost our maths provision and help more learners gain their maths GCSE - and maybe even learn to love the subject.

SHINE is a charity based in the North of England. Its mission is to improve basic literacy and numeracy levels across Britain, and so far, says it has invested more than £29 million in projects benefiting 20,000 schools and 1.3 million disadvantaged children across the country.

When I first found out about its work, I applied for a little over £2,000 in funding for a literacy project. The outcomes were enormously successful.

The project focused on students making regular entries into low-stakes journals and engaging in writing about their interests, hopes and experiences away from college. For many, this was the first time they had put something down on paper without receiving written feedback from a teacher or without it being in preparation for an assessment.

The majority of the funding was used to purchase the journals for more than 300 students, as well as some going towards staff CPD, and purchasing rewards, such as £20 vouchers, for students who had participated and excelled while completing the project.

Combined with several other factors, such as a new attendance and sanction/reward policy and greater cross-college accountability for English and maths, this renewed student engagement in writing led to the college posting our best-ever GCSE results and the best progress results in the North East.

Buoyed by this success, we set about bidding for another round of funding - this time to help boost maths learning. And we saw even greater results. We applied for £3,000 on this occasion, and used that for a raft of benefits, such as external CPD, costs to visit other colleges (locally, regionally and nationally to identify and share best practice), the purchase of resources and a small amount for literature materials, such as books and research journals.

The aim of this was to help give us the skills and resources to undertake a new approach to how maths is taught - chiefly, improving assessment. After all, better assessment means better understanding of what students do, and do not, understand.

However, having trained and spent many years in secondary education, I was acutely aware that too much assessment stifles practitioner freedom and too little means key intervention pinch points are easily missed.

As a result, the timing and duration of assessment was key. We also needed to ensure that the data was reliable.

With all these considerations in mind, it was decided that a “little and often” approach would be taken, and we decided to adapt only what happened at the beginning and end of lessons. After much trial and error, this took two forms:

Maths topic assessment grids. Students were given an A4 page, split into sections, comprising nine topics (such as algebra, percentages and fractions) to complete independently at the beginning of their twice-weekly GCSE maths lessons. The questions took the form of GCSE-style tasks, which were created by the maths team and based on questions seen in previous papers. These tasks were self-assessed (staff provided answers and students self-marked, with staff logging their results afterwards), which meant students did not have to share results with their peers if they did not want to.

Differentiated extension tasks (at three levels: developing, secure or mastery). We had these pre-printed on adhesive labels so they could be used in student books after lessons to signal their areas of development. As these were pre-produced, it meant consistent, efficient, high-quality feedback and practitioner workload was cut significantly - a class set of books could be assessed in 15 minutes.

With the results of the maths grids being known only to individuals, we found they became more focused on their individual learning journey rather than working competitively (which carried the risk of alienating those with lower scores).

We also found that students who gained higher scores after completing the grids became motivated to continue gaining high marks on core course assessments, too.

Furthermore, we saw that when students gained low scores, they were better able to forget about this as they soon had another chance to improve on their score in their next “grid assessment”, rather than having to dwell on a bad result in a more high-stakes assessment - such as an assessed piece of work, or a mock or real GCSE exam - and wait a long time to rectify this. The approach provided more opportunities for them to see that they could do maths and held back the more negative thoughts that so many had before about finding maths too hard.

To complement these twice-weekly grids, we also introduced more frequent but lower-stakes assessments. This was done after we witnessed the effects of more stressful assessments in key stages 3 and 4: regular mock exams and lengthy assessments had turned many students off maths.

Instead, these lower-stakes assessments, taking place once every half term, take the form of larger grids, often with the difficulty of the questions slightly increased, to further stretch and challenge students without it becoming too daunting.

By having this mix of low-stakes assessments, it meant there was a thread that ran throughout their learning, as topics were not taught in silos any more but, instead, students engaged with them regularly on their learning grids. This meant there was a better chance of the students embedding their learning rather than only returning to a topic ahead of their exams.

Furthermore, because lecturers were able to regularly harvest data on learner progress with minimal additional effort - data capture and analysis tools were no more complex than a spreadsheet - we were able to easily identify key areas of development for groups of students and initiate interventions by working with vocational tutors.

This took the form of tweaks as opposed to wholesale change. Where we found, for example, that GCSE resit students on engineering programmes struggled with a certain topic, we created resources for engineering lecturers to embed in their schemes of work when that topic naturally occurred. With vocational staff also using resources created by maths practitioners, the students were able to see much more clearly how maths is applied in the “real” world, helping underline the importance of the topic to their area of study.

All this had a big impact. As well as posting the best progress in the North East for 2018 (+0.22) and 2019 (+0.25), we also moved from 17 per cent of 16- to 18-year-old students achieving grade 4 or above in 2017 to 32.5 per cent in 2018 and 46 per cent in 2019. Preliminary results suggest this is the best grade 4-plus percentage in the North East and one of the best for English FE colleges.

Obviously, many factors contribute to this but the use, analysis and application of assessment has been key to developing every aspect of the curriculum at the college.

Having since left Hartlepool and started a new role as head of English and maths at Tyne Coast College - one of the first to obtain a “good” grading under the new inspection framework - I am looking forward to further developing the project and continuing to support students to achieve in maths and English.

With the funding, guidance and support that SHINE continues to provide (not only for our project but for projects in all sectors of education in the UK), I hope we can have a similar impact and help more people improve their core education skills.

Jonathan Kay is head of English and maths at Tyne Coast College, and a lead English expert for a major exam board. He tweets @jonnykayteacher and blogs at thereflectiveteacher.co.uk

This article originally appeared in the 3 April 2020 issue under the headline “Low-stakes tests take fear out of the GCSE resits equation”