TTR0010

Written evidence submitted by NRICH

NRICH, an award-winning collaboration between the Faculties of Mathematics and Education at the University of Cambridge, has been successfully supporting the training and retention of teachers of mathematics for over a quarter of a century. During the pandemic, teachers requiring high quality home schooling mathematics resources relied on NRICH’s ‘Maths at Home’ initiative which regularly attracted in excess of a million page views per week.

NRICH specialises in supporting the development of problem-solving skills, a key curriculum objective which Ofsted regularly reports is taught inconsistently  across many schools. NRICH’s free resources support schools to address those inconsistencies by delivering challenging yet engaging curriculum-mapped activities for all ages from Early Years to university entrance. To further support schools maximise the potential of those resources, NRICH also delivers teacher professional development for both trainee and experienced teachers of mathematics, including delivering the keynote lecture at the launch of the annual DfE Scholars Programme.

Through their work, the NRICH team has acquired valuable insights into addressing the ongoing issues of teacher retention, training and recruitment. These issues include:

• Unequal investment in mathematics PD across schools – often caused by the reluctance of many Senior Leadership Teams to release their mathematics teachers in under-staffed departments – often leading to huge variance in the quality of mathematics teaching across schools – however other head teachers report that investing in PD can lead to increased teacher retention and job satisfaction
• Growing expectation that teachers attend PD during their own time – resulting in workload issues as well as challenging embedding learning across schools – those schools investing in the release of teachers and planning the dissemination of their training report greater impact
• Over reliance on short-term teaching recruitment solutions such as Teach First, which can result in overloaded Heads of Department required to support the induction of new colleagues who are not expected to remain in their careers and rise to management level, leading to potential shortages of future leaders in some schools– in contrast the DfE Scholars Programme encourages strong links between its Scholars and leading mathematics organisations (often offering free membership during training) leading to the development of stronger support networks and helping new teachers acquire a sense of belonging to the profession -this approach could be extended beyond secondary schools

Should the proposed extension of teaching mathematics up to the age of 18 go ahead, schools will be under even greater pressure to cover lessons, potentially leading to worsening situations regarding retention and access to PD for the existing pool of mathematics teachers.

Dr Ems Lord

Director of NRICH

March 2023