Shaping the future of maths

Level 3 Core Maths case study – Wyke Sixth Form College

By Emily Rae
Published 02 October 2023

Emily Rae is a teacher of A-level Maths, Further Maths and Core Maths at Wyke Sixth Form College in Hull.

Our centre and cohort

Wyke is a sixth-form college with just over 2,000 learners from a range of backgrounds, covering Hull, East Riding of Yorkshire and North Lincolnshire. We feel that Level 3 Mathematical Studies (Core Maths) is an excellent course for many of our learners, as it gives them the opportunity to study Level 3 maths in a real-world context.

Core Maths is offered to learners as an enrichment course alongside their main programme of study and is delivered over a single year in two timetabled lessons per week. A typical cohort size for us is between 70 and 80 and has a mixture of first and second-year learners.

Why we chose AQA

We chose the AQA specification because we already use AQA for A-level Maths and Further Maths, and we liked the Statistical techniques option it offered. We felt this was the most appropriate choice for our learners due to its overlap with other subjects.

Attracting learners to the course

Core Maths is promoted to new learners during the college application and enrolment process as an ideal accompaniment to subjects such as Psychology, Biology, Geography, Economics and Business studies, due to the curricular links with the finance and statistics topics. It’s further advertised to learners at our college enrichment fayre in the first week of term. We also have a number of learners who choose to take Core Maths in their second year at the college; this is promoted through the tutorial system and by the teachers of related subjects at the end of the first year. For these students, the decision to pick up Core Maths in their second year is often driven by a desire to gain some extra UCAS points for their university applications, or as a way to explore further the mathematics they are using in other subjects such as Psychology or Business Studies. For others, it is chosen purely for enrichment and enjoyment purposes, perhaps after they have finished another one-year commitment such as an Extended Project Qualification (EPQ).

How we teach Core Maths

Having offered Core Maths since 2015, over time we have developed a set of centralised resources such as PowerPoints, worksheets and group work activities that our teachers can use or adapt as they wish. We have a Teams group chat for the Core Maths teachers where they can share ideas and topical resources like recent news articles that lend themselves well to the topics we are covering, such as Fermi estimation or financial maths.

We liaise with our teachers of related subjects to make links between their courses and Core Maths. This allows us to highlight the relevance of our learners' skills in Core Maths in the context of their other subjects, such as using standard deviation or the Normal distribution in Psychology, or the effects of inflation and changes in income tax and national insurance rates in Economics.

Top tips for teaching

One challenge that we have found in delivering Core Maths is the relatively wide range of abilities and confidence levels among the learners. Some learners will have performed highly at GCSE, and may even be studying it alongside A-level Maths, while others may not have even studied Maths in over a year if they have picked it up in their second year, and can be rusty on the basic skills. We seek to overcome this by dedicating the first few weeks of the course to setting a solid foundation of fundamentals such as percentage increase, decrease and reverse percentages, in the context of more wordy Core Maths-style questions, where learners are encouraged to justify their answers. This ensures that learners are confident in carrying out numerical calculations when they get onto more in-depth financial questions such as income tax and national insurance.

Core Maths is a course that lends itself nicely to group work and discussion activities. As a department, we have invested in a number of class sets of large (A1-sized) whiteboards, which learners can collaborate on in small groups. This has worked particularly well with this course, where discussion of problems is encouraged, and we use these in the majority of lessons.