Shaping the future of maths

I’ve taught Level 2 Further Maths for several years now in two different schools. I think it’s a great qualification to offer alongside the GCSE for those students aspiring towards A-level Maths or just wanting a bit more of a challenge.

What I especially like about the qualification is that virtually all of it can be taught alongside the normal GCSE (with the slight exception of two main topics) and the questions are really good and challenging.

What do students and staff think?

In my experience, this hasn’t been too hard a sell to students or staff.

For staff, having the content sprinkled throughout the schemes of work makes it manageable and supplies really good extension material easily. There isn’t that much extra to learn how to teach, so it’s a nice professional development opportunity without adding too much to the workload.

For students, there are several selling points. It can really help them get up to the higher grades in the normal GCSE. Seeing more challenging questions throughout years 10 and 11 helps to stretch the higher attaining and keep them well engaged.

Whilst I teach the material to everyone in the higher sets, I’ve always made entrance to the final exam completely optional. Students have a lot of exams to sit at the end of year 11. I don’t want to add to potential anxiety by requiring students to sit two more exams.

However, a big selling point for the L2FM is that there isn’t an awful lot of extra content to learn, it’s often just harder questions. If students are aiming for grade 7 or above in the GCSE, then they should be able to grade relatively comfortably in L2FM. We tend to get around 75% of our top sets sitting the exam and this has increased the longer we’ve run it.

Largely, these students really enjoy doing maths so they often love having more challenging questions. They especially enjoy the new content on matrices and calculus as it feels much more A-level-like to them. The fact that matrices is only in A-level Further Maths also makes them feel especially smug!

How to start?

Most of the topics are extensions of the existing GCSE content so can fit nicely within your existing scheme of work. The matrices and calculus sections are the only new topics and these can be taught across three or four lessons for each. Everything else can be seen as extension work.

We’ve spread the teaching across years 10 and 11 (we have a two-year KS4) to make it more manageable. For most of the content, we found an extra lesson or two at the end of an appropriate section worked really well. For example, when we were expanding double and triple brackets, we added an extra lesson or two on expanding 4, 5, 6 and n brackets using Pascal’s triangle. When we did the equation of a circle, we added an additional lesson about circles with centre not at (0,0).

We left the two new topics of matrices and calculus to the end of the course. Each topic took three or four hours in total but you could do some of this by flipped learning, for example.

Because you’re teaching it to high-attaining students, they tend to get through the normal GCSE material (especially the grade 5 and 6 work) very quickly so we’ve found there’s plenty of time. They also like having a separate further maths book or section in their folder. It’s worth doing this so all specific content can be found more easily at the end of year 11.

Where should the new content go?

This table shows what I believe to be more specific, ‘additional’ content that is in L2FM. Of course, this is my view so check the specification and teaching guidance to ensure you have covered everything.

There is more content than this but much of it mirrors the GCSE very closely, eg functions or algebraic fractions. The references to the GCSE specification help you link your existing scheme of work.

There isn’t a lot of additional content, it’s just preparing your students to attempt harder, more challenging questions on a more regular basis.