The “Forgotten Third” needs help – but the problem is bigger than that

 With the latest government curriculum review due to report later this year, coupled with the (seemingly) imminent white paper that promises reform of vocational education at Key Stage 4 as well as changes to post-16 English and maths provision, speculation is rife as to what our new National Curriculum in maths will look like. Although the curriculum review interim report seemed to point more towards evolution than revolution, praising many aspects of our current system, one area that has come under increased scrutiny are those students that do not achieve grade 4 in maths (and/or English) by age 16 – the so called “forgotten third” (as it accounts for roughly one third of the 16-year-old cohort each year).

The Oxford, Cambridge and RSA (OCR) Examinations board is leading the charge in this area, already publicly calling for a new “short course” GCSE maths that would focus on “the fundamental maths skills that you need for life and work”. The idea is that pupils would sit this short course at the end of year 10 before sitting the full GCSE maths in year 11. There are obvious issues in this approach around the comparability of any grades awarded from the short course and the full GCSE maths, whether colleges and employers would accept and value the short course, and whether pupils who achieved a standard pass in the short course would then lose motivation to continue on to the full GCSE. This last one in particular needs careful consideration, as it is likely that those schools with the most disadvantaged and disaffected cohorts are likely to be more acutely affected.

I applaud any work that aims to support those pupils that find learning maths most difficult. Those pupils who don’t achieve a standard pass or higher by 16 are highly unlikely to do post-16, with only 17.4% of 17+ students achieving the standard in 2024. Given that, in the years that these students would have sat their GCSE maths in secondary school the grade 4 could be achieved with around 50% on foundation tier, and less that 20% on the higher tier, it is a sad state of affairs that only about two-thirds of pupils meet this standard after 12 years of schooling, and that less than 1 in 5 of those remaining then go on to achieve the standard at all. The government is already taking action to deal with this, with conditions of funding changes for academic year 2025-26 meaning the colleges and sixth-forms have to provide at least 100 hours of maths teaching for pupils without a standard pass within each academic year that they are re-sitting, and strongly encouraged to provide a further 35 hours on top of this, but it is clear that more will be needed to radically shift these numbers.

However, whilst these pupils clearly need more support both pre- and post-16, there is a larger issue at play here in the mathematical progress of a much larger group of pupils. I am speaking of the more than three quarters of 16-year-olds that do not achieve a grade 7 in maths.

Now, I am aware that the awarding of grades at GCSE is influenced by the distribution of prior attainment, and so the percentage of pupils that can be awarded a grade 7 is somewhat limited. But I am also aware that the National Reference Test (NRT) is sat each year by a sample of pupils to determine if there are differences between the most recent cohort and those in 2017 (the baseline year for the NRT). The NRT is sat in February/March of year 11 for those schools and pupils selected, with the data used to modify the distribution model that is used in the grading of GCSE exams. Except that it has never thrown up a need to change that model in any significant way (beyond a couple of percentage points from one year to the next). What this means that, the COVID pandemic disruption notwithstanding, we (and I count myself in this) have not really improved the number of pupils who gain access to the upper echelons of school-level maths. And when I say, “upper echelons”, I mean pupils that can open a higher tier paper and achieve 55% of the marks. This is the average number of marks that were required in 2024 to secure a grade 7. This figure is somewhat skewed however – with two of the four boards that offer GCSE maths in English schools the figure was less than 50% of the marks required. Bear in mind that 2016-2017 was the first year that the NCETM and Maths hubs started training Secondary Mastery Specialists (I know, because I was in the first cohort). Not that I am blaming the NCETM, the Maths Hubs, or even myself. The issue is a systemic one, finding its roots in a curriculum, assessment and accountability system that forces teachers to progress at a pace that has no choice but to leave some behind at each stage in order to try and maximise those that might reflect well on the school. The culmination of this is that many of the foundational ideas that should be secured earlier in schooling are not cemented, and therefore provide no foundation for higher learning. In reality, it should be the case that a significant number of pupils should be able to breeze a foundation GCSE paper by the end of year 9 (10 years of schooling in total) if not before, and that many of them should then have little further difficulty in the higher tier content.

Please note here that I am not advocating for pupils to sit foundation tier GCSE in Year 9 as a gateway to higher tier – this would only lead to the same problems that the proposed OCR course may do but on a grander scale. What I am advocating for is a curriculum that prioritises mastering the fundamentals and provides time for this to happen, an assessment system that measures this properly, and an accountability system that doesn’t incentivise pupils and schools to aim for enough surface-level knowledge that they can scrape what might be considered an acceptable standard, but in reality, is anything but. This is what the curriculum review needs to be focusing on, and what the implementation of it needs to make happen. This is a big departure from our current system, and will require drastic shifts in our approaches to make it a reality. However, this has to be the aspiration for a world class education system.

So, colleagues up and down the country, I have just one more thing to say: Viva la revolution.