Mathematical creativity lecture

Well, I am off to the North-West of England tomorrow to give a lecture at Edge Hill University. It takes most of a day to get there from Norwich by train, going via London and Liverpool. I've been asked to talk on 'Creativity in mathematics' to a group of primary school teachers on the Edge Hill Mathematics Specialist Teacher Programme.

This topic is one of my personal enthusiasms and one that I always enjoy sharing with primary school teachers. My involvement in classroom-based research in this area goes all the way back to my 1984 PhD, which I did part-time at London University. Over the years I have been privileged to explore the topic further with various groups of more able children in primary schools, particularly at Cringleford Primary, a local school on the edge of Norwich close to the University. So, I have plenty of material from interacting with children to share on this subject – and I hope this will entertain and stimulate the troops in Ormskirk.

The following weekend I shall be doing a repeat performance in Birmingham, with another cohort of mathematics specialist teachers.

I see that Ian Sugarman is doing a session after me at Edge Hill on place value and calculation. He's always good value – likewise, Ian Thomson, who is doing the same session at the Birmingham event.

New Primary Curriculum for England Dropped

The new primary curriculum, following the Rose Review, had been accepted by Ed Balls and published in the government's website as being statutory from 2011. It has been distributed to many schools, teachers are already engaging positively with it and in some LAs teachers are being trained to implement it.

However, the proposal for this to become statutory was incorporated in the Children Schools and Families Bill, along with various other more controversial legislation. Progress through parliament was consequently slow – and on Thursday the new primary curriculum was dropped from the Bill in the so-called 'wash-up' that takes place when a general election is called. The opposition could have agreed to it going through, but they did not.

This leaves all of us involved in primary education in a bit of a mess. A huge amount of time, effort, expertise and funding has gone into the development of this curriculum, including the Rose Review itself and the extensive consultations about the proposals. The outcome was something that primary schools seem to support and which was research-based and contemporary. Schools may well determine to implement it anyway – but we are left now with the statutory curriculum for primary schools still being the one that was published in November 1999.