Too many children have trouble relating maths to real life and suffer from low maths confidence and maths anxiety.
Children have lost months of learning and the learning gap is wider than pre-COVID-19, making a solution to the maths problem more urgent. Rishi Sunak announced additional education funding in the recent Budget but has been criticised for underestimating what is needed to resolve this issue – https://inews.co.uk/news/education/budget-2021-rishi-sunak-school-catch-up-recovery-tsar-1271233
Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are worst hit from the school closures due to COVID and reports in BBC News show that these pupils are falling behind and require additional support even after considering the Government Catch-Up Funding for schools-https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-56996245. Their parents are usually from low-income communities and may also have suffered from maths anxieties in their own childhoods.
The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) study states that pupils eligible for free school meals have fallen behind more than the estimated three months their classmates fell behind during Lockdown. The Chair says we need to act now to avoid a “catastrophe for disadvantaged children”. The learning gap for poorer pupils is now 46% wider-https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-53947982.
Struggling with maths at school can impact children’s entire lives. Maths anxiety can easily lead on to low confidence and low self-esteem as well as a reduction in long term career opportunities. In addition, parents who do not feel confident in maths cannot support their children easily. They feel stressed, unhappy and worried about their child’s maths skills and their own inability to help their child, and to support teachers and schools. This can reflect easily on the child and go on to present itself in school work performance and affect maths attainment levels for the child and school.
Our Solution – School Tournaments and a Research Programme
By outreach within schools, within and in After-School clubs, Education With Ease, a Social Enterprise, are offering support by way of fun tournaments and resources to the children who need it most but whose opportunities to access extra assistance like extra private tuition, are limited by financial limitations in their home.
BeGenio’s multi-award winning Race To Infinity game will be used in schools for COVID catch-up sessions and extra fun maths practice. The School Tournaments will take place towards the end of the Spring Term, just before the Easter holidays and are funded by Peabody Trust for Thamesmead and for schools around the Borough of Lewisham.
Each school will be given 12 Race To Infinity maths games free of charge – six games for the school and six games for individual children. At the end of the period, we will support each school to run a tournament and there will be prizes: personal copies of the Race To Infinity game for the children and the school.
An Inter-schools tournament at the end of the project is also being planned, with the aim to lead on to Inter-Borough tournaments nationally.
BeGenio are also performing a data-based research in schools with University of Greenwich.
