Ross Deans and the importance of framing maths as stories (Part 1)

“As a school there's a pressure to have good performance, but we're not going into this to create robots. We're trying to give these children a future.”

– Ross Deans, Year 6 and Maths Lead at Muscliff Primary

Ross Deans has come full circle.

The Year 6 and Maths Lead at Muscliff Primary in Bournemouth vividly recalls not liking maths when he was younger because of the way it was taught, with the focus on factual recall, drilling the algorithm, and the lack of any exploration or fun.

“It was something that repelled me as quite a creative person when I was young,” Ross said in a recent interview. “Maths for me was an area of anxiety. It was something I wasn't very confident in. So to have ended up as one, a teacher, and, two, a teacher who specializes in maths is not something I would have imagined when I was younger.”

Ross, who’s been at Muscliff for 13 years, says it wasn’t until he got into teaching primary maths, and specifically using the maths mastery approach, that the subject opened up for him. For instance, he recalls that using bar models as a teaching tool really resonated with him.

“It's a very pictorial representation, something that's logical but also lends itself to being quite creative and for me that made the subject a lot more accessible to my pupils, but also to how it would have suited me as a child.”

Framing maths as stories

Another important difference now from the way maths was traditionally taught is that the maths mastery approach frames maths as stories, which is useful for both teachers and learners. Ross says the stories, along with the Concrete-Pictorial-Abstract approach, are built into the Maths — No Problem! Programme, which he and his colleagues at Muscliff have been using since 2017.

He says in every session, there’s a story, along with concrete representations. So, as much as is necessary, the children are using manipulatives, they're seeing different pictorial representations and they explore the concepts being taught in significant detail before moving to the abstract.

“What these mastery approaches like Maths — No Problem! are really trying to do is develop that conceptual understanding and flexibility so that they become problem-solvers. They've got a way in. Coupled with that is that we want them to be talking about their maths. Let's explore and let's talk about it. Let's make connections.”

The importance of conceptual understanding

Ross has personal experience of what happens when the conceptual understanding isn’t there.

He says in secondary school, even though he still didn’t like maths, he managed to do quite well in a certain area of algebra, so he was moved into the top set. “I found myself grappling with formulas and algorithms.”

It’s something he used to see in the children when they reached the end of Key Stage 2 and SATs. He’d see them “plucking out” and guessing the answer because they didn’t know what to do. They lacked conceptual understanding.

But things have changed since maths mastery was introduced at Muscliff.

There are many more children who are “very enthusiastic and positive about maths” because the way it’s taught now is playful and explorative.

“There's a really different relationship with maths as a subject now,” says Ross, who had an earlier career as a conservationist before he became a teacher. “It still has that ‘yes or no’ element to it because questions can be wrong. But depending on how you deliver that as a setting, you can try and take that sting out of it a little bit. The importance is on the exploration and spotting patterns, making links, rather than yes-no, correct or incorrect.”

It’s about equipping the children with different methods and different approaches to learning. Sometimes during an exploration the children might arrive at a solution quickly. “We say that's great. That's one way you could do it, but let's look at another way — and in the early days you'd get a lot of, ‘Why, I know how to do it.’ But that’s not the point.”

Building a robust toolkit

Ross says it’s important in those moments to remember the goal of the approach. “We're trying to develop our mathematical brains here. We're trying to look at different ways of doing things. And the idea is that you're building a more robust toolkit.”

He rattles off a list of questions to ask the children who may be stuck on the notion that there’s only one way to do things:

• Is this more efficient?
• Can you see what this person's done here?
• Would that be useful for something else?

He says this helps develop flexibility and in future scenarios, when they're faced with a problem, whether it is something dry like an exam or whether it's a real life situation, they've got lots of different strategies to use rather than trying to remember how they solved a particular problem during a particular lesson.

“That's what you want, really, for your children, isn't it? As a school there's a pressure to have good performance, but we're not going into this to create robots. We're trying to give these children a future. We want them to be able to think for themselves and enjoy their learning as well, and that is all part of that story.”

Ross says the biggest difference he’s noticed in the kids now since he’s been doing this for almost seven years is their ability to make links between things and talk about it.

He’s also seen an uptick in the data.

Maths mastery improves SATs results

The primary benefit of the maths mastery approach is that it helps children develop resiliency and problem-solving skills in later life. One of the spin-off benefits is that it also helps schools to improve their results.

Ross cautions that achieving good results in the SATs data “shouldn’t govern your why for teaching,” however he agrees there’s a place for data, even if it’s just to have a way to measure and observe progress.

When Muscliff overhauled its approach to maths and brought in maths mastery in 2017, they saw continual improvements in data that continued all the way through to 2019, which was their strongest year to date. Then Covid hit, which disrupted things for everyone, but they recovered well and since then, in the years that have followed up to last year, Muscliff has “extended a lead on national data and it's looking pretty strong.”

He says a higher percentage of pupils are feeling very confident in their maths, and the greater depth percentages “have increased quite a lot actually and they're quite far ahead of national data.”

“Really what we found is, by developing the whole child, really focusing on that conceptual understanding, the data has gone up accordingly anyway.”

Learn more:

The impact of CPD on education and pupil success

Working Together: How collaboration creates meaningful learning

6 strategies to help pupils develop an early understanding of place value