Neil Le Feuvre, Rosie Ross and the 10-year journey to developing mathematical language

“If it helps with data and results — great. But actually, I want them to have a love of maths and a mathematical language and something that's a critical skill for life.”

– Neil Le Feuvre

Neil Le Feuvre, Headteacher at St. Bridget’s Church of England Primary School in Wirral, UK, began his maths mastery journey a decade ago, after speaking with a colleague who suggested he have a look at Maths — No Problem!

“St. Bridget’s has always been a reasonably high attaining school and the children were reasonably good mathematicians, but they weren't really enjoying maths,” Neil said during a recent interview. “It was just a subject they had to do and they had to get through. And as an educator, that just didn't sit right with me.”

He said from there, he started learning about how Maths — No Problem! was developed and the programme’s roots in Singapore. One thing that strongly impressed him was when a colleague told him that in Singapore take maths A level because it's the “easy” one. “And I was like, good grief, at that time my daughter couldn't wait to give up maths after GCSE, and I was just thinking, right, well, there's a whole culture I need to understand, because that's what I want for my children in my school. If it helps with data and results — great. But actually, I want them to have a love of maths and a mathematical language and something that's a critical skill for life.”

Neil says when St. Bridget’s started to embark on the mastery path, they had the luxury of time because Ofsted had graded the school ‘outstanding.’ “So we knew we had a little bit of time to embed things, rather than have to rush stuff, which was really important for us, because it meant we could be brave and we could make mistakes.”

According to Neil, prior to adopting the mastery approach, English maths was all about guessing what was in the teacher’s head in order to get the correct answer. Then the pupil would correct it multiple times and repeat it multiple times.

But this was a whole different approach. He noticed two things immediately once they switched to Maths — No Problem! “One was, children started talking about maths in a much more interesting way. And the second thing was my staff started talking about maths in a fascinating way: they weren't so worried anymore about planning; they were more interested in, ‘how will these lessons fit with my class?’”

One of the things Neil says he learned from going to Maths — No Problem! conferences was that switching to maths mastery isn't a one-year fix. So when he went to his governors, he told them it would take five years. I said, ‘Let's be brave. This is the time scale we're looking at.’ So for five years, maths mastery was the number one thing on our school development plan.”

It’s a long process, and Neil admits it was sometimes messy. He says every year was different because they were building from a different base, and whenever a new teacher arrived, the plan had to shift to account for that teacher’s five year journey.

From the archives: Listen as Neil describes, in this video made in 2018, the impact of the mastery programme on pupils of varying abilities.

He tells the story of some teachers who visited the school. They said things like, ‘Oh the language of your maths is so embedded,’ and praised various aspects of the lessons such as the journaling. Neil’s response to them was, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. This is a 10 year journey. Don't think all of this happened day one.”

Rosie Ross, Assistant Headteacher and Maths Lead at St. Bridget's, says she first heard about maths mastery 10 years ago at a conference with Ban Har, one of the founders of the original approach known as the Singapore Method. “It was the light bulb moment of my teaching career. As a Year 6 teacher at the time, I was looking for something to get me out of the drudgery of boosting and how am I going to get these kids over the line and oh this is just grim. I remember going back to my own school and saying, ‘We have to do this, we can't not do this for our children. This is what math should look like.’”

She says the work she started to do through Maths — No Problem! marked a turning point in her career because it opened up a new, collaborative way of teaching maths. Rosie says not only was she implementing Maths — No Problem! in her own school, but she was working closely with Ryan Neil, the former Maths Lead at St. Bridget’s, now Deputy Headteacher, spending time in each other’s school, talking about what maths looks like in the classroom and how lessons could be crafted. “That was a really massive change, a change in culture across schools, across how schools work with each other.”

Neil and Rosie were guests on the School of School podcast, hosted by Robin Potter and Adam Gifford, who asked whether someone who teaches and learns through the programme and increases their subject knowledge would feel more empowered around their pedagogical practice.

Neil replied that for him and his staff, implementing the programme in the school was “just a starting point” where they realised what they were missing, and the Maths — No Problem! approach started to guide them in a way that was different from other programmes and approaches. With other programmes, the materials would get dropped off at the school and that’s where the support would end, but with Maths — No Problem! it was a more involved conversation. “There was a whole network of support ready for us in a way that wasn't before.”

That allowed him as a leader to intentionally guide his staff, and it allowed his staff to begin talking about themselves as maths subject teachers. “For the first time, we started talking about maths more regularly. We were talking to each other. ‘Did you do this? I found this.’ Suddenly we were talking about precise resourcing. We were talking about what is the language that we need. And we’ve gone through several iterations of what mastery means to us.”

He explains that after the first year, the staff talked about the multiple ways of journaling and recording the different methods. Then, they realized it was part of mastery but it depended on what you were journaling, some parts didn’t work. “So we talked about journaling in a really serious way.” The next thing was discovering they weren’t getting the right degree of precision in the vocabulary they were using with the children. Each of these was a focus of their mastery journey and affected the pedagogical approach.

Rosie added that to be an effective maths teacher, you have to have specialised content knowledge, but you also need knowledge of teaching generally and of teaching maths specifically. She says the difference for the teachers now is the “absolute realisation that I have really got to know my stuff, and that’s really frightening, unless you’ve got something to help you.”

She says with the textbooks, teachers can see there’s a deliberateness behind the representations and a deliberateness in the very careful changes in the types of resourcing they’re asked to use, there’s a deliberateness in the language. She points out Maths — No Problem! is an accredited textbook because it does everything the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics says it should do to adhere to the spiral curriculum.

“It puts a responsibility on us as teachers because we realise we don’t just have to be able to do the maths, we have to understand the journey of the maths, we have to know how to unpack the maths. That's where those conversations happened, that's where we started to get in and out of each other's classrooms because that responsibility was there. In terms of a pedagogical approach, it very much has affected the way we teach in a very positive way across school.”

St Bridget’s is now taking the same approach to other subjects. Rosie says one of the first things that they noticed was they could take that level of subject knowledge into, say, grammar lessons, “not as a standalone type of lesson, but actually we need to unpack this, why is the structure of writing this way? How does that feed through other areas of writing? It's now across every curriculum area.”

Teaching with Maths — No Problem! has helped her think deeply about subject knowledge and the pedagogy behind the teaching. It has affected the level of subject knowledge that she tries to bring to her history lessons, and also not trying to overload the students. “We really stripped it down to, ‘What's the thing in each lesson, not just in maths, but in every single lesson, what is the thing and how are we going to get that thing to our children? What’s the tiny steps and the progression?’ That's had a really positive impact across our whole curriculum.”

Adam circled back to Neil’s earlier comments about creating an environment where teachers were allowed to make mistakes and where there was a high degree of trust between the teachers and the leadership. “This isn't one of those things that we've all seen in schools where it's like, ‘Right, this is new, overnight, tomorrow you're going to be assessed on it and you're going to be held accountable by the end of the week.’”

Another point Adam wanted to amplify from Neil and Rosie’s comments was these conversations about the teaching of mathematics simply didn’t happen before. “I have been in a lot of classrooms, and prior to these shifts, it just simply wasn't talked about. It was just a thing that everyone did. So creating that environment, which you clearly did, where people could talk about it, I know some of that will be organic, but I would also suggest that that a decent chunk of it will be because they felt that they were empowered to do so.”

Neil said there were certainly challenges in the early days. “Some of my governors had children in school and there was a change in the way of working. Previously, children who thought they were good at maths were actually just really good at calculation and a vertical way of thinking. Whereas mastery maths broadened that challenge and presented problems that needed more exploring a lateral way. And one of my governors said, ‘Look, my child used to be good at maths and now this new Maths — No Problem! stuff's come in, and they don't feel they're so good at maths anymore.’ I said, ‘Whoa, whoa, whoa, what we're doing is,’ and I explained it. A month later she comes back, ‘Oh yeah, now I get it. I get what you were doing. My son is good at maths, but he's now exploring it in a deeper way.’”

Neil says he and Rosie have learned by observation that it’s crucial to make sure things don't drop off, so that you always get that early buy-in, which enables you to come back in the second year, then the third year, to make the necessary changes. “I've noticed that some of my colleagues in other schools, that's a very challenging moment because particularly if the data's not quite in the right place, then there can be a bit of a panic. But it's, actually, no. If we are teaching this right, if we are developing the right culture, the data comes in the end, but you just have to grit it out a little bit, because actually the children's mathematics knowledge goes well. Sometimes there can be a drop off because you just think that professional learning, that discussion, ebbs away and we have to as leaders keep on reinvigorating that and thinking about that.”

Neil says one of the tangible things they’ve seen is the pride the children take in their journals, particularly now that they’re used to journaling, and the work that goes into the Year 6 journals is “really a thing of beauty, particularly if you're a mathematician.”

In the past, when the children were finished with those books, Neil says they’d be put into a dark cupboard and forgotten, “never to be returned again until the end of the year when you pass them back,” now they are sellotaped together “because we find that children are looking back through their work to review some of their learning. That has been really fascinating, because there's been massive ownership of their work and massive pride, which we've never seen before.”

Robin asked Neil and Rosy to give the top four bullet point pieces of advice for schools who are just starting out on the maths mastery journey.

Neil said you have to have patience at the beginning and make sure there is buy-in from key members of staff. You also need, after the program is initiated, to revisit it regularly. “You have to have regular moments in time where you look at what that progression is.” He also said there needs to be a constant conversation about maths so you can forecast what it looks like going forward.

Rosie said “culture, professional trust, professional respect for everything, so allowing your staff space to make those mistakes, to try things out and to be brave.”