The sign definitely said 8÷0. Very weird!

The mission in episode 5 of Irish Traitors! One of the questions was 8÷0... I wonder what the correct answer was?

Has anyone here used Magma Maths and what do you think of it?

My top 10 books of 2025

Soft launching them via this post! They're not even two weeks old

Accidentally conducting randomised, double-blind trials on my newborn identical twins by forgetting which one I've given the daily vitamin D drops each day.

From the AskUK community on Reddit: Can someone please explain why my daughter only got one mark for this question in her year 8 maths? Explore this post and more from the AskUK community

If any maths teachers feel like feeling annoyed by people being confidently wrong on the internet this evening, go and check out this Reddit thread: www.reddit.com/r/AskUK/s/Cz...

Got to admit I'm disappointed my twins don't seem to be coming tonight. How cool would it be if the older one ended up being legally younger than the younger one due to daylight savings? Ok not that cool

My school may sometimes have some crazy policies and ideas that I think are a bit silly, but a work from home inset day just before half term is absolute genius

Can't wait to suggest these in the next subject leaders meeting

That would be really useful! Thank you for the offer.

And are you aiming for a symmetrical set of GCSE results? I'm trying to work out whether that matters

Oh so when you say above or below what do you mean?

Mathematically speaking I think that's only true if each question was independent. If success on one predicts success on another I don't think so necessarily

Why did you decide that a symmetrical, unimodal distribution was the ideal? Wouldn't a skewed distribution be a better indication of good teaching? Especially if you're using a mastery approach. (Not criticising, I really want to understand!)

So if their percentile for CATS was 40th and now it's 60th you might say they're making above expected progress?

I've always thought the skew in A level maths is weird. Other subjects aren't as skewed. Maybe if you remove FM students they're less skewed?

GCSE maths grades nationally are quite bell shaped. But it's a weird thing to aim for because if you want to increase your grade 9s you'd have to aim to increase your grade 1s too!

Wouldn't any distribution identify that though?

Oh good someone who's been through this! I would love to know how you think it's improved the usefulness of the data you have. Also you will always have half of your cohort below expected - is that useful?

This sounds sensible. The overlap means you can still compare well enough to decide if someone needs to move up or down a set.

That would make some sense. But it would probably be a flawed expectation. There's no reason to believe results will naturally follow a normal distribution.

It's just so hard when someone is using maths badly 😭😭😭

I agree. They didn't use to do the same test, we used to have three levels, but now they have to do the same one, which means that the bottom set has to do a test containing things they were never taught.

Yeah, if anything we should be trying to match it to the distribution of our SATs results, or to the distribution we're aiming for in year 11.

They definitely won't. Frustrating though because I'd rather refuse to do it on the grounds that it's pointless. I'm going on maternity in four weeks though so I'm trying not to care

And what I'm really concerned about is that we have whole year groups making less progress than they should, which will be hidden completely.

It does seem a bit like the tail wagging the dog

I'm not sure if you can tell, but it was a non maths teacher who came up with this idea

I think they just mean that rough shape. They said that our assessments are badly designed if they don't make that shape. They want to track percentiles as a way of monitoring progress (?)