Yep - it's horrible for young people who just can't do the maths prescribed in the usual formal qualifications. For a lot of them, it's not that they're not numerate but in the ones I've seen it's the abstractness of the concepts. /1
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The more times they fail, the more they're convinced that they can't do ANY maths at all. Some of the functional syllabuses seem to have some potential if they could lose the patronising tone. For a lot of people "relevant" number skills would probably work.../2
...but who knows what's going to be relevant to you in future when you're only 15 now?
When I started my OU degree in Technology we had a pre-qualification maths unit to aim to give people a little bit of confidence and it seemed to work really well. I had a (bad) maths A Level .../3
at the time and the OU stuff was really good material that taught/reminded me of stuff I'd pretty much forgotten. And it did it much better than my 1970's/80's SMP maths books did. I think we need to have these very short courses but we need them as lifelong availability to anyone.../4
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When I started my OU degree in Technology we had a pre-qualification maths unit to aim to give people a little bit of confidence and it seemed to work really well. I had a (bad) maths A Level .../3