Aims

To encourage students to develop a positive attitude towards the subject and recognise the importance of mathematics in daily life. Students build on a sound base of conceptual understanding to apply mathematical techniques in a variety of authentic contexts. The course enables learners to: 

• develop fluent knowledge, skills and understanding of mathematical methods and concepts

• acquire, select and apply mathematical techniques to solve problems

• reason mathematically, make deductions and inferences and draw conclusions

• comprehend, interpret and communicate mathematical information in a variety of forms appropriate to the information and context. 

Course Content

The course extends mathematical study in the following areas: 

• Arithmetic and its application to realistic problems. 

• Algebraic concepts and its use in problem solving. 

• Geometric properties of 2D and 3D shapes. 

• Graphs to support real-life situations and data presentation. 

• Trigonometry and Pythagoras and their application to practical problems. 

• Ratio and Proportion. 

• Statistical concepts of data collection, presentation and interpretation. 

• Problem solving and functional approaches to Mathematics.

Assessment Structure

There are two tiers of entry: Higher for the majority of students, and Foundation. The Linear GCSE course is taken by everyone and it is completed with 3 written exams at the end of Year 11 and there is no coursework or controlled assessment element. The Higher tier enables grades 9–4 The Foundation tier enables grades 5-1.  

You need to

In addition to the above, a number of features specific to Maths are:

• The minimum assessment time will be a total of four and a half hours for both Foundation and Higher tiers. Of this, between one-third and a half must be completed without access to a calculator.

• A list of required content has been published by the Department for Education (DfE), which includes much more content than has ever been required at GCSE before and also the requirement for candidates to memorise many more formulae than previously.

• The DfE has also provided a revised set of Assessment Objectives, with an increased emphasis on problem solving, often requiring multi-step solutions and with less emphasis on rote learning.

• Questions in assessments will be less clearly structured and more open-ended, frequently set within real-world contexts

  For further details, see Mrs Stapleton (Head of Maths)