Playing the funding game

A while ago there was a big announcement about £600 funding for additional maths students at level 3. Straight away there were questions about the use of the word additional. Today there was a much quieter announcement about what additional actually means in this context.

“For this payment, the number of additional students will be measured between the average of academic years 2015 to 2016 and 2016 to 2017 and academic year 2018 to 2019.”

https://www.gov.uk/guidance/16-to-19-funding-advanced-maths-premium

 

Schools and colleges round the country will now be frantically trying to work out what this means for them and how to maximise the chance to get some desperately needed extra money.

There are going to be schools and colleges who can play this game and win but on the whole I can’t see how it’s going to get more students studying maths. In the years chosen for the baseline students had more flexibility with the modular exams meaning that you could do the first year, get AS results and then decide which subjects to keep/drop. We’ve seen a drop in the number of maths students at A level this year and from twitter it seems others are finding the same.

 

These are some very quick thoughts, I’ve not read through everything yet and I can see how there could be some good news in this for core maths maybe. It’s a snow day though so I’m going to go take the dogs to chase snowballs as I’m already quite sad about the UK education system and this is definitely not helping!

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