Author: Sadie Robertson

Why not join Team Up yourself?

Sadly, my time at Team Up has come to an end. I successfully completed the progress and baseline assessments mentioned previously and started the long process of updating the lesson materials. This involved mapping the lessons to the key learning points on the syllabus and finding example exam-style questions for each lesson. Unfortunately, I didn’t have time to implement many of the changes I identified. However, whoever takes over the task in the future has a set of detailed notes and instructions regarding what changes need to be made.

I learned a lot from my time at Team Up: I experienced working in an office environment, I worked collaboratively in a small team and individually towards the end of the internship. I learned about the day-to-day running of a small charity. I was assigned a single task to work on throughout my time at the office, however many of the other employees have very varied roles and responsibilities. You have to be very flexible and open-minded to work in this environment, as well as realistic about what you are able to achieve and when you have taken on too much work.

I am looking forward to continuing to work with Team Up throughout the coming academic year. Unfortunately, I have to wait until my timetable comes through to see if it allows me to sign up for a tuition session in a school. But, if this doesn’t work, I will continue my engagement as Chair of Imperial’s Team Up society!

If you think that you could share your knowledge and experience with students from disadvantaged backgrounds, why not join Team Up yourself? Opportunities are posted on their website or come and visit us at Fresher’s Fair!

Writing an assessment is harder than you think!

I am now 2 weeks into my time at Team Up! I am into the full swing of tube commutes and office work. But for the more interesting part of my experience: I have almost completed the first section of my project, in which I am creating a new set of mathematics assessment materials. I will soon be moving onto the second half of the project, which will be based on updating and amending the current lesson plans. For this period, I will have more free range and control over how things develop, mostly because my supervisor is away on holiday!

So far, I have been working alongside said supervisor and, for two days a week, another volunteer. Firstly, I researched the current GCSE specifications and determined the knowledge required for each grade (or ‘level’ as they are now referred to, just to make things that little bit more confusing). I then cross referenced this with GCSE exam paper questions to produce a bank of example questions. This was all very time-consuming and took up the most part of my first week.

One of the main problems we faced when producing Team Up’s assessment was that we only had a maximum of 1.5 hours to test the students. The actual GCSE examinations consist of 3 hour-long papers, meaning that we only had half the assessment time. Because of this we had to be selective with the topics we chose to assess in order to try to test as much of the syllabus as possible.

We also had to consider the grades that the students were hoping to achieve. The students that Team Up works with are generally pushing towards achieving a grade 5 at GCSE (a high C/low B). A foundation tier paper allows students to achieve a maximum grade 5. To avoid restricting the students’ achievements, Team Up had proposed an assessment allowing students to achieve up to a grade 6 (high B). To achieve this without having to introduce higher tier content we looked at the breakdown of the different assessment objectives (put simply, how many easy/hard questions there are on the paper) in both the higher and lower tier papers and chose an intermediate weighting to allow higher ability students to show off their skills.

So far, the main learning point for me is the amount of work that goes into setting assessments. There are so many different restrictions and objectives to meet, let alone coming up with suitable questions! Throughout all of this you need to be guessing what the students of different abilities will/will not understand. There is no set formula for a grade 6 on a paper, when an exam board sets this they already have all the marks for the paper and use these to inform their decision. Trying to do this backwards as we are is very difficult!

Team Up – tackling educational inequality

Educational inequality is a huge problem throughout our education system. At primary school, only 1 in 3 children from poorer families achieves the expected levels in reading, writing and maths at age 11. At secondary school, 33% of pupils on Free School Meals achieved 5 A*-Cs at GCSE compared to 60.5% of all other pupils. Of these students, 1 in 4 make it to university compared to nearly double the amount of all other students. These students have a 1 in 1500 chance of making it into Oxford or Cambridge whereas 1 in 20 students from private schools go on to study at these universities.[1]

I’m working with an educational charity called Team Up whose mission is to help end educational inequality by delivering tuition in Maths and English to students from low-income backgrounds. They do this using a team of volunteer tutors. As one of these tutors over the past year, I have witnessed first-hand how the programmes that Team Up run can influence students, by both helping them to improve their grades and providing them with a role model to inspire them.

My project is focused on developing Team Up’s maths curriculum. The tutors are provided with lesson plans and student worksheets for the tuition sessions. As well as this, students on the programmes sit baseline and progress tests to assess their knowledge and development. My job is to assess the effectiveness of these current resources and develop them further. This will allow the programmes and individual sessions to run more smoothly, allowing both the student and tutors to get the most out of their time with Team Up.

 

 

[1] Teach First “Impossible?” Policy Report