Category: 2017 Team Up

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.

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!

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]