National Curriculum Maths level 5

[magwich2]

If she is good at maths you could do what we have done and just teach her the foundation gcse which has the advavtage of being a bit more interesting and covering the algebra. It is not overly difficult and our 9 year old (far from being a maths genius!) has done well with it.
Good luck anyway!

[mystery]

That's not a bad idea Magwich. It's struck me in the past when teaching the lower levels of GCSE and then volunteering with the top end of Year 6 that there's not that much difference.

How did you go about it? With the Letts guides or such-like?

[magwich2]

Yes - we used the CGP guides and husbands own notes - we found edexcel to be more challenging than AQA (but others might disagree) especially at higher level (we got DD2 to do this early as well as school doesn't provide much in the way of a challenge).
Main problem was motivating Master Magwich!!!
If he passes it will cost me a small fortune in the Lego shop!

[mystery]

So have you entered him early yourself? And how did you do this - when I've looked into entering myself to refresh on new syllabuses at A level etc working out how to register for a test centre has proved nightmarish.

[magwich2]

The exam board will provide details of test centres for private candidates - we had to pay extra for them to be in a separate room because of their ages!! I dont know what the college thought they might do but looking at some of the usual students they looked more disruptive than my DCs!

[mystery]

Oh it was probably the opposite - maybe they thought the older candidates were cannibals.

How did you persuade your child to do the preparation for this on top of school homework?

[menagerie]

teachermum - thank you! That helps a lot. Yoyo and magwitch and others, thank you for the suggestions.

[MoJo]

I have only just found out there are two levels of gcse Maths, foundation and higher and am a bit shocked that the highest grade the foundation can give on the certificate is a c, even if the child got full marks!! rather worrying why the schools are putting them in for this?

[magwich2]

But have you looked at the paper? It really isn't that difficult! Our 9 year old (as I've said before not a bof) can easily score in the 90's and so could most reasonably bright kids.

[MoJo]

I haven't seen the paper but I know lots of y11 and year 9/ 10 too doing this. Do they only do this to make the gcse stats better for the school such as x amount of a to c gcse s?