Browser does not support script.
Mastering Maths aimed to consider if teachers could be supported to use new teaching approaches leading to improved attainment outcomes for GCSE maths resit students. It tackles a persistent problem in England: a long history of poor performance by students who in large numbers retake GCSE many times in their 16-19 education and make little or no improvement in terms of their GCSE maths grade.
The Mastering Maths research was the outcome of intensive and substantial research carried out as part of the University of Nottingham team’s contribution to the Centres for Excellence in Maths programme led by the Education and Training Foundation over the period 2018-2023. As part of this work, the University of Nottingham ran a three-armed randomised controlled efficacy trial, which found that students of teachers in the full intervention group made an estimated one month of progress in comparison to the control group. This was increased to two months for those students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds.
The Mastering Maths research involved a large scale randomised controlled effectiveness trial, funded by the Education Endowment Foundation, developed by the University of Nottingham and evaluated by the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen). The programme ran over the 2024-25 academic year and the evaluation is ongoing.
For the Mastering Maths programme 12 Lead Teachers, trained by the University of Nottingham team, provided professional development for about 80 trial teachers in the form of two full days at the start of the programme. Each Lead Teacher then ran five lesson study meetings with a smaller groups of about five or six teachers throughout the year. The trial teachers were required to teach five Mastering Maths lessons to all their GCSE classes and were expected to adopt the Mastering Maths approach in some or all their other lessons. These lessons provided the source for intensive classroom inquiry by the teachers into their teaching and how it aligned with key principles that had been developed by the sector as appropriate to teaching resit students with a mastery approach.
The University of Nottingham team designed the 12 Mastering Maths lessons, the professional development materials for the Lead Teachers’ training and for the Lead Teachers to use when running the professional development sessions and lesson study meetings with the trial teachers. These materials included video clips, guidance for Lead Teachers, lesson observation sheets and frameworks for expected Lead Teacher and trial teacher behaviours and self-study materials. The extent and quality of this work was recognised in the award of the 2025 International Society for Design and Development in Education (ISDDE) prize for Excellence in Educational Design.
Mastering Maths website
Efficacy trial results
We can be contacted on masteringmaths@nottingham.ac.uk.
