Can we use digital innovations to tackle the top challenges in Maths?

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As many as 76% of maths teachers responding to Pearson’s 2024 School Report stated that teacher recruitment and retention was a top challenge for their school to manage in the coming year – followed by budget pressures (51%) and teacher/school leader workload (41%).

These are all widespread issues affecting many maths teachers, day in and day out. They require whole-sector collaboration to improve. But there are also solutions available now to help ease the strain.

A powerful tool to tackle top challenges

Recently I’ve been exploring Pearson’s ActiveHub platform, a one-stop shop providing assessments, insights, resources and interventions. Its features can help motivate and engage all types of learners in maths, while reducing many onerous administrative tasks for teachers. 

ActiveHub can even support educators who are not subject experts, but who find themselves teaching maths – helping address those interconnected issues of budgets, workload, recruitment and retention. 

How does ActiveHub do this?

Step-by-step learning

Inability to grasp foundational concepts in maths can cause students to stumble, setting them behind their peers. It’s challenging to make progress when this happens – adding extra strain on teachers to deliver interventions. ActiveHub aims to address this by using clear explanations in straightforward language, with small steps towards understanding. This guides steady progress, reducing any potential confusion.

Take a look at how this works in this video explaining the laws of indices with letters

Video stars

Videos are a star attraction in ActiveHub, adding variety to class teaching and plenty of interactive learning opportunities. Voiceovers are recorded by experienced maths teachers, ensuring clarity, accuracy and consistency. They simplify complex concepts into clear segments, making it easier for individuals to follow, pause, and retain key information at their own pace.

See how this works in this video about polygons

Instant feedback

Whether they’re accessing ActiveHub in school or at home, immediate feedback further supports students to correct mistakes in real time, mitigating misconceptions early. Teachers can be sure that students are constantly receiving instant, high-quality feedback, even when they are not directly by their side. 

Personalisation for SEND and more

Varied question formats, different colours, changeable fonts and printout options can help significantly improve accessibility for all learners too, with personalisation options supporting those with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). It is also a boost to students with no named diagnosis and who nevertheless like to learn in visual or auditory ways. 

Additionally, the platform has been developed to recognise when a student is accessing it on a smartphone, rendering screen layouts so they’re extra easy to use on any device.

Supportive assessments

Thanks to ready-made assessments, plus thousands of questions to help make your own, teachers can use ActiveHub to compile various types of assessment throughout the year – from single-concept checks to end-of-term tests. A number of assessments are auto-marked, with analysis and insights provided – dramatically reducing teacher workload.

The gift of time

Perhaps the most precious resource ActiveHub offers is time. Time you no longer need to spend creating and finding resources, writing assessments, marking, or analysing results – because ActiveHub can do all that for you. That’s time you can use instead to reflect on what you taught well and what you could do differently in future. And time when you can really focus on how you work with your classes – perhaps the most enjoyable part of the job!

Thanks to digital developments, tons of resources are now at our fingertips, consistently innovating alongside us as we tackle today’s biggest challenges. Want to ease the load in school and bring joy in maths back to the classroom?

Start right here

Dr Naomi Norman is an education researcher, consultant and author who has spent more than 20 years working on mathematics education resources and digital resources.