Enter the Dragon

Education ministers covet the Shanghai maths system, but can it be adopted wholesale in England? Having seen it in action, there are lessons to be learned, says Michael Tidd...

During the autumn term, in classrooms from Truro to Tyneside, maths lessons were being delivered by new faces, in what may turn out to have been the start of a subject revolution.

Back in July 2014, 34 Maths Hubs were launched in order to share good practice both locally and nationally. One of the network’s first big projects was a teacher-exchange programme with schools in Shanghai, which saw teachers from across England travel to China to see how maths is taught there – after which their Asian counterparts embarked on a return visit to demonstrate their methods in English classrooms.

The work of teachers in Shanghai has repeatedly been praised by ministers, civil servants and business people, and the Maths Hub programme was seen as an opportunity to learn from that practice; not so much an exchange, but an import, as Debbie Morgan – director of primary at the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM) – explained to me.

Thus it was that, several weeks before Christmas, I found myself visiting Hillside Primary School in Hucknall to observe a teacher from Shanghai delivering a lesson on fractions to Y6. I was fascinated to see how it would differ from the practice I’ve seen in English classrooms, and to find out what had been learned by the programme’s participants.

Not so different

Contrary to what you might be imagine, what I saw didn’t at all reflect the talk-and-chalk rote learning that many of us have come to expect from footage of schools in high-attaining nations. Rather, I watched a very familiar approach to teaching equivalent fractions: a starter activity for everyone, some collaboration on a team task, and opportunities for children to work independently.

The sequence of tasks was clearly well planned with small steps of progress in mind and there was a good balance of pictorial and symbolic approaches, which presumably built on previous concrete experience – nothing seemed completely unexpected. And yet, there was more to unpick.

For one, there was no hurry in that classroom – the teacher’s main aim was to collaborate with the students and ensure everyone had grasped how to find equivalent fractions. It seems ‘pace’ and ‘rapid progress’ – two things valued so highly by the English school system – are not so high on the Shanghai agenda. But while the mathematician in me liked what I saw, the senior leader wondered what an Ofsted inspector might make of it all.

Given time to teach

After the lesson, I spoke with Tom Isherwood, Y6 teacher and maths specialist at Hillside, and it was then the real differences in pedagogy started to emerge. He described the profound impact his visit to Shanghai had had on his teaching, and that the use of concrete, pictorial and symbolic representations were key. “You have to keep revisiting the pictorial ideas,” he explained. “So, you might introduce 6 x 3 by using the example of six boats, each of which contains three people. First you’d demonstrate this using toys, then pictures, and finally you’d use mathematical symbols. When children are finding a concept hard to grasp, you have to think – how can I show this differently?”

Speaking to Tom and his colleagues, it was also clear that subject knowledge has played a key part in the success of Shanghai’s schools. Every teacher there has a maths specialism as part of his or her degree – a sharp contrast to schools in England where many Y6 teachers may only have studied maths up to O level or GCSE. Culture too is an oft-mentioned barrier, with education valued far more highly in much of Chinese society than our own.

While in Shanghai, Tom saw teachers marking homework each day before the lesson began, delivering 35-minute lessons, and then taking time in the afternoon to run interventions for those students who hadn’t achieved the day’s learning. It’s a far cry from the packed timetable of the primary generalist in the UK and perhaps difficult to replicate (although at Hillside they are trialling an approach using a skilled teaching assistant to run interventions in afternoon lessons).

Would Ofsted approve?

So what can we learn from the approach used in Shanghai? Tom and his colleagues praised the benefits of a well-planned programme of small, incremental steps, where problems and new concepts are represented in as many different ways as possible. And although Shanghai’s classrooms may be teacher led, it’s not all about teacher talk – children play an important role in discussions.

A ‘less is more’ approach is clearly a factor. “We end up trying to do too many things, instead of doing one thing well,” was how Tom put it. “Sometimes when I’ve asked teachers in Shanghai how they’d approach teaching a particular topic, they just say, ‘Oh, we wouldn’t do that – they teach that at high school.’”

It also seems much of the brilliance in the Shanghai approach comes not just from the practice in the classroom, but in the considerable work that goes on beforehand. A prescribed textbook with a prescribed teaching programme that carefully plots out the stages of learning in a sequence based on tried-and-tested methodology lies at the heart of this expertly-taught curriculum – is that something we could replicate here?

Speaking again to the NCETM’s Debbie Morgan, I challenged her on the matter of Ofsted: the lesson I’d seen made me doubt it would pass muster under the current framework. Would that be an issue for schools wanting to adopt the successful approaches used in Shanghai? In reply, she told me that, at senior levels at least, Ofsted is on board with the approach being modelled – or so she’d been assured. She also referred to recent comments by Jane Jones – Ofsted’s national lead for Mathematics – via the NCETM website, stating schools had nothing to fear when adopting approaches that saw students consolidating work through ‘intelligent practice’ or being extended through challenging problems, rather than moving on to new content.

It seems there are things we can learn from Shanghai but, as might be expected, it’s clear the curriculum could not be adopted wholesale in England. Whether or not we’ll ever reach the stage of a centrally-agreed programme remains to be seen, but perhaps all of our classrooms could benefit from some of the ideas brought back from China. As Tom Isherwood said to me in our discussions, “I reckon 70 per cent of maths lessons would be improved if they had a ‘missing box’ question.” How’s that for a tip to get you started?

What is a mastery approach?

How maths is taught in Shanghai…

1. Teachers reinforce an expectation that all pupils are capable of achieving high standards in mathematics.
2. The large majority of pupils progress through the curriculum content at the same pace. Differentiation is achieved by emphasising deep knowledge and through individual support and intervention.
3. Teaching is underpinned by methodical curriculum design and supported by carefully crafted lessons and resources to foster deep conceptual and procedural knowledge.
4. Practice and consolidation play a central role. Carefully designed variation within this builds fluency and understanding of underlying mathematical concepts in tandem.
5. Teachers use precise questioning in class to test conceptual and procedural knowledge, and assess pupils regularly to identify those requiring intervention so that all pupils keep up.

From the NCETM report, Mastery approaches to mathematics and the new national curriculum (October, 2014).

About the author

Michael Tidd is deputy headteacher at Edgewood Primary School in Hucknall, Nottinghamshire.