The average primary school classroom in England is defined by playful, bright artworks by students across the walls, grouped desks – so that pupils can interact and learn together, and a teacher who moves from cluster to cluster while delivering lessons.
This year, a new configuration has been brought on in a bid to learn from educational counterparts in Shanghai, China. In the Pisa global education league tables, Shanghai is one of the top performers. For this reason, a partnership has been formed, with the aim of learning some of their best practises here in the UK, in an attempt to pull our standards up.
Lilianjie Lu, a primary teacher from Shanghai, is one such partner, working for three weeks in London teaching mathematics to English students, in the same way that she would back home. The classroom has been shaken up entirely – the desks now in straight rows, facing forward, with the carpet in the centre being put to one side. The focus of all students is centred directly on Mrs. Lu.
A total of thirty Shanghai teachers are participating in this program, across England, having been brought in by the Department of Education. While this decision was not without contention, given the already limited budget for education, it was a choice borne of the disparity between our standards and those from Shanghai. They were clearly doing something right, and could be learned from.
In Shanghai, the range of attainment is fairly limited – most pupils reach a similarly high standard. ‘No child left behind,’ seems to have been carried out in practice. In England, however, there is a huge disparity in attainment levels.
Mrs. Lu is focusing her time in the UK to teaching pupils at Fox primary school in Kensington how to work with fractions – an area in which English students struggle the most, according to testing. She uses the “Shanghai Mastery approach,” in which the classes are repetitive, repeating the same material and moving on only slightly whenever it’s clear that the whole class is moving on together.
She captures small mistakes made by pupils and adjusts accordingly, but never waivers from this repetitive methodology. The aim here is to embed fluency and create an inherent, almost intuitive understanding of the underlying concepts in mathematics.
Ben McMullen, deputy head at Fox School and the senior lead in the local maths hub, was one of a cohort of English teachers sent to Shanghai to observe primary schools and understand their methods. He came back to England with a new found respect and excitement for their methods in teaching mathematics.
“English teachers would have moved on so much more quickly,” he said. “They dwell on it for what seems a long time, so every child understands exactly what’s going on. We move them on too quickly before they’re properly understood the principle.”
In Shanghai, pupils have understood and mastered their times tables by the age of eight. Teachers in primary schools in Shanghai aren’t generalists as they are in England – they teach one subject, focussed entirely on their expertise, and teach a very small number of classes per day – in Mrs. Lu’s case, just two – and the rest of their day is spent discussing their subjects and making adjustments depending on class performance.
The lessons are also much shorter than ours in England. They last for 35 minutes, before 15 minutes of unstructured play. This is almost half the length of lessons being taught at primary school in the UK.
“I saw better maths teaching in 35 minutes than I had ever done in an hour and ten minutes,” says McCullen.
In Shanghai, children work at a steady pace, and in unison – all of the students are on the same page of the textbook at any given point – separating children into sets based on ability just doesn’t happen. It’s expected that every child in the room will get up to speed and attain similar levels of understanding.
There’s a lot to be learned from their methods. While some argue that their methodology is borne out of an entirely different culture, worlds apart from ours, there is nonetheless value in observing their obvious success. Perhaps by combining their methods with our approach to a diverse range of students and cultures, we can work towards forging a new path for early years mathematics in the UK.