The Edexcel rep said that they were expecting the specification to be accredited last week. However, it appears that it has again been rejected by Ofqual. There is currently no due date posted for their 5th submission, but it would now seem unlikely that the Edexcel specification will be accredited before the end of this term.
It was great to see so many people at Coffee and Pi yesterday. We counted 44 not including the exam board reps! Each of the presentations is attached (just one presentation for the OCR A and OCR (MEI) specifications together). There were some interesting comments about the LDS. Edexcel said theirs would be reviewed probably in about 5 years; AQA were less specific but promised 2 years notice of change. But it is clear that LDS lasting 'for the life of the specification' really means 'until we run out of questions to ask'. Edexcel's SoW has a rather useful feature that if you move a topic ahead of its prerequisites, it will flash a warning! But do remember that FMSP are preparing SoW for all boards, so you don't have to rely on the exam boards for this. The OCR rep noted the different approaches to Discrete Maths on their 2 specifications: OCR A emphasises reasoning and understanding the algorithms. OCR (MEI) emphasises modelling with algorithms. It will be interesting to compare the approaches of the other 2 specifications. In the question session that followed the presentations, it should be noted that the Edexcel rep was quite positive that all of the available options for Further Maths were workable when teaching Maths and FM in parallel, and that she had a schedule which demonstrated this. The OCR rep was clear that for OCR A, there were topics in both statistics and mechanics that could be taught in the autumn term of y12. The AQA response was rather vague. It will, I think, still be important to check any schedules produced by the exam boards, to ensure that the options you choose really will work for you. The OCR (MEI) specification has much more flexibility. One teacher noted that if her students wanted to do stats and mechanics and discrete, then the OCR (MEI) specification was the only one that offered it. But conversely, if they only wanted to do mechanics or only stats, then this is not possible. Pros and cons for all of the specifications. Thank you for all of your suggestions for future meetings. We have done sessions on geogebra and calculators before, but we can do them again! We will also definitely have sessions on planning Further Maths once the specifications are approved. Finally, I would like to emphasise that there is no advantage in using the same specification for Mathematics and Further Mathematics, and this should only be a deciding factor if all other things are equal. Remember also that you do not need to make a decision about which specification for Mathematics until well into the 2018-19 academic year (or spring 2018 if running Maths in y12 and FM in y13). We strongly recommend that you make use of more than one LDS anyway, and the level of 'familiarity' needed can be acquired very quickly.
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July 2019
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