A student failing grade ten maths usually has a grade seven problem. Teaching grade ten again, more slowly, cannot fix it.
This is the single thing I would want every parent in Male to know, and it is the reason this centre is organised the way it is.
When a student is struggling in maths or science, everybody's instinct is to get them more of the current work. Extra classes on this term's topics, the same chapters again, a teacher going more slowly. It almost never works, and the reason is structural.
Maths is built in layers. This year's topic stands on something from two or three years ago. A student who is shaky on fractions cannot do algebraic fractions. A student who is uncertain with negative numbers will get the right method and the wrong answer in a third of all questions, for years. A student who cannot rearrange a formula will lose marks in physics, chemistry and maths simultaneously, and it will look like three separate problems.
So when a grade ten student is at forty per cent, the question is not how to teach grade ten better. It is which layer is missing.
In a cohort of fourteen O level students last year, eleven were losing most of their marks to exactly two things: rearranging before substituting, and questions where the information was in words. Both are grade eight skills. All eleven had been revising grade ten topics for months.
We spent six weeks on those two skills. It felt to the students like going backwards and three parents asked me about it directly, quite reasonably. What happened at the next practice examination was an improvement across topics we had not taught at all during those six weeks, because the two skills sat underneath all of them.
This is why every student here starts with an assessment before any teaching, and why that assessment is free. It takes a session and it produces a page saying where the layer is missing. Without it, a tutor is guessing, and a guessing tutor defaults to teaching the current chapter because that is what the family asked for.
Two practical things for parents.
When you look at a report or a test, ignore the total and look at what was wrong. If the mistakes are arithmetic and sign errors rather than method errors, the problem is not this year's topic. If a student can do a question when the numbers are simple and not when they are awkward, the problem is confidence with number, not the topic.
And be suspicious of a centre that enrols your child in a subject without assessing them, or that puts them in a class of twenty five. Neither of those can find a missing layer, and finding it is the whole job.
