8th March 2010 9:00
By Blue Tutors
A recent survey has shockingly revealed that 20% of primary school children in the UK receives help with maths in the form of a private tutor, the Sun has reported. That figure increases to a quarter within London. A former chief inspector of schools, Chris Whitehead, said “It’s an indictment of today’s education in schools.” And added “This statistic demonstrates how Labour has failed generations of primary school children.”
Parents say that they pay up to £60 an hour for private tuition, and that they feel the need to do so because they are unable to help their children with the more difficult topics, such as algebra and fractions.
The problems may have arisen because of many of the ‘new’ systems imposed to teach maths in primary schools. The techniques include ‘chunking’ long-division, ‘decomposition’ subtraction, and addition by ‘partitioning’. These systems are not only considered difficult and unnecessary from the students’ point of view, but are also difficult for parents to understand, and therefore restrict the help that they are able to offer to their own children.