Core Maths: Everyday maths skills for your future
Continuing to study maths could make a huge difference in whether you achieve your future aims. Even if you’re unsure what you want to do, it will help keep your options open.
What is Core Maths?
You may not have heard of Core Maths – that’s because it’s a fairly new type of qualification. It’s designed to build your confidence in using maths and focuses on really useful everyday maths skills that you’ll need for work and study.
It’s a great choice if you’re not taking AS or A level Mathematics. It is usually studied over two years alongside your A levels or vocational qualifications. It takes about half as much time as an A level. It’s graded A-E, can be used in your UCAS application, and can even reduce your university offer.
What to Expect in a Core Maths Lesson
Core Maths lessons can be quite different from other maths lessons.
You’ll meet some new topics, but you’ll mostly be using maths from GCSE. Where it differs is its focus on becoming skilful at applying maths to real-life situations such as personal finance, estimating and understanding and interpreting data. As well as:
- Discussing problems and explaining your thinking – Sometimes, there’s no single ‘right’ answer.
- How to analyse data and interpret the results
- How to communicate your findings and use them to justify your argument.
These skills will be useful in your other subjects and help you question and criticise statements based on data, such as surprising claims made by the media. These are all really useful skills for your future, whatever direction you go in.
Because there’s no right or wrong answer in certain situations, it helps you to think more deeply and takes the pressure off getting the exact answer. I completely agree, it’s like you’re teaching each other – ‘I did it this way’ or ‘I saw it this way’. Instead of just seeing it as black and white, there is this grey area… and I quite like that.
Core Maths students talking about their lessons
Whether you already know exactly what you want to do or are still deciding, continuing to study maths can help you.
The skills you learn from Core Maths can greatly help further study. It will equip you with stronger numeracy, graphical and problem-solving skills, all of which are good preparation for the maths needed for many university courses and higher apprenticeships.
Further Resources
Here you will find what resources the AMSP offers for students studying Core Maths and to find out more about our Core Maths Skills course.
More maths
Here, you will find some more places where you can find interesting content to explore which is related to Core Maths:
What comes next?
Go to our ‘What comes next’ if you want more information on what comes after Core Maths, including career advice, applying for university, and preparing for internships.