What is Core Maths?
Core Maths is a level 3 course equivalent to an AS, which provides students with a ‘maths for life’ education and supports them with the maths requirements in their other subjects. It is for anyone who has achieved at least a grade 4 in GCSE maths and is usually studied alongside 3 A levels or a BTEC/T level. Students will solve problems involving finance, statistics, and estimation by studying Core Maths and develop their critical thinking skills.
Our economy increasingly requires everyone to handle numbers and data, and Core Maths could be revolutionary in filling this data skills deficit that we face.
Hetan Shah, Chief Executive of the British Academy
What do students think?
In this 3-minute video, you will hear from different young people on why they chose to study Core Maths and how it has benefited them.
Aside from learning valuable life skills, students value how Core Maths supports them with the maths content in their other subjects, and they may get lower offers to University.
What is the content?
There are four different Core Maths courses to choose from, available from AQA, Edexcel and OCR. Each course focuses on authentic contextualised problem-solving, but they feature varying proportions of statistics, probability, graphical techniques and financial maths.
We have created an overview of the content for each course. The overview can help you decide which course is best for your students.
What are the lessons like?
A Core Maths lesson will feel different to a GCSE or A level maths lesson because of the emphasis is on real-world problem-solving. Context is always at the forefront, and students must communicate how they solved the problem. Try this interactive Core Maths activity on Planning a Festival to get a flavour of the content of the course.
We have created the Core Maths Platform, which provides you with a huge number of free in-class and interactive resources. Why not try one of the resources with one of your current classes?
What is the assessment like?
You can offer the course over 1 or 2 years, depending on your school/college, and students will sit two exams in May/June at the end of the course. In the exams, students will be asked to solve problems in authentic contexts. Previously exams have featured “student loans”, “lotteries and raffles”, and “football.
All specifications offer pre-release material available approximately two months before the exam so that students are familiar with these contexts. We run discussion webinars on how to get the most out of this material specific to each qualification.
For full details of specifications and to explore previous assessments, why not visit the exam board websites?