I have just read Making Britain Numerate by Kevin Norley.
It begins with a 27 page rationale in which he describes how he goes about teaching adult numeracy students, his thoughts on the dumbing down of maths qualifications and the improvement the introduction of Functional Skills should bring. He is scathing about the use of computer initial and diagnostic assessments which he thinks lead to the de-skilling of the teacher, and is also very unhappy about the standards of numeracy amongst people teaching maths in FE , but gives no numerical study to back up his hypothesis, apart from his “observations” and “understanding”. I suggest Kevin needs to provide some hard evidence before rubbishing such a large group of teachers.
Following the rationale there are a series of exercises. A Level 1 Numeracy Assessment, Level 1 Practice Questions, Level 2 Numeracy Learning Guide, Level 2 Functional Skills questions, Level 3 Numeracy Learning Guide, and then the answers to all the exercises.
The exercises are good, and the text is very easy to read. I like the topics for some of the questions- forinstance I doubt if you have seen a question on trans-gender issues before in a maths text book. A Level 2 question is posed as follows.
” There are currently 5000 transgender adults living in Britain. Taking the adult population of Britain to be approximately 45 million adults, calculate how many non-transgender adults there are for every one transgender adult.”
Although I disagree with Kevin on some important points, this book is a must read for Numeracy teachers in FE and work based learning.
