Dispatches

Kids Don't Count (Part 2 of 2) (2010x6)

: 22, 2010

In the second half of this two-part special, maths specialist Richard Dunne returns to Barton Hill Primary School, with Countdown's Rachel Riley, to help the pupils with their mental arithmetic. Kids Don't Count asks why and how we are failing Britain's children when it comes to maths. The programmes follow a class of final-year primary school pupils in Bristol as their staff adopt a radical approach to teaching, in a bid to improve the maths ability of these children before they head off to secondary school. In the first programme, the Head drafted in maths specialist Richard Dunne. Children who had previously struggled with maths thrived under his programme, which taught them how to understand abstract concepts and relate sums to the real world, and gave them lots of opportunities to repeat the basics so they could be memorised. But as their SATs approached, under pressure to improve results, the Head temporarily set aside Dunne's methods. In this second programme, the SATs are over but many of the children have lost enthusiasm for the subject and still do not have a grasp of the basic building blocks for maths. Dunne returns to Barton Hill to help the children with their mental arithmetic, joined by Countdown presenter Rachel Riley, who visits the school to help encourage the children to tackle their maths demons. Sitting in on a maths lesson, Riley is shocked that many of the children struggle to do sums in their heads and do not know their times tables. In a bid to inspire the children in a subject she feels passionate about, she organises a 'children versus adults' Countdown competition at the school.