Filling a new role that will hopefully add up to everyone – teaching staff and pupils – seeing an increased focus on maths teaching, Lee Coates has joined Nene Education Trust as its first Maths Lead.
Nene Education Trust comprises seven North Northamptonshire primary schools and one secondary school, and the Maths Lead appointment continues the development of the Trust, which was founded in 2011. The most recent addition to the family of schools was Redwell Primary School in Wellingborough, along with its training centre, Five Wells, which provides ongoing professional development for teaching staff both within the Trust schools and outside of it.
The appointment of Lee Coates is the first subject specific lead role to be filled, with further appointments to follow.
Lee said:
“As the Trust has grown, the first priority was on whole school values, such as the Work. World. Wellness approach to the curriculum. Now that the senior leadership team is confident that is in place, they felt it was the right time to look at subject specific roles. Opportunities like these are few and far between and having always been interested in professional development as part of my primary school teacher role, I was delighted to be given the chance to join the team and focus on something that I am passionate about.”
Matt Coleman, Director of School Improvement at Nene Education Trust, said:
“The executive team, wanting to do the very best for our family of schools and the students we serve, deliberately made the strategic decision several years ago to recruit for and appoint to the Trust Lead roles for SEND, Safeguarding and Mental Health/Wellbeing.
“This is because we see these areas as the foundations to children succeeding, in line with our focus on creating a nurturing, positive environment. More recently, we identified and recognised mathematics as an area that requires specialist focus across our Trust and we are delighted to have appointed Lee to this hugely important role.”
In 2004, after 11 years in banking, Lee felt the time was right to move in a new career direction and trained as a primary school teacher. Although he admits he’d always struggled with maths at primary school he found a love for it at secondary, and it was the subject he chose to specialise in during his training and from there spent years developing his skills so that he could better understand not only how to teach children, but how he could help other teaching staff feel more comfortable with the subject.
“I have always been a believer that you can always better yourself,”
he explained.
“I always want to be a better maths teacher, so I studied with the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics and through them I’ve done various courses that have helped me in
my work.“But whereas teachers in a secondary school are subject specialists, primary school teachers cover pretty much the whole curriculum and some of them can feel real anxiety about teaching children something they are not completely confident about themselves. But there are always solutions, different ways to approach teaching, models you can use, techniques like representing a topic through drawings to show how maths works.
“Maths can be fun, it’s really very similar to doing puzzles, games and quizzes – but if you’ve been through something with a child and they don’t get it, repeating it isn’t going to help. You need to use a different strategy and giving teaching staff the tools with which to do that is something I hope I will be able to focus on in my new role.”
Lee will be working with school leaders and department heads to ensure peer coaching and collaborative planning is in place to support the maths provision in all schools in the Trust. The approach is inevitably different in primary school compared with secondary, but Lee hopes that the fundamental strategies will be applicable and transferable between the two.
“With secondary school teachers, I will be looking at teaching topics I’ve never had to do in my working life, but that doesn’t mean the techniques I use can’t help them, or that things I learn from them can’t be applied to primary teaching,” said Lee. “It’s going to be interesting, and there’s going to be a lot of focus on the transition of children from primary to secondary, what they already know, what they need to know and how we can build on that.
“It’ll be a focus on the outcomes for children, and ensuring parents know their children are getting the best possible teaching in our schools.”
Nene Education Trust is a multi-academy trust comprising Newton Road School in Rushden, Windmill Primary in Raunds, Stanwick Primary, Raunds Park Infants, St. Peter’s CE Junior, Woodford CE Primary, Redwell Primary in Wellingborough and Manor School in Raunds.
–
For further information visit neneeducationtrust.org.uk
