Secretary of State for Children, Ed Balls, has announced the roll out of a new programme of intensive support and one-to-one tuition in maths for primary children. The Government will invest £144 million over the next three years into rolling out nationally the Every Child A Reader (ECAR) and Every Child Counts (ECC) programmes.
The aim is by 2011 for 30 000 seven year olds to get a daily half hour of one-to-one tuition through the ECC programme. This will also mean training up 1 600 teachers to offer the higher level of expertise needed.
Ed stated, “Every child should be able to do simple sums using subtraction, addition, division and multiplication appropriate to their age.”
At last this is recognition that many of our children do have problems in the early stages of maths and once they get behind it is very difficult to catch up. Mathsblog will be keeping an eye on this.