St Mary’s University College was happy to host a taster session of “Numicon” for school teachers on Monday, 5 March. Numicon is a top maths programme in England. The event proved so popular that it was fully booked within two hours of going live, so provision was extended to include a morning and an afternoon session.

Ninety-eight teachers from across the country attended the College for this event, which explored how Numicon offers a consistent teaching and learning approach centred around three guiding principles: communicating mathematically, generalizing and exploring relationships. It is believed that these principles allow children to understand, confidently explore and master abstract concepts.

Each session included an introduction and overview of the Numicon approach, exploring a Numicon lesson and looking at how the programme works across the year groups. All attendees were given a free sample lesson to take back to try in their school.

The feedback has been very positive from all the teachers and has raised an awareness of the demand for further INSET (in-service education for teachers) courses for schools. St Mary’s hopes to run further courses for teachers in the future. Our thanks to Oxford University press for sponsoring this event.