Engineering Professors’ Council

Maths Working Group Report – April 2009

General Activities

The group met on 20th February and received updates from the ‘More Maths Grads’ initiative (where the focus is moving away from ‘Widening Participation’ towards ‘Employer Engagement’), from the QCA (where the possibility is under discussion of permitting Awarding Bodies to submit Maths and English GCSE and Free Standing Maths Qualifications for entry into the Diploma ASL Catalogue) and NCETM (where the growth in participation continues to exceed expectations, with some 1200 new registrants currently being recorded per month).

As it had been agreed that the group would turn its attention to supporting Physics now that the Mathematics for Engineering Certificate was established, the discussion focused on the proposed new Science Diploma. Peter Main (Institute of Physics) explained the concerns of the science community that the Science Diploma would fail as it was too wide-ranging and inflexible, there being no facility for weighting it towards a particular science discipline. It thus ‘satisfied nobody’ in terms of preparation for HE studies.

The science community had also found it impossible to combine the ‘academic’ and ‘vocational’ routes as had been achieved in Engineering. The Working Group would produce a Position Statement on the Science Diploma.

Maths Task Group

This sub-group focuses on ensuring that the appropriate Mathematics is available for those Engineering Diploma students wishing to progress onto HE.

UCAS have still not awarded a tariff for the Mathematics for Engineering Certificate ‘due to their heavy work load’. The Task Group is pressing for this and is helping the Awarding Body (OCR) to prepare a presentation for their meeting with UCAS.  

It is not yet known how many students opted to take the new Mathematics for Engineering Certificate this year. However, concerns remain regarding the ability of teachers to provide sufficient support in the classroom as regards the mathematics. The Task Group has therefore turned its attention to supporting the teachers via workshops and professional development and is working closely with the NCETM, the HEA Engineering Subject Centre and the MEI to identify and provide the support needed. It is also considering how to develop further the exemplars produced for the Mathematics for Engineering Certificate and how to make them more widely available in a form most useful to teachers.

FJM   12.04.’09