Swinton Maths

Registration opens 18th September 2025. Competition starts 9th October 2025.

Just a few days now until the 2025 National Cipher Challenge opens for registration! If you know someone aged 11-18 who might like codes and ciphers (or who might not yet know that they do!) then get them to take a look at www.cipherchallenge.org on Thursday.

Some fun for Year 10 homework this week

Just found this gem! On the Y10 homework today.

Tofu scramble 😋

I see all these posts about Banda machines and even with Google I'm still pretty clueless about what they are.

Not bad!

Dinner at speed!

I also acquired some homemade chutney and a book about the history of the village.

I won a coconut on a coconut shy today! What an exciting village fete.

I like to do lessons with my A Level groups where I ban calculators sometimes. It is often surprising who copes and who doesn't.

I think that's exactly the same as what my previous school did 🙂

I have a colleague that does that - he showed me his resources this year. Something I'm keen on trying next year (if I teach Year 9 again!).

That is an excellent idea!

Some help for my students who forgot calculators for a test today

I'm very happy at my current school with no intention of moving but it is still fun to have a peek at the jobs board on TES every now and again!

Yes we only give out paper copies of the 2024 papers.

I've written a practice paper for OCR H245 further maths statistics. It's on my website along with the Edexcel spec papers I wrote a couple of years ago. I'm planning to do a mechanics one in the next week or two as well.

swintonmaths.co.uk/indexphp/a-l...

Union executive election ballot paper sent!

Not bad...

Scout Camp this weekend - it's looking like a balmy 22 degrees tomorrow! Makes a change from one I ran a few years ago at the same time of year where it was below 0...

As we move into revision season, a reminder that I have written a set of practice papers for Edexcel FM (CP1, CP2, FM1).

swintonmaths.co.uk/indexphp/a-l...

I'm now at a school that teaches OCR, and I'll probably do a similar things for FM mechanics and statistics this year.

Picture asking students to use cos10 = p to express several other trig ratios in terms of p

In #ALevelMaths #MathsToday (yesterday actually) we started with this lovely activity that someone shared at the maths conference last year. We went on to look at geometric and matrix proofs of the addition formulae.

Adolescence on Netflix. I watched all four episodes on Sunday. It's incredible. Watch it.

I'm mentoring a new teacher this year and your website was one of the first places I suggested he go for resources. It's great!

It is! It's about this big.

I did the exact same thing today, actually! We even have a huge metre long one in the store room that I dig out.

Update: this is fantastic. No fluff, just hundreds upon hundreds of good, well-designed questions.

OCR FM June 2019 Mechanics Q7.

Yuck!

I think I've taught compound angle formulae every year since I started 5.5 years ago, using this diagram from the Edexcel textbook. I still remember how awfully it went the first time! It's nice to be able to look back and think that I have improved my practice over that time.

The past couple of years I've put a poster on the wall with the dates of all our remaining lessons that we tick off one by one. I wrote on the poster as we went what topics we were going to look at each lesson. I think we spent roughly 50/50 split on topic revision and papers.