Brendan Sullivanvan, the head teacher at Leixlip Boys National Schooll in County Kildare, Ireland, also criticized "a very narrow performance measure that people have in mind, where they define student performance in terms of literacy and numeracy.
A failure to focus on learner outcomes, particularly in terms of literacy and numeracy skills, whilst focusing on more esoteric study, is far more damaging long term for both the economic and future wellbeing of students.
"It really is time now for head teachers in particular to ask themselves very honestly: 'Is my school operating well enough in terms of that whole-school numeracy policy or do we need to apply some urgent attention to this?'".
Persons with recent sadness or depression perform worse than persons without such experiences in terms of word recall and numeracy but better in terms of verbal fluency.
In summary, the above results suggest that including pre-school cognitive skills in students' development equations shrinks the gender gap in reading while widening the gender gap in numeracy in terms of the statistical significance level and magnitude.
Table 1 reports results on the returns to numeracy skills in terms of hourly wages in the 32 PIAAC countries, using different specifications to address potential bias from measurement error, reverse causality, and omitted variables, respectively.
Defending an existing subject will be done in absolute terms, as noted above, i.e. in terms of whether mathematics or arithmetic or numeracy are important or useful (which of course they are), rather than bringing them into the comparative domain, where they might not do as well.
Finally, including students' pre-school cognitive ability is found to increase the gender numeracy test score gap favouring male students in terms of magnitude and statistical significance.
Findings from this scoping exercise confirm our findings from preliminary scans that the majority of tools are heavily biased towards word recognition, numeracy and reading skills, rather than what this means in terms of health behaviours and service utilisation.
In terms of the application process, both School Direct and PGCE candidates need to pass the skills tests (in numeracy and literacy), have at least a C at GCSE in English and Maths and a good degree (we specify a 2.1 or 2.2 with experience).
