Exploring The New Gcse Maths Syllabus

Students currently in Year 10 will be the first to sit the new GCSE Maths syllabus with exams taking place May/June 2017. The new syllabus will bring a whole lot of changes in content, exam format as well as the grading system being used. All of these are impacting both teachers and students in different ways but there s one basic theme everyone can agree on: the new syllabus is noticeably harder.

Let s first look at the changes in topics being taught. There s been some new topics added to the both the Higher and Foundation courses as well as downgrading some of the Higher material into Foundation. The topics added into the Higher format include:

Products of more than two binomials

Inverse and composite functions

Finding turning points on quadratics

Estimating gradients of curves and areas under curves

Simple geometric progressions

Nth term of quadratic sequences

Venn diagrams and conditional probability

The following topics have been added onto the Foundation syllabus:

Index laws

Compound interest and depreciation

Proportion

Factorising quadratics

Simultaneous equations

Cubic and reciprocal graphs

Trigonometry

Arcs and sectors

Vectors

Density

Tree diagrams

Restructuring has meant that some topics were on the A-Level syllabus are no higher GCSE which is pushed some higher topics down to foundation. This in turn has pushed some foundation topics into Key Stage 3 which has meant some of the Key Stage 3 topics have gone down to Key Stage 2. All in all, a complete restructuring and making it harder throughout.

The exam format has changed to three 1.5 hour papers, one being non calculator whilst the other two are calculator exams. There s more questions revolved around reasoning and problem solving then there have been previously and less formulae given at the front of the paper.

The final change is to the grading system which is now graded 9-1 with 9 being the top grade. A grade 7 is roughly equivalent to a grade A with a 4 being the current grade C. The higher papers will now be graded from 9-4 with foundation covering 5-1 meaning there is a two grade overlap.

So there you have it. A very different GCSE in many ways but certainly a more difficult GCSE.