Operation Able Magwitch

          (Project coordinator: Anthony van Bick)

                   Abel Magwitch was the character in Charles Dickens’ tale “Great Expectations” who amassed a fortune, through sheep-farming, which he used to fund Pip’s route to the higher echelons of society. A twist on the first name produces the name Able Magwitch which symbolises an academic mixing it with the masses to find individuals who are keen to make progress in mathematics.   Project Background This story begins with an article in the Portsmouth News in December 2015 in which Suella Fernandez, he Member of Parliament for Fareham, called for volunteers to set up an academic institution in Fareham so that students can study A-levels in the town without having to spend hours travelling around the county.     Volunteers wanted to bring A-levels back in to town. As I had been working on a website to put A-level Mathematics resources online it seemed like a good opportunity to put this work to good use. So the idea was to visit Open Days of local schools and colleges to find out if they were interested in the website resources. There was no response from the maths staff at St. Vincent’s College and so I hoped for better fortune in October 2017 when I attended the Open Evening at Fareham Academy. I had looked at their website prior to the visit and was quite perplexed by the statement that in maths “57% achieved a pass in the new Maths GCSE with 31% achieving the highest grades”. It was not clear how they defined “the highest grades”. It transpired that only 57% had achieved Level 4 or higher. This meant that 43% of their maths candidates had failed to achieve the equivalent of a low Grade C. Despite this very concerning fact, the information was delivered under the extraordinary heading “Once again we are bursting with pride for the Class of 2017”. What makes this situation even worse is that it has been revealed that only 18% was required to secure a level 4 pass in maths on the higher paper of the 2017 exam session.     GCSE results 2017: Exam boards defend maths paper where 18 per cent equals a pass According to the St. Vincent Open Evening booklet, a level 7 or above is required in Maths at GCSE level as a minimum entry requirement for A-level Mathematics. However, only 14% of the students at the Fareham Academy achieved a level 7 or higher in GCSE Maths in the 2017 exam session. I was happy to offer my support to Fareham Academy to help them to get their results up to scratch, particularly since none of their students had attained a level 9 in maths. At the Open Evening the Head of Maths seemed keen enough to take up the offer of support. However, once again there was no response to follow-up Emails. It is clear that what is said by staff at Open Evenings is just empty rhetoric. Six weeks after the Open Evening the senior staff finally responded to further prompting by saying that they had no interest in my website resources since they produced all their own resources. A fat lot of good those resources were for the 43% of their students which they dumped out into the world without even a low Grade C pass in GCSE Maths. In the Fareham Academy Open Evening booklet senior staff write about the importance of respect and accountability. They are certainly not held to account for their failings. They offered not a single word of apology to their students who had failed to reach level 4. There was not a single word of remorse. Most significant of all, there was not a single word about how they were going to make amends for failing so many students. Whilst money in being poured into an educational system that is failing so many students there are stringent financial controls on patients receiving medication and additional nursing. According to the Office for National Statistics 525,048 people died in England and Wales in 2016. This is an average of over 10,000 people each week. So there must be thousands of families each year seeing the government deny their loved ones extra health support.           Deaths registered in England and Wales 2016 It speaks volumes that Ofsted classes the Fareham Academy as a “good school”. Something totally new is required; an expedition into a different dimension.               Dementia Absorbs the Future (Glass edition) To see how the artwork “Dementia Absorbs the Future” was created, click here:            Dementia Absorbs the Future                            To be continued …