Providing effective professional development for the teachers of mathematics is high on the agenda for many countries across Europe as they increasingly recognise the crucial role mathematics has to play in the development of a knowledge society. Ensuring teachers have the skills and understanding necessary to promote enthusiasm for, and an understanding of, mathematics has become even more important in England recently, as the new national curriculum with its raised expectations, is implemented.

However, concerns have been raised by the English government about the ability and confidence of primary teachers to effectively teach the raised expectations of the new mathematics curriculum. The importance of effective primary teaching in mathematics is recognised as impacting on future success for pupils as they progress to secondary level (Nunes et al. 2009) and so having confident and competent primary school teachers is vital for developing future mathematicians.

To address concerns over teachers’ ability to deliver the new national curriculum for mathematics in England, the National College for Teaching and Leadership has provided money for the implementation of mathematics subject knowledge enhancement programmes for teachers who already have qualified teacher status. The programmes are to be developed in partnership with teaching school alliances and Higher Education Institutions, and must use a sustainable model so they can be run in future years without the aid of external funding. Within this remit, one such programme has been developed and is being run in the south west of England during the academic year 2014-15.

However, the European Commission (2011) recognises that participation rates in European countries are often low on such programmes designed for teachers of mathematics, and so it is important to ensure programmes that do run are effective and provide what teachers require in order to maximise impact. Having developed a mathematics enhancement programme for teachers in the south west of England, this research seeks to identify the elements of a course that attract and retain participants through a primary mathematics subject knowledge enhancement programme in order to identify features that would make such courses more attractive to teachers in the future, thus improving uptake of professional development. Furthermore, through the examination of qualitative and quantitative data, elements of the course that impact on teacher confidence and understanding for teaching primary mathematics will also be identified. Previous research has identified teachers’ content knowledge (Kahan, Cooper and Bethea, 2003) and pedagogical content knowledge (Baumert et al. 2010) as contributing to effective teaching in the classroom. However, the research aims to examine whether recipients of the subject knowledge enhancement programme for teaching primary mathematics identify for themselves these aspects as impacting on their confidence and competence for teaching maths in the classroom. The aim is to move beyond a simple evaluation of a subject knowledge enhancement programme and begin to identify specific features that should be included in future programmes to maximise uptake and impact of such courses.

Baumert, J., Kunter, M., Blum, W., Brunner, M., Voss, T., Jordan, A., Klusmann, U., Krauss, S., Neubrand, M. and Tsai, Y. (2010) Teachers’ mathematical knowledge, cognitive activation in the classroom and student progress. American Educational Research Journal, 47 (1) p133-180 European Commission (2011) Mathematics Education in Europe: Common challenges and national policies. Kahan, J., Cooper, D. and Bethea, K. (2003) The role of mathematics teachers’ content knowledge in their teaching: a framework for research applied to a study of student teachers. Journal of Mathematics Teacher Education, 6, p223-252 Nunes, T., Bryant, P. Sylva, K. and Barros, R. (2009) Development of Maths Capabilities and Confidence in Primary School. Research report DCSF-RR118