Cuppa with a Change Maker
Sam: Calculation, careers and curiosity
☕🫖You pour the brew, I’ll provide the content
In these ‘Cuppa with a Change Maker’ blogs, I’ll feature a guest that is passionate about social justice and tackling inequality.
I launched the Cuppa series to spotlight good practice and introduce you to the people quietly (and sometimes not so quietly) making a difference. The kind of people whose work restores optimism, tops up your cup, and reminds you that change doesn’t always come from policy or system leadership circles.
One of the networks that’s helped me find, and learn from, people like this is SHINE. As a former Let Teachers SHINE award winner, I’ve seen first-hand what happens when busy teachers are given time and backing to nurture an idea and take it from spark to reality. SHINE doesn’t just fund projects; it creates the conditions for teachers to lead meaningful change. For this, I’ll always be grateful! More on my past project here.
Sam (Samantha) is one of those teachers. She has a genuinely shiny idea, but more than that, she has a curiosity about inequality and a practical way of tackling it. A maths teacher in Sunderland, Sam is on a mission to make professional development more accessible and realistic for fellow educators. With a background in law before moving into teaching, she knows exactly how daunting it can be to build deep subject knowledge when you’re new to a discipline.
Thanks to a £20,000 Let Teachers SHINE award, Sam is scaling her brilliant project: The Mathematical CPD Library, an online platform packed with short, high-quality video tutorials designed to boost maths teachers’ confidence and subject expertise, without adding to their workload.
So, pop the kettle on again and settle in. Sam’s shiny idea about knowledge, confidence and educational inequality might just make an impact in her classroom and your setting too.
Over to Sam…
(Sam with a cuppa)
Hi everyone, I’m Sam. These days, I’m a Lead Practitioner teaching maths and engineering up to A-Level, and I’m lucky enough to be working on a project supported by Let Teachers Shine. But the journey to getting my subject knowledge to, well… shine, was far from straightforward. Let me elaborate!
Calculating careers and confidence
Once upon a time, I was a slightly bewildered law graduate sitting in a university seminar, about to begin an Advanced Diploma in Mathematics; essentially a year long conversion course for people heading into a maths PGCE. At that point, I was shaky on substitution, let alone calculus. I knew I liked maths, I even used to be good at it, but I absolutely didn’t have the skills anymore.
That year was a shock to the system for me. It was easily the most challenging year of my professional life, spent mostly hoping no one would ask me a question I couldn’t answer.
Although, looking back, it was also the year that changed everything. It forced me not just to memorise rules but to understand maths. More importantly, it also shifted my mathematical identity from someone who had always found maths fairly intuitive at school, to someone who genuinely understood what maths anxiety feels like. That experience taught me empathy better than any course could and I hope that has shaped the teacher I’ve become.
“It didn’t add up!”
Fast-forward to today and teacher development looks very different. Year-long conversion courses are gone, and high-quality maths CPD for classroom teachers is surprisingly limited. The National Centre for Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM) offers excellent programmes, but they often require time out of school, which is increasingly difficult to manage. After lockdown, enthusiasm for long CPD travel days has understandably dipped. Teachers are stretched. Parents are stretched. Somehow a single day out of school can create a domino effect across your whole life, not just your timetable.
My advocacy for subject knowledge development comes from the fact I’ve never stopped developing my maths knowledge, even after eleven years in teaching. A few years ago, I took on the challenge of developing myself to an AS-Level standard. I found there was a real lack of on demand resources that went through everything from scratch. Teaching maths to any standard is scary and when facing year 12 students for the first time I really wanted to make sure I understood everything. That’s why I was even prepared to take on a six-hour round trip just to access some maths training. But somewhere south of Darlington, two hours into the drive, a thought crept in surely there has to be an easier way to do this?
It didn’t add up. Once that question lodged itself in my mind, curiosity took over. I began wondering whether there was a better way, one that made professional learning more accessible for busy teachers, and ultimately more impactful for the children and young people that we teach in classrooms across the sector, especially those facing barriers to learning caused by inequality and poverty.
Real world learning
That question stayed with me. What if there was a way for teachers to build their subject knowledge that actually worked around real life and in real world ‘busy’ schools? Something they could dip into during planning time or non-teaching time, without organising cover, travelling miles, or giving up a whole day and that came with resources you could use straight away in the classroom.
I believe that most teachers barely get time to think about their own subject knowledge. Even fewer feel comfortable admitting when they need a bit of help. As trainees, we pore over subject knowledge audits, worrying about every gap. Then we qualify… and they quietly disappear. For primary teachers, an old grade C, once the entry requirement for maths, doesn’t always translate into confidence with the depth now expected by Year 6. For secondary teachers, a grade C or a 4/5 can make higher-tier content feel just out of reach. If, like me, you want to improve while you’re in the profession, it begs the question… where do you even start?
A-Level maths has clear textbooks that walk you through the specification in detail. But that kind of structured, accessible support just doesn’t exist in the same way for the maths we teach in earlier year groups.
Interestingly, as a country our expectations of subject knowledge development are modest in comparison to higher performing counterparts. Without going into too much depth, high performing countries such as Singapore and Finland provide strong, systematised ongoing professional development and career pathways that reinforce and deepen subject knowledge (and these are linked to curricula and assessment). Access to these programmes are well structured and funded meaning time out of the classroom isn’t quite as challenging as UK teachers might expect.
However, we don’t have a system built on ongoing subject knowledge development and rather than make plans for a system that in practice is unlikely to ever exist in the UK, let’s focus on ways we can make improvements easier for our staff. It’s within this difficult space that charities like SHINE work to try and make a difference for our young people. Winning Let Teachers Shine in 2024 and 2025 has been an enormous privilege, and the Mathematical CPD Library simply couldn’t exist without their support.
No barriers
SHINE’s vision that there should be no barriers to learning for children from low-income backgrounds in the North of England, resonates deeply with so many educators. Ed-tech is not an easy space to grow in, and Shine provides far more than financial backing. Their mentorship, encouragement, and the community of past winners they’ve built have been invaluable.
I’ve never been part of a network where everyone will pick up the phone to help you, or where you instantly gain a team of people genuinely cheering for your success.
I think that this is Shine’s real power, being part of a collective that understands that when one of us wins, all of us, and most importantly, all of our students, win too. For me, this is important. It’s also why I appreciate you taking a moment to share a cuppa with me. Thanks!
You can find out more about Sam’s work here
🫖 Fancy a cuppa?
Could you be one of my next guests?
Here's a link that will take you to a quick form about the blog series. I'll be running 1-2 a month, so I would love to add prospective authors to the schedule.
Please do pass the link on to other change makers you might know of.
Ideas for content might include:
Particular project making a difference to the lived realities of hardship for others
Innovative approaches to understanding and/or tackling inequalities
Signposts of further support, free resources etc on a specific issue
Ideas or examples do not have to be school based
I’m happy to promote approaches, strategies and ideas - but avoid using the blog as a sales pitch for a particular product or traded offer please! (Unless it’s really brilliant like the book above!)