There are currently hundreds of Mastery Specialists supporting colleagues in their own schools and beyond to develop mastery approaches to maths teaching. Mastery Specialists are classroom-based practitioners who develop expertise in mastery and lead Work Groups to support other schools and teachers locally.
The Mastery Specialist Programme for primary teachers started in 2015/16. Each year around 140 primary teachers – four from each Maths Hub – complete a programme of professional development to become Mastery Specialists. In every subsequent year, each of these teachers leads a Teaching for Mastery Work Group. This involves working with participant teachers from six or seven primary schools within their Maths Hub area, so that these schools can start to introduce teaching for mastery themselves.
By the end of the 2019/20 school year, there will be 700 Primary Mastery Specialists established and operational. They will collectively have worked with more than 8,000 other primary schools, which represents around half of all primary schools in England.
Want to know more? Listen to a Mastery Specialist discuss her work in this podcast. Read more about Work Groups led by Mastery Specialists. And this short video from 2017/18 tells you more about how Mastery Specialists are trained and what their role involves:
2021/22 Primary Mastery Specialists Cohort 7 programme
Following the successful first six cohorts of the Mastery Specialist Programme, the NCETM and Maths Hubs are now seeking to recruit a seventh cohort of expert primary school teachers to develop and work as Primary Mastery Specialists.
“I’m constantly delighted and enthused by the impact that teaching for mastery has on our learners, as well as the impact it has on practitioners at all levels.”