In April 2021, the Children’s Commissioner for England, Dame Rachel de Souza, launched The Big Ask: a national consultation exercise with children in England to ask them about their lives and their priorities, their aspirations and worries for the future. The Big Ask ran for approximately 6 weeks and gathered more than 550,000 responses, making it the largest ever survey of children anywhere in the world, to our knowledge.
Maths Week England is an annual week for schools to put on special events to raise the profile of maths. Maths Week publishes resources and activities for teachers to use during the week. This year it’s being held from November 14th-18th 2022.
The Big Ask Maths Week Challenge is an opportunity for young people to learn about what young people told us about their wellbeing and future priorities, using real data from The Big Ask and drawing on elements of key stage 3 and 4 maths curriculum.
There are two options for completing The Big Ask Maths Week Challenge. With access to a computer, we’d recommend completing the spreadsheet challenge, where you can create a summary table and chart using 1,000 randomly selected observations from The Big Ask. Without access to a computer, we’d recommend completing the printable worksheet.
We are encouraging young people to share the chart they create with a description for a chance to be featured on the Children’s Commissioner’s website and social media. All children and young people who submit a chart will receive a certificate for their participation in the challenge. The winner and runners-up will also be invited to participate in a meeting with the Children’s Commissioner’s team to share why they chose specific views from The Big Ask to share and their thoughts on maths in school. The deadline for submissions is 13th January 2023.
On our maths page we share the two versions of the challenge, as well as a link to our Where can I go with maths? resource which profiles role models who use maths or maths skills in their work and helps connect the KS3 maths curriculum with careers, skills and everyday life.