Maths

As a nation we are terrible at maths. By the age of 11 just 77% reach the government's benchmark score in the subject and it's all downhill from there with only around half our kids passing maths GCSE - an exam which many claim is substantially dumbed down. Employers complain about young people not having the basic maths skills needed in the workplace and universities claim that many of today's students do not have a good enough grounding in maths to understand science and economic degree subjects.

Inspirational maths guru, Richard Dunne, believes that he can change all that. He claims that our schools could teach every child the basic mathematical concepts that will enable them to succeed in life - but they aren't going about it the right way at the moment. The Head of Barton Hill Primary School in Bristol, Simon Robinson, has invited Richard to prove that his methods can work at turning around children's achievement in maths at his school. At Barton Hill just 59% of their 11 year olds reached the governments expected standard in maths last year.

» In video – Richard Dunne's maths lessons

It's a tough test. The children in their final year at Barton Hill will be his challenge - can Richard, working with the schools' teachers, get every single one of them up to the governments expected level in just one year? Many of these kids are working at the level of a 6 year old and they will have just one year to learn all the basics of maths and then beyond. Richard is confident that they will all understand percentages, decimals, negative numbers, algebra and even how to multiply and divide fractions. But Richard's first task will be to teach their teachers.

Richard believes that the biggest problem that we have with maths in this country is that most primary teachers don't understand it at all. To be a primary teacher you need at least a C in maths GCSE - but that is actually not a very high level and many of the teachers have been taught it very badly.

We will be testing the maths ability of primary teachers from several schools using a specially devised test. Do they have the mathematical ability a 10 year old should have?

The maths skills of the ten and eleven year olds will be tested before Richard has had time to train their teachers and at the end they will be tested again - although the ultimate test will be their SATS results- but Mr Dunne believes that most of the pupils will do better than that and they will probably outperform the teachers who took the test.

Many of the parents of the featured children will have substantial problems with maths and we will film children helping with supermarket shopping etc as their kid's confidence grows. Richard's methods are very visual - his scheme revolves around paper cups which are moved across the room with the children chanting the "maths story" - we aim to capture the essence of some of the basic concepts so that the audience will thoroughly understand what is going on. There will be plenty of lightbulb switching on moments for the kids and some amazingly complex looking maths that will seriously impress the audience.

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