'It's like my third child': Former primary school teacher hopes to expand pre-school maths classes
When former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty unveiled a new charity dedicated to improving numeracy across the UK last year, they did so with the aim of breaking down barriers and building confidence in numbers across all ages.
Just an hour south of Richmond, the area of North Yorkshire which Mr Sunak represents as an MP and which inspired the name of The Richmond Project venture, Annette Peterson has been working with similar aims for nearly ten years. Her focus, however, has been on supporting preschool children and their families with the foundations of maths. That need is something The Richmond Project recently recognised too, when it announced £588,000 in grants to support the improvement of early numeracy skills and tackle number anxiety from the earliest years.
"We’ve been doing this for nine years,” says Leeds-based Annette. “I didn’t say too much in the early days but I knew when the time was right, we could go ‘vroom’ and get it out there. That time is now.”
Annette, 48, is the founder of Number Train, a pre-school maths class designed to inspire children to be confident, creative and curious. "As a Leeds University maths graduate and a former primary school teacher, I know the importance of building strong foundations in maths and having a positive attitude to this subject,” she says. “We want children to love learning and to love maths from an early age so they go on to succeed in all areas rather than seeing it as something only some people can do. We do this by making it fun, hands on and engaging every week.”
The idea for Number Train began after Annette left teaching in 2016 to focus on raising her boys, now aged 12 and 15. She came across a huge variety of activities to do with pre-schoolers but says no one was offering an early years maths class – so she set to work to create one.
Since its launch in 2017, Number Train has grown to include a team of six, all with a background in primary school teaching, and now runs classes across many areas of Leeds, as well as in Wetherby and Harrogate, Otley and Ilkley, Bradford and Doncaster. It also hosts sessions in early years settings such as nurseries and there are plans in the coming months to expand into Wakefield and Stockton-on-Tees.
"Number Train is like my third child,” Annette says. “I’m really passionate about it. It’s fun, the children are in small groups and when they go to school they’ve had some exposure to (maths)...If they have basics in place, children will be confident and if they’re confident it’s like an upwards trajectory and they want to do it more. Parents come to classes too and when parents engage with education, it usually means their children go on to more success.”
“There’s a huge importance of maths going forward,” she continues. “Technology relies on maths, the sciences do, a lot of problem solving does, a lot of life does...Having a strong number sense, it helps with everything.”