On Friday 15^th July, Guys Marsh held a special event to celebrate their success in winning the 3/5 Maths Challenge for 2017/18. The shield was presented by representatives from the Education and Training Foundation (ETF) to Weston College management team Daniel Skelton and Isabella Franco in a special event held in the library and was attended by many of the successful participants.

The ETF’s 3 out of 5 project aims to engage and enthuse people mathematically by providing prisons with a pack of 21 maths challenges to be completed in classrooms, libraries, vocational areas and industrial workshops. Learners that successfully complete 3 challenges are presented with a certificate and free calculator. These created a highly valued incentive, especially by those that were able to use the calculators to help their children with their homework during family visits.

To increase engagement with the tasks, Weston College maths tutor Deb Darvell redeveloped the challenges to make them relevant to each course on offer. This supported the learners to develop their maths skills whilst completing the course of their choice and helped them to recognise where maths fits into everyday life.

Weston College also hosted a launch week for the opening of the new library, during which time every participant completed the challenge as part of a whole host of enrichment activities. One learner commented “I used to hate maths at school but doing the challenge in small chunks like that helped me to realise that maths can actually be quite useful!”.

The team at HMP Guys Marsh won this year’s competition with an amazing 133 completions from participants in just 6 months. The ambition is to beat this record total next year as the Weston College team have continued to promote the challenge for 2018/19 and have high hopes of retaining the shield.