ABSTRACT
Citizenship, with its emphasis on enabling children to become adults who play a full role in society, and with its messages of participation, rights and responsibilities, is a useful focus for reviewing the effectiveness of maths teaching. One very useful piece of work which arose from children's needs used an initial suggestion from school's dinner supervisors. They had noticed that many children had exactly the same dinner each day, and were also concerned because children who received free meals were not using their full entitlement. Motivation to help alleviate the problem was high, even amongst those who brought sandwiches. Children discussed the strategies they used for mental arithmetic, and teachers were reassured by the quality and quantity of mathematics they saw going on. Data handling is a key area of work for education for citizenship, and it is one where younger children can gain a great deal from being given more responsibility and control.
