ABSTRACT
In Chapter 4, the work of Ian Lyons and colleagues was mentioned in relation to the suggestion that there could profitably be a re-focusing of attention in the early years of schooling on ordinal aspects of number. Ordinality can be a slippery concept that I take to be involved in any attention to sequencing. The suggestion from the neuroscience of Ian Lyons is that facility with sequencing aspects of number is the key predictor of mathematical attainment, from age 7–8 onwards. Furthermore, the older children get, the stronger the correlation, i.e. as children get older, facility with ordinal tasks becomes a better predictor of overall mathematical attainment.
