City council enters partnership with social enterprise Sumdog to improve numeracy skills in deprived areas
Glasgow City Council has taken steps to give children in its primary schools access to an online game based learning system aimed at boosting their proficiency in maths and numeracy.
It has entered a partnership with Edinburgh based educational social enterprise Sumdog, which designs games for learning, to provide the children in years P3, P4 and P7 with premium access with immediate effect.
A study carried out between December 2015 and June 2016 found that Glasgow primary school pupils who spent an average of one hour per week using Sumdog progressed three times faster than those who used the website and apps very little or not at all.
A specific focus for the partnership will be to raise attainment among Glasgow pupils from the most deprived backgrounds and to close the educational attainment gap. The majority of pupils taking part in the recent Glasgow schools study, which demonstrated the effectiveness of Sumdog in improving attainment in maths and numeracy, attended schools in areas of high deprivation, as measured on the 2012 Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation.
Impressive results
Bailie Liz Cameron, Glasgow’s executive member for children, young people and lifelong learning, said: "We were genuinely impressed by the results of the recent study of the use of Sumdog in Glasgow Council schools - particularly since a majority of pupils taking part were from schools located in areas of high deprivation.
“It's great to see how enthusiastic pupils are about learning using Sumdog. We look forward to that enthusiasm continuing to grow as Sumdog gets rolled out across the city - and to seeing educational attainment boosted as a result."
The partnership is Sumdog’s first with a local authority in Scotland. It has said that more than 2.8 million children in 88 countries now use its online learning system.
