From a strategic perspective, four components that address the same range of goals are needed to enable any planned learning to succeed:

1.	Standards that describe what is intended;
2.	Teaching materials that help teachers understand and implement the intended classroom learning;
3.	Professional development support that helps teachers with the new pedagogical challenges involved;
4.	Assessment that recognises and rewards the various kinds of performance in a balanced way.

QCA has provided the first of these components. The Bowland Maths materials are designed to support the second and third. The Bowland Trust is undertaking further work on the fourth. The following provides an overview of each.

QCA has described the standards in the Programme of Study for Key Stage 3. It features four qualitatively different aspects of curriculum: Key Concepts, Key Processes, Areas of Content and Curriculum Opportunities, summarised below.

Key concepts: •  Competence •  Creativity •  Applications and implications of mathematics •  Critical understanding

Key processes: •  Representing •  Analysing (reasoning) •  Analysing (procedures) •  Interpreting and evaluating •  Communicating and reflecting

Content areas: •  Number and algebra •  Geometry and measures •  Statistics

Curriculum opportunities to: A.   develop confidence in an increasing range of methods B.   work on more challenging mixes of contexts and mathematics C.  work on open and closed tasks in real and abstract contexts D.  tackle problems from other subjects and from outside school E.  link different concepts, processes and techniques F.  work collaboratively and independently G.  select from a range of resources, inc. ICT

These are the essential ingredients in any problem solving that uses mathematics.

While some features of the Programme of Study are familiar, as a whole it represents a broader agenda than maths teachers have had to address in recent years. Apart from the Content areas, it is a substantial change of emphasis, requiring changes in classroom practice for many teachers. It also requires rich exemplifications to clarify its meaning.

The Bowland Maths materials have been developed to provide support to help teachers and their pupils to understand these goals - and achieve them successfully and enjoyably.

In their everyday teaching, many teachers of mathematics use materials that offer detailed guidance, lesson by lesson. To move into new terrain and handle the new challenges, it is reasonable for them to look for equally supportive material.

The Bowland Maths Case Studies are teaching materials that help teachers and pupils with the new types of learning activity emphasized in the Programme of Study. Independent testing and evaluation of the case studies by a team from NFER showed that such learning can be achieved. (The feedback from these trials was also used to help the Case Study designers refine the materials).

The Case Studies are very varied. All involve non-routine problem solving. Some are rather like computer games, others are more conventionally paper-based, yet others combine the two. The topics range from Alien invasion to Reducing road accidents and from Product wars to Save a baby kangaroo and How risky is life? All involve thinking with maths about problems; each situation was chosen to be of interest to pupils of Key Stage 3 age. The trials showed that pupils enjoy the activities and do good work with them.

The Bowland Trust commissioned the case studies from a diverse range of teams, with a design brief that included the following:

•	each case study problem should have a complexity of interpretations and be of interest to a significant proportion of the target age group
•	the problems should encourage thinking, reasoning and problem solving, with open tasks for the pupils
•	the work should normally involve pupils discussing ideas with each other and testing and refining techniques when tackling unfamiliar problems
•	the tasks should not move too quickly to the mathematics - in fact, it should not always be obvious even what maths is needed; current examples of 'problem solving' are often disguised opportunities to practise 'how to' procedures that jump straight to the maths
•	mathematics ideas should be visited in contexts in which pupils do not normally think of maths as being relevant
•	any one case study should include the use of topics in the KS3 content curriculum, but the requirement for routine mathematics procedures should be limited
•	each problem should be able to be approached/solved on different levels of difficulty for pupils with differing abilities

The resulting collection of Case Studies, each supporting 3 to 5 lessons, provides teachers with a wide range of valuable materials to help them adapt to this new type of teaching. The Case Studies use the key concepts and emphasise the key processes: representing a practical situation in mathematical terms, analysing this model of the situation, interpreting, evaluating and communicating the results.

More detailed information is provided in:

The Bowland Maths materials are also available on a DVD, free to schools in England, which can be requested here.

To help develop the styles of teaching required, the Bowland Maths materials include five Professional Development modules which cover the pedagogical challenges in working with pupils to tackle non-routine unstructured problem solving. An outline of the five modules can be found here.

The questions the modules address can be expressed as:

•	"Where is the mathematics in these case studies?"
•	"Do I just stand back and watch, or intervene and tell them what to do?"
•	"How can I get them to stop talking and start discussing?"
•	"How do I get them to stop playing and start thinking?"
•	"How can I get them to think, reason and explain?"

These PD modules directly support the Case Studies. Of course, they are important for any maths teaching, but for implementing the Programme of Study, they are central. The modules are designed primarily for use by teachers in groups (eg in a school), but can also be used by individual teachers working on their own. Teachers can use any one module on its own or together in any order.

Each module has a "sandwich" structure:

The modules themselves can be accessed through the Bowland Player.