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Summary

Number skills develop through the mastery of significant stages that are the same for children with and without language and cognitive differences. Teenagers with Down syndrome can continue to develop new skills and master the significant stages that are learned by pupils who do not have learning disabilities in their primary school. It is essential for teenagers and young people to continue in their development of basic number skills so that they can understand and use money, time and other types of measurement in real situations, as a life skill.

Learning number skills requires a great deal of practice, even for the most able young people with Down syndrome, and many teenagers are willing to work hard to master new skills. Some teenagers enjoy maths, are self motivated and achieve higher skills. Most teenagers require graded programmes of work and need to practice number skills daily, with encouragement and reward, to further their attainments during their secondary years.

The more teenagers can see the relevance of their activities and learning to everyday life and independence, the more motivated they are likely to be to practise and learn. The more they are supported at home and across the curriculum at school to practise their skills, the faster they will progress.

There are no short cuts to mastering the stages needed to understand and use numbers, but there are teaching methods, materials and activities that can help teenagers with Down syndrome to learn, particularly those that use visual images to illuminate concepts, support memory and aid practise.

There are strategies and aids that can help pupils to manage practical number skills without necessarily understanding the numbers involved. The information, context and purposes of many of the numbers we encounter and use daily can be memorised, written down and learned through experience. The relative values of money and the coins needed for the purchase of particular items can be memorised by teenagers who cannot add or subtract. However, this approach is limited. For example, understanding place value for hundreds, tens and units helps with reading bus numbers, cooking and weighing. To operate a calculator requires place value skills and, in order to use a calculator for money, an understanding of the decimal point as it relates to money values is needed. Knowledge is required for teenagers to decide when they do not know (and thus to identify the need for help) as much as for when they do know and can succeed with the skills required of them.

The authors recommend that both basic and practical approaches to teaching are maintained for teenagers aged 11-16, in maths lessons.

• Development of number skills (to at least 100), using a numeracy teaching programme, (these can be transferred to practical skills fairly easily when mastered), and
• Learning basic practical skills for independence, including money, time and number recognition for weighing, measuring and other life skills. This requires that teenagers are given opportunities to practise and become competent and confident, with or without understanding of the numbers involved, such as buying their own lunch, receiving and spending their own money and cooking and preparing food.

We recommend that teachers and parents do not stop the first approach to focus exclusively on the latter in secondary school, as many teenagers have more mature work habits than primary aged children and are more likely to attend to teaching instruction and undertake the amount of practice needed to master number skills. Teenagers have 5 years between the ages of 11 and 16 when they may be at their most ready to learn - as much as possible should be made of this.