 At the moment, many students have been turned off mathematics because of the way it's been taught to them and because of the way they're being ability grouped. We need students to be passionate about it and to carry on into further education. I was the maths lead teacher at my school and I was coming across a lot of students who were not doing so well at maths and when I started to dig deeper I found out it was not often a capability but more that they actually disliked the subject. When students are ability grouped, the students in the lower group know and perform to their expectation. Students are very aware of where they sit within the class. So the lower expectation from the teacher and giving them just the next piece of work stops the child from being able to bust out of that ability range, therefore it actually holds them in position and creates a ceiling effect. Bruce and Donna Aitken have provided the funding that allowed for Cali's release from school and the idea behind that is to help grow leaders, to bring practitioners into the centre to give them an in-depth period of professional learning themselves. My research is looking at why lead mathematics teachers are continuing to ability group at their school when I know that we've all had training that's told us this is not good practice and that we should be looking at using mixability, problem solving as our approach. I like doing problem solving like decimals, problem solving sphere groups and stuff like that. I like challenging myself, I like solving and I like place value. We share our strategies to see if they can learn from it. If we need help like we're stuck on it, like we'll ask our buddies and see if they can like help us work it out. If we move away from ability grouping I believe we'll engage a large section of students who at the moment are not succeeding in mathematics and not enjoying mathematics. Math is really important because it underpins science, technology, we need it to be successful in society so it's a really important part of becoming a well-rounded citizen. It's a very good little snapshot that has got practical application for almost every principal and every teacher in this country. What I would like to do is go and be a principal in a school now and actually put what I've learnt into action so flip a school round so that we take away ability grouping and then four or five years down the track I'd like to do a PhD measuring the impact. Mathematics lead teachers are people who are good at teaching maths but they're not actually getting formal leadership training so having been at the centre I see now the need for both the mathematics content, pedagogy and some leadership skills. She's working in a very interesting area of education and I think she can make a huge contribution there. The Akin Fellowship Grant has allowed me to step out of a very busy school, focus on my studies so I'm sure they've completed to a much higher level. I would never have been able to learn the amount I have learnt or produce the quality of my research.