LEEDS MATHEMATICS CERTIFICATE
Significant extension to the breadth and depth of your academic experience at LMaS comes through the Leeds Mathematics Certificate (LMC). This is an extended, super-curricular research project that you complete, in a small group, in Year 12. At the end of the project you give a 10-minute presentation and you create and publish an academic poster.
Your LMC research starts you bridging the gap between sixth-form study and further study, at university or as part of a degree apprenticeship. Researching your LMC project and preparing your presentation and poster introduce you to real world problem-solving and accelerate your development of skills which are highly valued by employers: project management, problem solving, debating, speaking to audiences and collaborative teamwork.
The LMC is a core feature of our partnership with the University of Leeds: it is how our partnership ‘comes to life’ for you.
The LMC brings the experience of grappling with – and not always solving – open-ended problems into the A-level curriculum. This is excellent preparation for undergraduate study in the mathematical sciences, and employment afterwards. Through the completion of the certificate, LMaStudents know that mathematicians are highly sought after in many and varied professional areas. They become much more informed about the multitude of rewarding career pathways that numerate graduates can follow: literally, in every field from actuarial consultancy to zoological modelling.
You play an active role in shaping your project and in defining the focus of the problem you want to solve. Many of the projects are based on questions and suggestions from the project supervisors, who are volunteers from our network of education, business and industry partners. Throughout the project, you connect regularly with mentors from business or industry, or with University of Leeds teaching staff and students.
Your ICT confidence and competence are developed significantly through the LMC. You learn to use confidently standard office packages such as Excel and PowerPoint, and you might also learn skills such as writing in LaTeX or analysing data with powerful statistical software. You will enter Higher Education with ICT skills that many other students don’t even graduate with.
You complete your LMC project in Year 12, giving you additional time for A level study, academic extension and university preparation in Year 13. Self-managing a complex piece of work over an extended period of time is a highly valuable, and greatly valued, skill that you will develop through the LMC. Your experiences during the LMC will become engrained learning habits for success in Year 13, and beyond.
