How many teachers get to inspire and encourage other teachers and students across the world? Local Tiffin maths teacher, Jamie Frost, set up a website to help children with their maths. During the pandemic, millions from across the world visited his website and downloaded his free resources and, in recognition of his work, he’s been awarded the global Covid Hero award. He talked to Pippa Duncan
Jamie Frost is a little overwhelmed by all the attention he’s been getting since being named Covid Hero in a global awards ceremony. He was one of 10 finalists for the Global Teacher Prize, and the award was created specially in recognition of how he has helped children from countries as diverse as Abu Dhabi to Zimbabwe to access maths lessons during lockdown. ‘It’s just been completely bizarre.’ Boris Johnson announced the award, saying ‘Your creativity and ingenuity has given hope and support to millions of children throughout the world’; Gavin Williamson, the Secretary of State for Education, mentioned it in his Commons speech, and he’s been on breakfast news shows and interviewed in the press.
While he’s enjoyed the media attention, it is helping children across the world to learn maths in a way that they can understand that is his driving force – and won him the prize.
Frost’s website, Dr Frost Maths, is a resource for both teachers and students – and is totally free to use. Teachers use the online learning platform, teaching resources, worksheets and past exam questions to help their students, who can also access the website. Whiteboard tutorials can be watched, paused, re-run as many times as needed.
A former investment banker, with a PhD in Computer Science from Oxford, Frost set up the website when he began teaching eight years ago: ‘Being an investment banker and living in New York was fun, but it was soul destroying.’ He was a 6th form pupil at Tiffin Boys (having failed to get in at 11+), so he contacted the school to do some work experience teaching during his holidays. He realised he’d found his calling and quit his job within the week. He set up the website as more of a blog when he started teaching, but as it became popular, it became more about teaching resources – helped, of course, by his knowledge of computer science.
But it came into its own during the pandemic. With schools across the world in lockdown, many teachers found their schools did not have the resources to help them teach pupils stuck at home. ‘The PowerPoints are more engineered at teaching, but students can register independently and can just work the topics they want. They can see their progress for themselves and when they get stuck on a question, I’ve got example videos which they can play and pause.’ Three quarters of schools in the UK now use his resources and his site has had 8.4m downloads and has more than 1 million views a day. All totally free and while he’s continued his job as a full time teacher.
The Covid Hero award of £33,000 means he can help develop the website further. At the moment he runs it himself, with the help of one other full-time teacher who contributes in his spare time. His site helps students following the English curriculum but he would like to be able to help others sectors and created a ‘shared platform’. He gets great feedback: ‘I had an email from St Helena (part of the Ascension Islands in the Atlantic Ocean) who have extremely limited resources. They have one secondary school and a high turnover of staff because the posts are only for two years when you get stationed out there. They said the site was a godsend. I’ve also had emails from schools in Tanzania, Malawi, East Asia and the Middle East.’
Frost was one of 12,000 nominees for the Global Teacher Prize, set up by the Varkey Foundation, then made it down to the last 50 and then 10 finalists. The top prize of $1m went to Indian village primary school teacher, Ranjitsinh Disale, who helped girls to get their education. Disale has decided to share half of his prize money with the other nine contestants. ‘He started this school in a cattle shed and he’s completely turned around the community so that girls can learn too. He absolutely a deserving winner.’
All of the teachers nominated are exceptional and Frost’s love of what he highlights why he was one of the 10 finalists.
‘I love teaching so much. It’s a profession I enjoy doing every day. It feels more like my lifestyle rather than a job – the sheer volume of different skills used in teaching, like being able to explain things, to communicate, the social interaction, the creativity and creating new lesson resources and the fact I get to use my programming skills to build this education platform and use my AI knowledge. I can’t think of any other job where I’d be able to use that gamut of skills and enjoy it at the same time. It’s the perfect job really.’
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