Preliminary Material 2023 – AQA
It’s every Core Maths teachers’ favourite time of year – preliminary material time. This year, I accidentally looked at the paper 1 material before guessing the context but my colleague, Lucy, spectacularly guessed “Something to do with trees?”! For paper 2, I guessed at something to do with cars or mobile phones so we’re feeling pretty good about our psychic abilities.
Anyway, you’re probably here for resources and, maybe, my thoughts on the material. I’m going to include links to other people’s thoughts too where possible. If you know of any I don’t, please do tell me so I can add them.
If you write a resource or question and would like me to share it here, then also please get in touch.
Thoughts
Paper 1 sees the much anticipated return of Income Tax and National Insurance. The format is pleasingly familiar and the numbers are what I was expecting. It’s a little unusual to have the 45% (additional) rate of tax included and this does make me wonder if they will give additional information about the personal allowance to work that into the question. The National Insurance is as expected and I must remember to actually do some monthly calculations with my students.
Student loans is a sensible financial focus. I’m going to talk about the change in tuition fee laws that explain why the threshold changed at September 2012. Other than that students don’t usually find this topic too bad as long as they just treat it as another ‘tax’ (ie it’s worked out on the gross salary). The mention of additional payments is interesting but my feeling is that that would vastly overcomplicate a question if that were used.
Christmas eh? I like this. A criticism of AQA I’ve had in the past is that the estimation question can be a little too easy to predict (the motorways and sweet factory felt like that) so it’s nice that this one is not completely obvious. I’m going to spend more time on this one later on but my intuition is something to do with “how much space would all of the Nordmann Firs that were sold in 2022 have needed to occupy while growing?” There are some other options (I think) but I’ll put them together another time.
The Paper 2 preliminary material is typically more difficult to enagage with and has more difficult questions. Having said that, I do think this year’s topic is interesting to students as they all use social media (critical analysis resource here) and the text is fairly accessible. I’ve made a fairly comprehensive familiarisation resource below and working through that gives you a fair sense of what I think about for each part. I’m sure I’ll write some more exam-style questions but essentially, I’m pretty happy with this material as being something to work with.
If you haven’t been to an AMSP meeting about this, I strongly recommend just showing students the graphs first, without labels/titles and asking them what they think about it before giving them all the text.
General Resources
My FAQ about what you can and can’t do with preliminary material is worth a read if you’re new to this.
As ever, Cat has put together a padlet with loads of useful links. They’re great for doing work around the preliminary materials and really digging in deep to the topics.
Resources for Paper 1
Here is a set of finance questions I made for the 2023 Preliminary material.
The finance resources for Tax, NI and Student Loans I’ve used this year are here.
I was asked in the comments about monthly National Insurance payments. Here’s a worksheet to take you through that.
Abby Beer has made an excellent Desmos Activity for students to practice their Tax and National Insurance work. Abby has also kindly let people have access to the editable teacher version.
Ellis Johnson has started to collate some possible questions along with a place for you to add your own ones.
Here’s something that Lucy and I have written about the trees.
Resources for Paper 2
I’ve made a familiarisation worksheet to help students read through the material. I was envisaging the classic Science text book with a double page spread and then questions that linked really clearly to each section.
As I’ve said above, if you have anything you’d like to share, get in touch and I’ll add it.
reflectivemaths's Blog 
Hi thanks for the resources but could i ask how do you work out the monthly repayments.Would be really helpful thank you.
Hello. Thanks for the thanks!
I don’t have a teaching resource as such but I’ve made a worksheet that should hopefully make it clear how it works.