The English and maths skills you need for teacher training

Skills, not just qualifications

It’s easy to think about ITT entry requirements purely in terms of certificates — a GCSE grade 4 in English, a grade 4 in maths, done. But the DfE’s framing is deliberately different: “It is the standard, not the certificate.”

What this means in practice is that what you can actually do with English and maths matters as much as what you can produce on paper. Teacher training providers aren’t just checking boxes — they are trying to ensure that the people entering classrooms have the fundamental skills to model good English, explain mathematical reasoning clearly, and use data to understand how their pupils are progressing.

This post breaks down what the GCSE grade-4 standard actually looks like, skill by skill — both so you know what to aim for, and so you can assess honestly where you’re already strong and where you might need to build.

English skills for teacher training

The English component of the grade-4 standard covers the kind of practical, precise language use that underpins effective teaching. These are not abstract literary skills — they are the everyday tools of a professional communicator.

Grammar

At grade-4 level, you need a reliable command of the rules that govern how sentences are constructed and how words work together. This includes:

Sentence structure — understanding simple, compound, and complex sentences; knowing how clauses join together
Subject-verb agreement — ensuring that singular and plural subjects match the correct verb form
Tense consistency — maintaining consistent tense within a piece of writing
Parts of speech — recognising and using nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions accurately

For teachers, grammar fluency matters because you’ll be explicitly teaching it in primary and secondary classrooms — and because your own writing (to parents, to colleagues, in reports and planning documents) is a constant model of the standard you expect from pupils.

Spelling

Reliable spelling at this level means being accurate with a wide range of common words, including those with irregular patterns. Common areas tested include:

Words with double letters (accommodation, necessary, occurrence)
Words with silent letters (knowledge, subtle, receipt)
Words with common suffixes and prefixes (-tion, -sion, -ance, -ence, un-, dis-)
Homophones — words that sound the same but are spelled differently (their/there/they’re, affect/effect, principal/principle)

Punctuation

Accurate punctuation conveys meaning clearly. At grade-4 standard, you should be confident using:

Full stops, question marks, and exclamation marks
Commas — including in lists, after fronted adverbials, and to separate clauses
Apostrophes — for both possession and contraction
Speech marks and inverted commas
Colons and semicolons for connecting related ideas

Vocabulary

A broad, active vocabulary allows you to communicate precisely — to choose the word that says exactly what you mean, rather than settling for approximate language. At grade-4 level, this includes:

Knowing the meanings of a wide range of words, including less common words encountered in formal writing
Understanding words in context — using surrounding text to infer meaning
Choosing words that suit the register and purpose of the writing (formal report vs. informal message)

Fluent reading and comprehension

Reading at this level is not just decoding words — it is understanding meaning, including implied meaning. At grade-4 standard, you should be able to:

Read and understand a range of texts, including non-fiction, information texts, and formal documents
Infer meaning that is not explicitly stated in the text
Identify the main idea and supporting detail
Recognise how a writer uses language to achieve a purpose (to inform, persuade, explain)

Maths skills for teacher training

The maths standard is firmly rooted in number and data — practical mathematics rather than advanced or abstract topics. The emphasis is on fluency and the ability to apply maths in context, including the kinds of school contexts you’ll encounter as a teacher.

Whole numbers

Confidence with whole numbers is the foundation of everything else. At grade-4 level, you need to be fluent in:

Place value — understanding units, tens, hundreds, thousands, and beyond; comparing and ordering numbers
Arithmetic — adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing whole numbers accurately, including multi-digit calculations
Rounding — to the nearest 10, 100, 1,000, or significant figure, depending on context
Mental maths — doing quick calculations without a calculator (some assessments are non-calculator throughout)

Fractions, decimals, and percentages

These three forms of expressing parts of a whole — and moving between them — are central to both the grade-4 standard and to everyday classroom maths. Key skills include:

Converting between fractions, decimals, and percentages (e.g. ¾ = 0.75 = 75%)
Ordering and comparing fractions and decimals
Calculating percentages of amounts (e.g. 20% of 350)
Calculating fractions of amounts (e.g. ⅖ of 80)
Applying these in proportion problems (e.g. if 3 out of 25 pupils achieved a score, what percentage is that?)

Interpreting pupil data, statistics, and graphs

This is arguably the most directly classroom-relevant part of the maths standard. Teachers regularly work with assessment data — class averages, score distributions, progress over time — and need to read and interpret it clearly. You should be comfortable with:

Tables — reading data from rows and columns, comparing values
Bar charts and pictograms — reading and comparing category data
Pie charts — reading proportions and calculating values from sectors
Line graphs — reading trends and changes over time
Averages — calculating mean, mode, and median; knowing when each is the most appropriate measure

Problem-solving by varied methods

The grade-4 standard is not just about knowing procedures — it’s about applying them when the problem doesn’t announce which method to use. Problem-solving questions often:

Present a scenario in words (a school trip budget, a class test result, a timetable calculation)
Require you to identify what maths to use, set it up, and carry it through
Involve more than one step to reach the answer
Require you to check that your answer makes sense in context

Practising varied problems — rather than drilling a single technique repeatedly — is the most effective way to build this kind of flexible mathematical thinking.

Where to start

Reading this list, you might feel confident in some areas and uncertain in others. That’s normal — most people have uneven profiles, strong in one part of English or maths and less so in another.

The most efficient preparation starts with knowing your own gaps. Rather than working through everything from scratch, a diagnostic assessment tells you in 20 minutes where your skills already sit and where you need to focus.

Take the free diagnostic test at SN Academy’s UK prep hub — /uk/ — and get a clear, honest picture of where you stand against the GCSE grade-4 standard. No charge, no pressure: just the information you need to prepare smartly.

— The people of SN Academy