How Barnsley College Doubled GCSE Maths Engagement with ThingLink

Louise Jones September 2, 2026

The Background 

Barnsley College is a Further Education college in South Yorkshire, England, which caters for over 8000 students across a number of campuses. It provides a very wide range of full and part-time vocational courses, including T Levels, A Levels, university-level courses including Higher National Certificates and Diplomas, degrees, foundation degrees, Apprenticeships and Degree Apprenticeships. 

The Challenge

Reece Tinkler is a teacher of GCSE maths at the college, and he was facing a challenge common across education: student engagement. The two months between the November GCSE resits and the release of the exam results in January is a period in which attendance and engagement historically drop away sharply. Having already sat their exams, students often approach lessons with less motivation, viewing the remaining time differently than they did beforehand. Compounding this, traditional teaching often left maths feeling fragmented, with topics taught as isolated units rather than connected, real-world skills. 

The college had also relied on an AI-driven online maths and English platform, which, despite being powerful at identifying and cementing individual gaps in knowledge, suffered from a user experience problem: students had to work through an alphabetical list of over 800 possible learning modules (or “nuggets”) to find relevant content. Combined with negative peer and teacher sentiment that had built up over time, this left many students viewing the platform as tedious and unengaging. 

Reece and the college needed a way to make maths feel immersive, purposeful, and grounded in real life, particularly during the post-resit period, while also giving students greater autonomy to lead their own learning rather than simply receive instruction. 

The Solution: ThingLink

Drawing on an initial introduction from the college’s teaching and learning team, Reece built a fully interactive virtual street using ThingLink. The immersive 360 image was populated with shops and locations where students could apply maths concepts in a simulated, real-world setting. 

To connect the many individual scenes, Reece developed a “lobby” concept, allowing students to move between different areas — such as shops along the street — in a way that mirrors the navigation mechanics of a video game. This approach solved the technical challenge of linking together multiple AI-generated environments and allowed the project to be expanded rapidly. 

A major factor in the tool’s success is its interface, which closely resembles the navigation style of Google Maps and Street View. Because most students already have experience with gaming and digital navigation, they were able to move around the environment with little to no training, leaving them free to focus on the maths itself rather than on learning new software. 

In the classroom, students work individually on laptops alongside a physical worksheet. Reece opens each session with a short, five-minute demonstration at the front of the class — typically using the bakery section of the street as a worked example — before allowing students to explore the resource independently. This frees Reece to circulate the room, offering targeted support and checking understanding as students progress. 

Completion is verified through the worksheet, which requires students to record values drawn from tasks within ThingLink, followed by a final creative task to confirm the activity is finished. Throughout, the focus is on problem-solving: students who reach the correct answer through an alternative method are still considered to be demonstrating the core skill being assessed. 

Building on the success of the original street-based resource, Reece went on to develop a construction-specific version of ThingLink. This resource includes tags that explicitly explain how concepts such as prime factors or algebra are applied within construction trades, directly answering a question students frequently ask: “Where am I going to use this?” 

The Benefits and Results

The ThingLink resources:

• Tackled the post-resit engagement drop directly, giving students a reason to stay invested in lessons during a period when motivation and attendance have historically fallen away. In detail:
  • The number of unique “nuggets” or modules completed by active learners virtually doubled after the introduction of the ThingLink resources:
    • 2023/24 before ThingLink was introduced: 1,092 nuggets completed by 115 active learners (approximately 9.5 nuggets per learner)
    • 2024/25 after it was introduced: 5,455 nuggets completed by 301 active learners (approximately 18.1 nuggets per learner)
  • Average questions answered per student increased in the same time period from 99 to 201
  • Average time spent on the platform per learner doubled during the period
• Encouraged students to challenge themselves, with data showing high completion rates on intermediate-level “BIDMAS” tasks — suggesting students felt able to explore harder content without fear of failure, in contrast to the standard interface, where moving to a difficult module is more cumbersome.
• Provide stretch for higher-level learners, whilst concurrently improve accessibility for lower-level learners.
• Consolidated previously fragmented topics into a single, unified, real-world context, helping students see the relevance of maths rather than experiencing it as disconnected exercises.
• Required little to no training to use, allowing students to focus on maths content from the outset.
• In the construction-specific version, directly linked concepts such as prime factors and algebra to real trade applications, and implicitly reassured students about the relevance of maths.

Student and Teacher Feedback

Feedback from the construction course students was extremely positive and encouraging. It includes the following direct quotes:

“It helps me understand where the maths would be used on site” – Level 2 bricklaying student

“ThingLink helped me to find what I wanted to learn” – First year T-level plumbing student

“I could find the modules that came before what I struggled with” – Level 1 joinery student

“The significant increase in time spent on the platform, alongside the growth in nuggets completed, suggests not only that learners were engaging during lessons but also that many were accessing the resources independently outside of timetabled sessions. For me, that is one of the strongest indicators of the autonomy that ThingLink helped to develop.”

Reece Tinkler, GCSE Maths Teacher

Summary

This project demonstrates how ThingLink can help Further Education providers overcome one of the sector’s most persistent challenges: sustaining student engagement regardless of whether exams are imminent or completed . By translating fragmented, abstract topics into a single, immersive, real-world environment, Reece Tinkler and Barnsley College gave students both the confidence and the motivation to keep learning. What began as a solution to a seasonal engagement dip has grown into a broader teaching resource — one that reflects Reece’s wider view of maths education as a tool for building problem-solving skills and neural pathways, not simply memorising facts.