Chapter 5: The Politics of Purpose

This chapter opens the second part of this book, where we examine some of the themes of the work presented in the first four chapters. Hopefully at this point, we have made a good case to the effect that children's out-of-school mathematics learning is an interesting and important focus for attention. But we also think that we have started to make the case that there is a great deal of complexity in this topic too. Our aim in this second part of the book is to engage with this complexity in some depth and to consider what might be some of the implications for theory and practice from our own research experience together with some of the research literature in this area. Readers will not be surprised to see that we do not advocate a one-size-fits-all approach, but rather one that attends, at least to some extent, to the context of individual children, families and schools.