This study originally aimed to find out whether mathematics anxiety has an impact of students’ progress and performance within mathematics. Due to the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that is due to be implemented on 25th May 2018 (Information Commissioner’s Office, 2018), the data needed for this was unable to be retrieved, therefore, the researcher investigated the prevalence of mathematics anxiety within a secondary school instead. The literature suggested that mathematics anxiety is becoming more common within schools and educators need to be more aware of it in order to support students.

The research was completed with 79 students across Years 7, 8 and 10 in a town based secondary school academy. Within the research, students completed the Modified Abbreviated Mathematics Anxiety Scale (mAMAS) anonymously. They were each allocated and identification number by a third party staff member which they were asked to record on their paperwork. The list of ID numbers was not accessible to the researcher. The results found that mathematics anxiety was highly prevalent in the school, with 35.44% of participants sitting above the 95% confidence level across the entire questionnaire. Also, girls were portrayed as more anxious than boys.

The mAMAS was divided into two factors – Evaluation and Learning. It was evident that Evaluation settings caused higher anxiety than Learning settings. Four out of nice questions were highlighted as situations that cause high levels of anxiety and these questions make up the entire Evaluation subscale, therefore supporting the statistics that were found.

It would be interesting to further research this, looking deeper into gender and age differences. Also, it would be interesting to establish if there is a relationship between parents/carers and child mathematics anxiety.