WHEN Carol Vorderman pops up on Channel Four in the middle of the afternoon, don't think she is just providing a bit of entertainment for pensioners and bored students.

No, she's also inspiring a whole generation of school pupils in maths, making them realise it is no longer just about boring equations on squared paper.

In some schools maths has undergone a transformation in recent years. For those where maths is still about algebra and endless quadratic equations, criticism has come from the Office for Standards in Education which said last week it was simply all too boring.

Teachers spend hours working out new ways to make maths more interesting and now some pupils even think it's fun.

That is what has happened at Christopher Whitehead Language College in St John's, Worcester, where Cath Clark, an advanced skills teacher and head of department, has completely overhauled the way the subject is put across.

"I think everyone thinks maths is boring or irrelevant but that's not true at all," says 14-year-old Hannah Flynn, one of her pupils.

"It always crops up in real life. I help out in a newsagents and we don't have an automatic till - it's helped my mental arithmetic improve no end.

"Maths here is made interesting and fun. For example, one day it was warm outside and we had to estimate and then count how many daisies there were in the field by working out averages from small areas."

Hannah and her Year 9 classmates have just taken their maths Sats exams. Now each lesson begins with a Countdown-style game where numbers appear on the screen in front of the class and the pupils race to calculate them to find the answer.

With heads down as they beaver away, their mental arithmetic is getting a good workout - and they hardly even notice it is work.

As Mrs Clark says, maths teaching works only when it is made relevant to everyday life.

"I know someone who is an engineer on the railways," she says. "People in school might wonder why we teach Pythagoras' theorem but my friend asked for some help because he needed to know Pythagoras before he could work out how to change the design and height of the platforms.

"In the past there was a lot of rote learning. Children may have known the answers but there was no explanation. It's all very well teaching the strategy, now we're telling them the reasons and that's what inspires them."

Mrs Clark and her colleagues have looked at best practice in other schools and colleges and come up with a master plan to make maths attractive.

"We make sure we have a laugh as well as learning," she says. "We play crazy golf in the classroom to work out averages, count daisies to learn data handling and go fishing to think about the odds of catching certain fish.

"Using technology like the interactive whiteboard and these bizarre, off-the-wall topics, maths becomes fun and the students become enthusiastic.

"We talked about the circumference of the globe and then used Google Earth to zoom in on satellite photographs from the internet on the whiteboard."

All the signs are that the revolution is working. Four former Christopher Whitehead pupils have now gone on via sixth form college to study maths at Oxford. GCSE results are at an all-time high.

"Maths is different and more fun than English," admits James Knowles, aged 14, who successfully worked out the first Countdown problem of the day on the big screen.

His friend Matthew Holbourn, also 14, agrees: "People think it's just about numbers, but all the practical things we've done proves it's not."

And for those whose memories of maths are getting a bit sketchy but still didn't turn the page at the mere mention of Pythagoras, here's a reminder: The square on the hypotenuse of a right-angled triangle is equal to the sum of the squares on the other two sides.

Remember? If not, switch on to Vorderman, Lynam and friends and get inspired all over again.