Maths education is failing UK students
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
This article is the latest part of the FT’s Financial Literacy and Inclusion Campaign
The writer is a maths teacher, author of ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Numbers’ and co-host of Maths Appeal podcast
If you are paid £9 per hour, what would your hourly rate be if you received a pay rise of 5 per cent? If you correctly answered £9.45, you’re in the top half of the UK’s adult population.
Unfortunately, research from the charity National Numeracy (where I am an ambassador), shows that nearly half of all working adults in the country have numeracy skills no better than those we’d expect of an 11-year-old schoolchild.
Coupled with recent GCSE trends, this is a gloomy outlook. In England, students need maths (and English) GCSEs at a minimum of grade 4 to qualify for further study. Results this week show that maths papers graded 4 or above have fallen to 59.5 per cent, down from 61.1 per cent last year. (Eagle-eyed analysts will observe the pass rate for 16-year-olds was 72 per cent, meaning the total was dragged down by older students resitting exams).
How can these results be improved? Perhaps maths teaching should be more inspiring and relevant. Outside Stratford station in east London, I recently bumped into a former student who said, “Mr Seagull, you were a lit (Gen Z for excellent) maths teacher, but we didn’t learn things that matter to us.”
There is an intrinsic beauty in understanding the mathematical forces that underpin our world. But some students might need persuading that abstract algebraic notions or the allure of prime numbers is actually useful.
Certainly these skills are not the same as numeracy, an essential subset of the discipline. Competent numeracy skills enable adults to have confidence in day-to-day life when working out discounts in shops, checking recipe ingredients, holiday budgeting or calculating loan repayment rates.
For young people, numeracy can easily be taught by strategising the values of football players during their Fantasy Premier League or calculating the overall cost of Taylor Swift concerts.
As a maths teacher for 10 years, I’ve always believed the talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not. It deeply saddens me that regional educational divides are widening. The worst-performing region in these GCSE results, the West Midlands, was nearly 10 percentage points below London.
The CEO of the Northern Powerhouse partnership says that this gap largely reflect “differences . . . in the proportions of long-term disadvantaged children by region”. While the previous government’s phrase “levelling up” has been retired, maths education doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It reflects wider societal conditions.
Amid all this gloom, you may be surprised to learn that maths has been the most popular A-level subject for a decade. More than 100,000 teenagers took the exams this year. Despite that, the overall proportion of students studying maths at university has shrunk, leading to several universities cutting provisions and closing departments, according to the Campaign for Mathematical Sciences.
This will further destabilise the supply of maths teachers. One in eight maths lessons are already taught by someone without a maths degree and almost half of all secondary schools are using non-specialist teachers for maths.
Given that half of children judged to be falling behind at the age of five end up not passing their GCSEs and that around 80 per cent of young people “fail” resits on their second attempt, the system is clearly not working.
The UK has to tackle a broader cultural issue where it is deemed acceptable to say you can’t do maths. Yes, the subject can be tricky, but all of us can learn to be confident and competent in it, especially when it comes to using numeracy in our day-to-day lives.
The curriculum is in desperate need of an update. Financial and data literacy must be included if we are to ensure that our young people become mathematically literate citizens able to compete in the modern world.
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