Maths for all?

You’ve probably seen the news this morning highlighting a government ambition to make mathematics study compulsory up to the age of 18 in England (at present it’s up to 16). The idea isn’t new, and has been thrown around before and in fact has been a known agenda item for this Government at least since October where plans for a post-16 Baccalaureate were talked about (which included compulsory English as well). The bigger picture, potentially, is that this idea leans into the end of A Levels - which appears far more controversial than compulsory mathematics. There are few details on what compulsory maths would potentially look like at this stage - there has been no explicit link to the Baccalaureate idea from a few months ago, although it seems to me that they are one in the same given the short time gap between their reveals. Compulsory maths is ‘a thing’ in lots of other countries, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, many of those countries have high economic output, and that gets attributed somewhat to higher qualifications in maths. This is not a specifically English viewpoint, it’s popular internationally → “higher qualifications = higher earnings = better economy” is the theory. It’s unsurprisingly problematic, but the converse is also a well worn problem used for policy change and initiatives: lower qualifications = lower earnings = statistical financial costs to the economy. It’s a big part of the foundational reasoning behind the National Numeracy Project for example (“Poor numeracy costs the UK dearly; research from Pro Bono Economics estimates poor numeracy skills cost the economy £20.2 billion every year.”).

This new initiative clearly states that the maths qualifications that would be studied would vary, presumably beyond the currently available post-16 qualifications which include the traditional (and difficult) A Level, and the excellent Core Maths program. If we assume there will be more qualifications introduced to cater for the wider variety of learner starting points, there are of course financial and time implications regarding the design and development of those. The bigger elephant in the room though is staffing. Maths teacher recruitment is dire and this year is on track to be as bad as last year, which was terrible. It’s unlikely that non-specialists could retrain to cover post-16 maths, so a more likely (and unwelcome) scenario would be that non-specialists retrain to teach lower year groups, and the specialists teaching them move up to cover the post-16 demand. That’s assuming it gets off the ground and needs teachers quickly where there are none. Government targets for teacher recruitment are somewhat misleading, as the reported statistics on teacher recruitment are usually against target as a percentage, but those targets are often lowered mid year or low to begin with to cater for realistic expectations, so, for example, hypothetically we might need 9000 teachers but we get a target to recruit 1000 because we’re likely to recruit 900 and that looks better against the target, whereas recruiting 900 against a target of 9000 looks bad. I exaggerate but the point is the same. Targets are low, and teachers aren’t coming in.

In principle I’d be for a rethink around post-16 mathematics, but the realities for teachers and students dealing with the retake cycle in Further Education Colleges, and the supression of the arts at the expense of the maths curriculum in secondary schools both make me hesitant to back even the idea of it. Regardless, the logistics speak for themselves - this is an initiative that cannot work in the current climate of teacher retention and recruitment. Maths education is on a positive journey of improvement in England - I genuinely think the maths mastery approach has been a success and raised the quality of maths education and student understanding, particularly at primary school, but the post-16 idea is too much too soon. Not now please.