What goes around, comes around.
There’s almost always a point in any government’s lifetime when it realises the UK has a problem with maths and decides that something needs to be done. Usually it’s at a comparatively quiet moment when there is not much else going on. Not at a time when many public sector workers are threatening strike action, growth has stalled, inflation remains high, the prime minister’s record as a problem solver is in question and when the government is about 15 points behind in the polls.
But whatever. Let’s give Rishi Sunak the benefit of the doubt and assume that maths is not some kind of diversionary tactic. Rather that he genuinely believes in the subject – he wants everyone to have the chance to be a millionaire Goldman Sachs banker like him – and can’t understand why so many people are willing to fess up that they are hopeless at maths. You wouldn’t catch the same people boasting they hated books and couldn’t read.
Sunak first alerted us to his passion for maths in a speech back in January. Then he went quiet. On Monday, the first day back after the Easter recess, he turned up to deliver another speech at the London Screen Academy in Islington. His argument was to the point: the UK was one of the few developed countries not to have compulsory maths education up till the age of 18. So something needed to be done. Though he wasn’t entirely sure what. He didn’t think students should all necessarily do A-levels, but they should be doing something. He was rather hoping that he could put together an advisory board of maths teachers to tell him what’s what.
It was all reminiscent of the early 2000s when teachers and politicians were calling for the introduction of functional maths. Maths that would give you life skills to deal with day-to-day life. Personal banking, percentages. Things like that. Only nothing ever came of it. It was just another good idea that came and went. Something to be filed under “no election votes in it” and therefore to be gently forgotten until the next prime minister had the same idea. Which would be shelved again.
Rish! really didn’t have much more to say. But he tried to eke it out for another few minutes by repeating himself. Perhaps pupils could try learning about angles from football free kicks. Er, yes. But they were already learning about this in the current curriculum. And that was the problem. Because most of the things Sunak wanted them to learn they were already learning. He wasn’t quite so keen on percentages. His wife’s shareholding in Infosys was currently tanking by 9.4%. Or in cash terms, his family was £49m poorer than it had been that morning. Easy come, easy go.
By now, the internal logic – the maths – of his own argument began to fall apart. It wasn’t the fact that so many pupils stopped studying maths at 16 and didn’t get the chance to do A-level that was the problem. It was that at least a third of students didn’t pass GCSE maths. You don’t conquer people’s fear of maths by making them study for an extra two years from 16. You do so by changing the way the subject is taught at primary and secondary school.
And herein lies the problem. Schools simply can’t recruit the necessary number of maths teachers. Most people with a maths degree would rather go off and work somewhere the pay and conditions were more appealing. So many pupils were being taught maths by non-specialist maths teachers. That’s if they were being taught at all, given that many of the teaching unions had voted in favour of strike action.
Yet again, Rish! will be in for a hell of a shock when he realises what party has presided over the continuing decline in maths education over the past 13 years. Or maybe not. Perhaps he’s more self-aware than he seems. All he needs to do is look at his own MPs in government. The failure of so many to understand the maths behind the pandemic. Kwasi Kwarteng’s loose grip of basic economics.
Come to think of it, Sunak really only need look at his current chancellor. Jeremy Hunt is every bit the bluffer. Someone in a state of near panic at the dispatch box in case he is asked a complicated question. He reddens and sweats profusely every time he is let out in public. One of the reasons why he has become more or less invisible. Trusting the economy to a man who doesn’t really understand the job is an article of desperation.
Sunak took a few questions at the end but appeared somewhat disengaged. He didn’t want to talk about public sector strikes, he didn’t even really want to examine the possible flaws in his outline for a new maths curriculum. Identifying the problem is not the same as solving it. He looked relieved to scurry off. Maybe this maths thing hadn’t been such a good idea after all. Wrong time, wrong place.
Over in the Commons, the health secretary, Steve Barclay, was rather lamenting that the junior doctors and nurses belonging to the RCN union were, if anything, too numerate. They had been able to work out by just how much their real-term pay had fallen under a Tory government and were holding out for more money than had currently been offered. Then Barclay was also struggling with percentages – 54% of nurses voting to reject a pay offer was a narrow margin. But when 52% of the country had voted for Brexit it had been the overwhelming will of the people. Go figure.
Labour’s Wes Streeting tried to cut a diplomatic figure. Though secretly thrilled the RCN had voted against acceptance, he framed his urgent question as more in sorrow. The government had gone awol, he said. It needed to resolve the strikes. At the very least it had to sit down and talk to the junior doctors over at Acas. Everyone knew their starting demand of 35% was nonsense. Even the doctors themselves knew that. There had to be talks otherwise the number of cancelled appointments would carry on increasing. Barclay shrugged. Que sera, sera.
