Kristina Murkett

Sunak’s maths plan doesn’t add up

Rishi Sunak (Credit: Getty images)

In one particularly excruciating scene in The Office, manager David Brent tells everyone that they are about to lose their jobs, but ‘the good news is I’ve been promoted’. When challenged, he says, ‘Well I couldn’t come out and say I’ve got some bad news and some irrelevant news.’

A similar exchange seems to have just happened with Rishi rather than Ricky. The bad news is that the NHS is in crisis, with up to 500 people dying a week due to delays in emergency care and one in three ambulances waiting over an hour to hand over patients. The ‘good’ news though is that Sunak, after almost two months of silence, has announced that he wants all students to study maths up until 18.

The strange and surreal timing aside, Sunak’s policy simply doesn’t add up. The UK is indeed an outlier compared to other OECD countries such as Germany, Japan and America, who all have compulsory maths until 18. There’s also no denying that there are some serious failings in our current maths education (according to one study, around half of UK adults have the numeracy skills of primary school children). Yet whilst Sunak may have grabbed some distracting headlines, he has failed to show his working. 

The problem is we simply do not have enough maths teachers. The government has failed to meet its maths teacher recruitment targets every year for the last decade, despite dangling generous bursaries for maths PGCE students of up to £27,000. The Tories have actually cut their recruitment aims by 39 per cent since 2020, whilst nearly half of secondary schools use non-specialists to teach maths because of chronic shortages. Anecdotally, the vast majority of Teach First maths teachers I met during my time on the programme did not study maths as their degree, but were conscripted after having applied for another subject.

The problem is we simply do not have enough maths teachers

The second critical problem is that the policy is wildly out of touch with our current educational reality.

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