Last week, prime minister Rishi Sunak committed the government to “a new ambition of ensuring that all school pupils in England study some form of maths to the age of 18” and it’s fair to say the initiative got a mixed response. Some commentators saw this as a vicious attack by robot bean counters on all that is humanistic and creative in education, others saw it as a brazen attempt to divert attention from some of the country’s more intractable problems. But when a prime minister chooses to put the curriculum near the top of their priority list, we surely need to take it seriously and examine what’s being said.
The case is strong, as the prime minister says: “we need to equip young people with the quantitative and statistical skills that they need”. You don’t have to be a desiccated calculating machine to recognise that data is everywhere, and that mathematical thinking is needed more than ever.
Rishi Sunak’s first major intervention on education since entering office flows from a commitment to ensuring that young people acquire the right skills in both numeracy and literacy, suggesting that the job is done in literacy, while improving numeracy is unfinished business. But all those 16–18-year-olds who haven’t yet achieved at least a grade 4 in GCSE maths (and English) are already required to study both, and many of them are not A Level students.
