The British prime minister, Rishi Sunak, lately announced his ambition ‘to move towards all children studying some form of maths to 18’ (Sunak, 2023), prompting questions about what maths this should be (and who should teach it). While I don’t dispute the importance of these questions, I do believe that the debate is currently missing key information about what maths 16- to 18-year-olds already study.
The UK is unusual in that post-16 maths qualifications are optional for most students (Hodgen et al., 2010). However, moves have recently been made to increase the applied maths taught within other subjects in the pre-university curriculum (known as A-levels). In particular, a number of A-level subjects now have a formal requirement for quantitative skills to be assessed. This means that a student who arrives to study sociology at university, having taken A-levels in biology, psychology and sociology, does not have ‘no maths’. In fact, they should have developed quantitative skills in all three of these subjects. The question is, what skills?
