A charity will offer hundreds of secondary schools almost £3,000 to fund a “maths champion” in a bid to make it the “SAS of subjects”, as an ex-government adviser warned 30,000 promising pupils are “lost” by year 11.
The Mathematics Education for Social Mobility and Excellence charity (MESME), set up by Russian-born billionaire philanthropist Alex Gerko, has today been rebranded as Axiom Maths.
The charity, headed up by former Department for Education adviser David Thomas, has announced today it will hand schools money to fund time off timetable or extra payments for “maths champions” who will work to keep high-attainers interested in the subject.
Thomas said he wanted to “change the national perception of maths from being treated as a subject people ‘celebrate’ being bad at, to being seen as the SAS of subjects that unlocks the future, opening up opportunities in AI and the jobs of the future”.
