Which item from his most important speech as prime minister did Rishi Sunak decided to leak on Monday? Would it be the NHS crisis, rail strikes, inflation or Ukraine? None of the above: instead it was maths. Why maths? What on earth went through his mind?
The cult of maths knows no bounds. It rules global education like no other subject, its status akin to medieval Latin. The reason is that it is so easily measurable. Maths is right or wrong. Its targets are international, its results classifiable, its league tables definitive for any government. Immune to leftwing bias and rightwing ideology, maths can run like a ramrod through every school worldwide, a statistician’s dream.
When she was schools minister in 2014, Liz Truss visited Shanghai to look at how the Chinese teach the subject and returned mesmerised. She declared Britain faced “economic decline” if it failed to copy China and didn’t get better at maths. Here, at least, Sunak agrees with her.
The prime minister’s hero Margaret Thatcher would have been appalled. She held that what was taught in the classroom was a professional matter and not for politicians. She fought her education minister Kenneth Baker over his national curriculum and resulting testing bureaucracy. She lost. By the time she left office, 90% of the school curriculum was centrally ordained, with hundreds of staff dedicated to testing it.
This led to the slow death of extracurricular education – the number of playing fields halved – while parents were ordered “to devote 20 minutes to bedtime stories”. Baker’s school reforms were dubbed by the Modern Law Review, “the high point of elective dictatorship”.
