If nothing else, Sunak’s recently announced plan for all students in England to study Maths to age 18 generated a rich crop of maths related puns in the media. Our analysis shows the plan should be welcomed, at least in principle, as a long-overdue reform – but also how implementing such a policy without the requisite strategic and financial backing would likely lead to wider skills gaps and a worsening of the inequalities already seen amongst young people leaving upper secondary education.
England is amongst a small minority of OECD countries which do not require the study of either Maths or the national language throughout upper secondary education (ages 16-18) (the others being Australia, New Zealand, Ireland and the other UK nations). Furthermore, less than half of students in post-16 education study Maths as a discreet subject, many of them instead on courses to re-take GCSE Maths, in which only 20 per cent passed at grade 4 or above in 2022.
It is no coincidence that literacy and numeracy levels amongst young adults (age 16-24) in England rank poorly in international surveys. For instance, in the first round of the OECD Survey of Adult Skills (SAS), mean scores for numeracy were lower amongst 16–24-year-olds in England than in all 22 other countries included in the survey, bar Italy, Spain and the US.
