24
Examination of witnesses
Lynne McClure, Conrad Wolfram and Charlie Stripp.
Q1 The Chair: Welcome to this morning’s session of the Science and Technology Select Committee. We are undertaking a one-off evidence session on mathematics education in schools. My name is Robert Mair. I am the chair of this committee. I am very pleased to welcome our witnesses for the first session. We have Lynne McClure, chair of the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences’ Education Workstream, Conrad Wolfram of Wolfram Research, and Charlie Stripp, CEO of Mathematics Education Innovation. This session is being broadcast on Parliament Live. A full transcript is being taken and that will be made available after the meeting to make any corrections.
I will start with the first question. We have a contradictory picture about maths education in the UK. On the one hand the number of people doing A-level maths is at a record high; on the other, the GCSE pass rate fell in 2024 and around 40% of students failed to pass GCSE maths. In this context, we have heard about the cuts to the AMSP programme with some alarm, AMSP being the advanced mathematics support programme. How would you assess the overall state of mathematics education in UK schools? Is the situation improving or is it deteriorating? Also, could you discuss the role that the AMSP has played and whether there is any sign that it is being replaced? Lynne McClure, we will start with you. When you first speak, please introduce yourselves a little bit more and say something about yourself.
Lynne McClure: Thank you very much. In my role here today, I am speaking as the chair of the Education Workstream for the quite new Academy for the Mathematical Sciences. Previously I was a secondary mathematics teacher, then I became a primary head, and I worked in teacher education. Latterly I have been working within Cambridge University on a project called Cambridge Maths, which looks at a digital representation of the mathematics that one might expect students to be able to experience between the ages of three and 18. I am a trustee of several mathematical charities.
My answer is that maths education is a very complex landscape. Tim Oates talks about curriculum coherence, meaning that curriculum and assessment and PD and resources should all be connected. Even if all of those are in place, the problem that we have, and the negative thing about maths education at the moment, is that we do not have enough maths teachers. I think that is at the core of quite a lot of what is happening.
The number of girls taking A-levels is lower than that of boys. We have some maths deserts where we do not have the capability to be able to teach further maths, for example. I know that Charlie will talk about the AMSP and the way that that supports it. GCSE is a bit of a disaster for pretty well 40% of the population because they do not pass. That means they have done 11 years of schooling, and they have nothing to show for it. Personally, I think that is morally pretty reprehensible; 60% pass and 40% fail. Once they have failed it, at the moment they are committed to retake until they get a grade 4 pass.
I think that primary is in a pretty good state and that is largely due to the work of the maths hubs. There are 40 of those around the country and they support professional development for teachers, but the curriculum in primary is very crowded. I know that because I chaired the last curriculum writing review and we had a lot of pressure to keep putting more things in rather than designing something that was supportable and practical to do.
We have a lack of specialists in early years. The Government decided that people working in early years did not need a maths GCSE and so we have a lack of maths understanding in early years.
There are lots of good things, though. Standards generally have been increasing, and we have reasonably good results in PISA and TIMSS but there is still a long way to go.
The Chair: Could you say something about the cuts to the AMSP programme?
Lynne McClure: I think that Charlie is the person who has all the numbers on that. If it is okay, I will pass to Charlie to do that.
The Chair: That leads to you, Charlie. Say something about yourself as well, please.
Charlie Stripp: I am the chief executive of MEI, Mathematics and Education in Industry, which is the charity that I lead. I am also the Director of the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics, which co-ordinates the work of the maths hubs. I have a very broad picture of what is going on in maths education in England. Lynne is right that it is a very mixed picture. I certainly agree that the shortage of specialist maths teachers is the major issue that we need to tackle.
On the cuts to the AMSP, the funding is being reduced but the AMSP is continuing. I am still in negotiation with the Government about the final shape of it, so I cannot say much more than that at the moment, but I can say that the support it provides for professional development of A-level maths teachers and Core Maths teachers, the support it provides for young people who wish to study further maths A-level but are unable to study it in their own school or college because their school or college does not have the provision to offer and the AMSP can pick that up as well and that is continuing.
One of the things that is happening to the AMSP, which I think this committee will be interested in, is the idea that there is a recognition of a change in the nature of mathematics and the amount of digital technology involved and the need to think about how we can prepare our young people for a more digital world. I know that Conrad will be pleased to hear that. We are thinking about a transition and how to make sure that we are equipping our young people in the best possible way for using maths in work life.
Thinking about what Lynne said about GCSE, I would like to correct one thing. At the start you said that 60% failed[1] GCSE maths. Actually, 70% of young people pass GCSE maths at age 16. The overall pass rate is lowered because many people have to resit GCSE maths post 16, and they are very likely to not pass. Of the students who get a grade 3 in GCSE maths at 16—which is below national expectation, and it does not count as a pass—only about 45% manage to achieve a grade 3 by the time they are 19. If they start with a grade 2, only 13% achieve a grade 4 or above by 19. There is an issue around GCSE resit and a significant proportion of the cohort, 30%, certainly is not well served by the current maths curriculum.
The numbers around A-level maths and further maths are extremely good at the moment. I think 107,000 students took A-level maths last year, which is a record proportionally as well as in absolute numbers. We have 18,000 students taking further maths A-levels, which is also a record. I was involved in what is now the Advanced Mathematics Support Programme and I did the pilot work that started it. It was funded by the Gatsby Foundation from 2000 to 2005. We then got government funding from 2005 for the further maths network, which became the further maths support programme and is now the Advanced Mathematics Support Programme. It has been funded successively by Governments for 20 years and I think that that is a way in which we have managed to get such a good increase in A-level numbers.
The professional development it provides is absolutely essential. I think that the teacher shortage and ensuring that teachers have excellent access to professional development is absolutely crucial to improving maths education.
Lynne also alluded to the TIMSS and PISA international comparisons. We have never done so well in those as we are doing at the moment. That is a very positive thing but, if we want to be a leading economy we need to be better.
The Chair: Thank you. Conrad, do you want to add anything? There is a lot more questions coming, as you know.
Conrad Wolfram: Yes, just to introduce myself, my day job is to run Wolfram Research with my brother. We started it 36 years ago to basically deploy mathematics everywhere it could be deployed in the world. We see mathematics from virtually every angle imaginable, with tens of millions of people using it around the world in every walk of life, including education.
I have a rather broad perspective on what I think is the main issue here, which is the misalignment between the actual use of mathematics in the real world and almost all of our education—particularly later on, less so at primary. This is not just a problem in the UK, it is a problem around the world, but when you are looking at these metrics you have to ask: exactly what are we trying to do with a compulsory subject in this space? I think it is very important to distinguish a compulsory subject from an elective subject of any type that people find interesting to do.
The chief problem is that we are focused mostly on calculating by hand and that is not what is happening in the real world. People do not calculate by hand very much at all. What we are measuring mostly—and including PISA and TIMSS—is how well people calculate by hand and that really is not what we need for the AI age that we are getting to. The problem is it means that when we look at scores in A-level, for example, there is a certain amount of we are pushing people to do that subject because it is important to get into university, but it may or may not be in some cases a subject they would like to do.
The Chair: We will come to a maths curriculum fit for the future in a few questions’ time and I think that will be perfect for you to expand more on what you are saying, Conrad.
Q2 Lord Stern of Brentford: For transparency, my first degree a long time ago was in mathematics and I helped Philip Bond in the work for the report The Era of Mathematics. I suggested the title to him, and I think the title is important.
There will be a supplementary question covering mathematical sciences, but I want to talk about the balance of the allocation of resources to different age groups. In particular, the previous Government under Prime Minister Sunak had a policy proposal to require maths to age 18. However, the new Government have said that they will replace this with a proposal with a focus on early stage maths, focusing on primary maths as a first priority. Do you think this is the right priority? Are there any signs of these policies being implemented after they were pledged? My guess is that all three of you might be interested in that, but I am happy to leave it to you, Chair, to do the choreography.
The Chair: Okay. Lynne, would you like to answer that first?
Lynne McClure: Yes, thank you. The key reason for looking at early years is because the data says that the disadvantage gap that emerges in maths between birth and age 16 is 40% in the early years; 40% of the effect on small children happens in the early years as far as their mathematics is concerned. There is a curriculum and early learning goals, but those do not include anything to do with shape and space. The early years curriculum needs looking at to put some of that in it. In most early years settings, they do work on shape and space but if things are not in the early learning goals they are seen as being less important. Work on shape and space is important not only for future geometrical understanding but it affects future understanding of numbers. It is a very important part, and it needs formalising.
The other thing is the calibre of people who work in early years. They are not just babysitters. They need to be knowledgeable about the way in which they can support very small people to understand and come to grips with mathematical concepts. The previous Government removed the need for early years colleagues to have a maths GCSE and although maths GCSE may not be exactly what they need to be able to teach early years, it does really say something. If you cannot get a maths GCSE, you need something else that is much more relevant and better training for early years specialists.
The Chair: Thank you. Conrad, you said earlier that you think the early stage part of the maths teaching is reasonably okay.
Conrad Wolfram: Notwithstanding what Lynne said, which I agree with. I am usually a great advocate for early stage intervention as being the most effective, but maths clearly diverges—badly—from real application at late primary. By the time people are solving quadratic equations by hand, they are starting to wonder why they are doing that, and they have a point. Another part of that is many of the teachers in their real lives do not use anything that they are teaching beyond that level very much. That tells you that there is a problem with that as a mainstream subject, so by the time you are at A-level we reckon it is probably about 80% mismatched on subject with what one could optimise.
There are three categories to at least understand. There are people who elect to do it because they are excited by the subject in its own right—an important group for any subject whether it is this or ancient Greek. We should encourage and help them because it is valuable to them and to society to have those people. There is another group, which is the highly technical, high-flying people for the AI age who need a mathematical application background to be able to function and that needs to be at a high level. Then there is everybody else, who need to follow decisions made by government and to have in their lives a good computational literacy background, as I would call it. It is important to think about those separately in these context, although in fact the answer to some of those may be the same result.
Charlie Stripp: I will talk about maths to 18 and early years separately. I will talk about early years first. Lynne is much more expert in early years than I am, but the question Lord Stern asked was what has been put in place around that. I know that the DfE is funding a ‘Number[2] Champions’ programme for early years. I think that is being rolled out, so there is something happening there, which is a good thing. I absolutely agree with Lynne about the shape and space elements of the curriculum and about the qualifications of people who are engaged in looking after early years children and teaching them. Yes, they are much more than childminders and we need to make sure that they are well equipped to foster young minds. I think that the gaps that start at that point slow down social equity.
I am a huge advocate of maths to age 18. I am not a huge advocate of making it compulsory. It just should be a no-brainer that you study maths to age 18 because it is such a valuable thing that everybody should do. It has not been mentioned that there is a qualification called core maths. It is a level 3 qualification, which means that you require a grade 4 or above in GCSE to be ready to take the course. The idea is that around 300,000 young people each year who get a grade 4 or above in GCSE mathematics stop studying mathematics at 16 and that is unlike any other developed country.
Another issue is that I talked about us doing quite well in TIMSS and PISA, better than we have ever done before. It is the Far East countries that are ahead of us now. We do not do so well in adult numeracy and a factor in that is that generally most people stop studying maths at 16. There is good cognitive science evidence to suggest that learning maths for longer enables you to develop mathematic and numerical reasoning skills that will stay with you for the rest of your life and be very valuable to you. Core Maths was designed to fill the gap for students who had succeeded in GCSE maths but were not particularly keen on STEM or heavily maths-involved things. To be an effective citizen you need to understand a bit about data and mathematical modelling. When somebody on the television tells you about an R number, it is useful to know what that means.
Core Maths is something we have developed that is an extremely good programme. At the moment about 13,000 students do it. If you just took students who are doing A-level programmes who are not doing A-level maths, 180,000-odd of them drop maths at 16. My view is that they should all be doing Core Maths. That is an area where we need to work on improving our provision to keep us up with the rest of the world.
Going back to Conrad’s point, in GCSE maths you are learning about maths techniques and concepts and things. The ability to apply those concepts in context is another level of skill and that is what Core Maths attempts to do, to say, “Okay, you have learned some fundamental maths; now let us see how we can use that in the real world”.
The Chair: Thank you. Now on the all-important subject of teacher recruitment, Baroness Neuberger.
Baroness Neuberger: I ought to declare an interest; my son is a maths teacher.
Lord Stern of Brentford: I wanted to ask a supplementary question on the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences.
The Chair: By all means, do ask. I am sorry, Baroness Neuberger.
Lord Stern of Brentford: Perhaps this is for Lynne McClure. What do you see as the prospects now that the Government have said that they are not going to participate in the funding?
Lynne McClure: Obviously it was a huge blow when DSIT decided that it was not able to give us the £6 million that was predicated originally and before the election. The amazing thing about the academy is that it has, maybe surprisingly, brought the whole of the mathematical sciences together. It brings education together with academia together with business and industry and government. Anybody who knows anything about the way that mathematical sciences work thinks that bringing all of those groups together is a minor miracle in itself.
At the moment we are being funded as an incorporated charity by the Newton Institute within Cambridge, which is funding four posts. That is a CEO delegate, two policymakers and an administrator, and everything else is being done in a voluntary capacity.
We have already done some outstanding work. We rewrote the Deloitte report on the contribution of mathematical sciences to the UK economy—an amazing £495 billion, and it represents 20% of the total UK gross value. We have already done some sterling work, which helps people to use that evidence. We had a maths summit, which brought together all the movers and shakers to look at what was going to happen to maths in the future. A recent thing was to send posters out to secondary schools on “maths can take you anywhere”.
In the future, we are working to have presences in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland because the academy is intended to represent all of them. We are talking to private funders. I cannot say more about that except that we have some who are very interested in supporting us, but as you can imagine, it is rather deflating when you have got to the point when you are ready to do a big launch, and you do not have the money to do that.
The Chair: We understand.
Lord Stern of Brentford: Thank you.
Q3 Baroness Neuberger: I declared an interest: my son is a maths teacher. This committee has looked before at the issue of recruiting and retaining maths teachers, and the wider STEM subjects, but we would like a quick response on how severe the problem is and what the main barriers are. Then I will move on to retention. Given that we clearly have such a huge vacancy rate, it is quite interesting—I think Charlie Stripp said that he wanted everybody who was not doing maths A-level to be doing core maths. How would we ever do that? Do you want to start?
Charlie Stripp: Okay. I will start. First, on the overall teacher shortage, l think that last year only 63% of the target to recruit new maths teachers was met. One of the things that affect my work is that a lot of the work that the Advanced Mathematics Support Programme and the maths hubs do is providing professional development for maths teachers, and that professional development is freely available. It is state-funded professional development. I would say this, would I not, but it is of a very high standard. It is very well reviewed, and people think it is excellent.
One of the problems that we have with it is that sometimes teachers who want to engage with it cannot do so because they are not allowed out of their classes because there is such a shortage of teachers. I know that you are going to talk about retention a bit later, but it also means that the teachers we do have are under a lot of pressure and that also affects retention.
The way that it affects children is also quite distressing because children in disadvantaged areas are disproportionately affected by teacher shortage. If you are a maths teacher, you have quite a lot of freedom, about where you work, you are in demand. If you are in demand, it is human nature to want to work in a nice environment. Some maths teachers are extremely dedicated and will say, “I want to go and work in that very tough place”, but generally speaking it is perfectly natural that people would not do that. The fact that specialist teachers are not available in some of the most disadvantaged areas is another thing that adds to disadvantage. There is a whole spiralling issue around all of that.
On ways in which we can recruit more teachers, part of the reason why it is hard to recruit maths teachers is part of the reason why we know maths is so important. If you are qualified to be a secondary maths teacher, you are qualified to do lots of other things, which are possibly more lucrative and almost certainly easier. We need to make the career of being a maths teacher very attractive. There is recent research from NFER that suggests that young graduates are quite pro-social. They want careers where they feel they are doing something worthwhile and what could be more worthwhile for society than being a maths teacher, I would naturally argue. There is some room for hope there.
You do not need to be a maths graduate to be a secondary maths teacher, but I think you need to have A-level maths and to have done a numerate degree. We could perhaps spread the net of how we recruit maths teachers as well.
Baroness Neuberger: We do because we take you if you have done economics.
Charlie Stripp: Yes, that is right. We could be more bullish about that, potentially. The other thing that we can do is there are—I think the right thing to call them—out-of-field teachers, teachers who are qualified in other subjects and can convert to being maths teachers. The NCETM and the Maths Hubs do a programme around that, which is a very good programme for what it is, but it is six days. It would be good to have a much more formal, rigorous route for retraining teachers of other subjects to be effective specialist maths teachers. That is another source.
Working is becoming much more flexible in many areas of life, but teachers are summoned by bells, are they not? It is a much more rigid structure. If there were ways of allowing more flexible working—perhaps part-time working, perhaps some people who are retired from the classroom who could go back into the classroom—those kinds of things might help. It is very urgent to address this.
As I say, I am great advocate for maths to age 18. One of the things about Core Maths is that it is about how maths is used across the board. I would like there to be a Core Maths team in a school or college, and that might include a geography teacher, an economics teacher, a psychology teacher as well as maths, working with this common purpose of showing how to use the maths you have learned pre-16 in context post-16.
Baroness Neuberger: Lynne McClure, do you want to add to that?
Lynne McClure: Yes, thank you. I think that this will not be helped by the Labour policy of removing MATs’ ability to offer incentives to teachers. That will have a disproportionate effect on disadvantaged areas.
The other thing is that if we are looking at where maths teachers come from, a lot of them will be people who have done mathematics degrees. The post-1992 universities have been responsible for 17% of people going into teaching, whereas the Russell group universities are responsible for only 2%. Following the news, we know that several universities are now closing their maths departments, and they happen to be the low-tariff universities. Students at low-tariff universities, which do not require an A* but maybe a B to do maths, are the very people who will possibly go into mathematics teaching. We have a perfect storm here of low-tariff universities closing their maths departments and the Russell group increasing the number of people they have doing mathematics but those people, with exceptions, are not going to go into teaching.
Baroness Neuberger: I would quite like both of you to talk about the issue of government incentives, the bursaries, extra salary boosts—much of which is going to go—and how effective that has been but also what you do about retention. Then I will ask Conrad Wolfram what we are going to do about all this. I think we have to be quite quick.
Charlie Stripp: I will be quick. Bursaries and things have been quite effective in getting people to sign up to train to be teachers. I am not sure that they have been very effective in getting people to remain in the profession and be teachers in the long term. Sorry, there were two parts to your question.
Baroness Neuberger: How would you retain?
Charlie Stripp: How I would retain? An issue in the way our schools work is that to make career progress and gain status in salary you need to go into management. I think that is the wrong thing. In places such as Singapore, for example, they have different tracks for education professionals and as a subject specialist you can get a lot of reward and a lot of status and you can be working with other teachers to support their teaching—all of those things. Through the Maths Hubs and some multi-academy trusts now, we have people who are taking on responsibility for developing their colleagues, thinking about curriculum across a number of schools, all of those things. These things are evolving as more subject-specific career tracks, but I think it would be great to make those much more formal and clearer. I would argue that in many situations somebody who is an excellent teacher in the classroom for maths is more valuable to the country than they are as a manager. We need to think about how we can make sure that that is recognised.
Lynne McClure: Charlie is right. The bursaries have been effective in attracting people to maths teaching. That is good. NFER is just about to bring out a new report—next week, I think—on maths retention and recruitment. It might be worth looking out for that.
Teacher apprenticeships seem to be valuable because they do not incur huge debt and are another way of getting teachers in.
Particularly in primary schools, there needs to be more flexibility for women, especially those who have young children and who find it very difficult to be at school by 8 o’clock in the morning and to stay late to finish their work, which does not go down well with family life. Of course, men should have flexibility, too, but it is especially important for women.
There should also be opportunities for sabbaticals. I can remember feeling very jealous when colleagues in other sorts of operations, after they had done their seven years, had at least a term off to go and do something else. Obviously, we do not have enough teachers to be able to do that but maybe we have to decide which comes first.
Baroness Neuberger: Conrad Wolfram, briefly: how would you fix it?
Conrad Wolfram: There is a massive piece of good news. AI for tutoring and assessment is coming on in leaps and bounds and I think it can help a huge amount here. We are at the cutting edge of deploying some hybrid AI—a mixture of computational and generative AI—and the results are incredible. I would say that it does a better job. We need lots of human teachers for all sorts of reasons, but for the actual coaching of traditional maths, which of course I would like to see changed anyway, I think AI will do it better than many teachers. It is there. It is available. It can be deployed everywhere. It is exciting to watch.
It is even more exciting to see the extent to which AI can pull in other contexts, different things that would not be available to a teacher, particularly in the less advantaged schools.
The more context from the real world that you can put in mathematics the better. If we are having this compulsory subject, it is presumably for a wide range of our population. We need to have teachers from many different contexts deploying mathematics in their subjects. So I really do hope that we can pull in teachers from many different subjects, and I think that this is possible as we move forward.
The Chair: I think this is the perfect moment for the next question from Baroness Young. It is about a curriculum for the future.
Q4 Baroness Young of Old Scone: Yes and perhaps we could start with Conrad. You talked about traditional maths, but obviously times have changed. I learnt my statistics using a slide rule, which goes to show how much technology has changed. Do we really need to teach kids to be able to figure things out from scratch or is that passé?
Conrad Wolfram: To a large extent, no, it is not. I think we need to go backwards. We need to start with what is happening in the real world, which is that calculating is done by computers, almost entirely, certainly beyond basic primary level. That has meant that mathematics is deployed in a vast number of contexts that it was not deployed in 50, 60 or 70 years ago. That is why we are all so worried about producing people who have mathematical skills. We did not use mathematics for large-scale medical data analysis. It did not exist. Mathematics was for physics and accounting and things where it happened to work well.
Unless we understand from the root up that the subject has fundamentally changed, that the curriculum has to fundamentally change, we will be running in the wrong direction to catch up and that is exactly what we are doing.
Let us put this in context. When I was doing A-level further maths, I had a very good teacher who said, “Maths is the art of avoiding calculation”, and he was right. For hundreds of years that was the sticking point in using this fantastic system of getting answers and decisions. You could not calculate so you spent all your effort learning techniques, trying to get around the calculating, in effect. That has been turned on its head more dramatically than I think anything that you could point to in human history. We have computers that make calculating incredibly cheap.
Therefore, the emphasis now needs to be on harder problems, messier problems, problems that you could solve with a vast array of new algorithms. Where is machine learning in the curriculum? It is a critical algorithm for much of the AI that is currently being delivered. Nobody has seen it. If you take a typical student, an A-grade student who has done maths and further maths, and you say, “Here are a few million data points from two versions of a website. Tell me which version is performing better”, they will not have a clue where to start. Those are the real sorts of questions that people need to be able to address and they are miles off being able to do so.
I think the good news here is that the maths that I am talking about could be much more endearing to a much larger range of people if they could see it from a context that they are interested in.
If we cannot apply it to a context—the application of maths—defining the question, abstracting it, getting the computation done, typically by a computer and interpreting the result and not being fooled by it, those things are very hard. They are high-concept. They are difficult. They need a lot of experience, and they need the experience of actual real problems that you have to address. Unless we get that in education, it will fail and, frankly, that is why it is failing, to some extent.
To be clear, at the moment you often learn completely the wrong thing: the wrong kinds of algorithms, the wrong approach. For example, I put out a slightly caustic blog post about this—I think early in the pandemic—and the exam-grade fiasco. What really went wrong was that it was a detailed exposé, in my view, of the authorities being hoisted by their own petard by a lack of computational understanding and thinking.
They tried to strip out much of the data so they could make the calculating simple and come up with a simple answer as to what the model was—totally the wrong approach, but that is the approach that we teach people now because it is all predicated on that. We have the wrong algorithms, and the wrong approach and I think we are putting a lot of good people off if they do not happen to be good at calculating but are interested in computational mathematics. Some of those people just go adrift. They say, “I am not interested in the abstraction of this. I am not personally interested in maths itself, so off I go”. Again, I think we are slightly deluding ourselves about the popularity of A-levels. I do not know but my definition of “popular” would include “really keen to do it, excited by it”, and not “semi-coerced”.
At the moment, the problem is that we are telling people that if they do not do maths A-level, they cannot get into a decent university. They are kind of stuffed for all sorts of things that they might want to do in life. It is a bit like what we told people about Latin in the 1950s. Again, there is a real subject out there that we really need. Let us align them.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Are we in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater? Are there cohorts of people out there who need to be able to check their bookie slip, make sure that their supermarket bill adds up and sort out their bank accounts? Let me ask Charlie Stripp and Lynne McClure.
Charlie Stripp: I have a lot of sympathy with a lot of what Conrad said, but I think he says that it is towards the end of primary school that maths stops being relevant.
To get a pass grade in GCSE maths—a 4, a 5 or possibly even a 6 in GCSE maths, certainly a 4 or a 5—if you have a strong understanding of numbers, proportional reasoning and graphs, you will achieve that. Everybody needs that. I do not think that you can suddenly say that it is not relevant, exactly for the reasons that Baroness Young just gave: in order to function as a citizen in everyday life and for the basic things that we do in society, we do need a strong understanding of numbers and proportional reasoning and to be able to interpret graphs. We are hamstrung if we do not have that.
It is also very important to know that all the digital technology, the rapid movement and advances in technology and engineering science, are all driven by using maths with big data. We should be amending the curriculum—certainly post-16 and possibly post-14—to start to think about that.
Baroness Young of Old Scone: Do we need new courses, or do we need to change the existing courses?
Charlie Stripp: At MEI we like to get our hands dirty, trying things out. We have a data science-type course. It is just certified by MEI; it does not have real currency, but 1,000 students have done it so far. They are A-level maths students who are doing this course. What’s great about it is that Warwick University, for example, says it cannot compel people to do it but if students are doing it, it is a very good thing to do. It is being done alongside A-levels.
Thinking about A-level maths itself, I would not want to say that we need another subject. We are not saying that we need another A-level and to call it something different. I think we need to change what is there.
If you go to do a maths degree, for example, and you cannot code, you are at a massive disadvantage because there is an expectation that you should be able to code. Universities spend a lot of time teaching people how to code. They should have done that in school. I would want to make A-level maths much more digital, or computational—perhaps the word that Conrad would prefer.
I heard Lynne quoting Tim Oates earlier. One thing I worry about is that, if we are going to make these changes, we need to have a proper, reasoned look at it. We need an independent panel of expert people to think about planning how to change the curriculum for the long term and about how to implement it. We need cross-party consensus to say that this is so important.
Everybody needs fundamental maths. What you need to get a good pass in GCSE—we can argue about quadratics and so on, of course we can—is essential everywhere, for everybody, but we can do a lot more with the curriculum.
The Chair: Thank you. Lynne, do you want to add anything to what you have just been hearing?
Lynne McClure: Yes. I look at those at the lower end of the spectrum who are not looking to do mathematical sciences in the future or even apply their mathematical sciences but need basic numeracy to be confident and competent citizens. That is where GCSE is not fit for purpose. To get a grade 4, you can cherry-pick the sorts of questions you do but still cannot plan a journey or interrogate your pay packet. These things are not routinely part of what students do.
I know that there is a question on maths futures coming up. One of the things that the Mathematical Futures programme suggested was that there should be some sort of qualification that would be for everybody, because everybody needs to be numerate and to be able to take part in civil society.
Instead of being norm-referenced, which GCSEs are, which means that between one-third and 40% of people will always fail—because it is norm-referenced, it is always those at the bottom of the curve who do not get their grade 4—it should be criterion-referenced, a bit like a driving test; if you can do it, you get the grades. That has some data in it. It also has some of the AI stuff that Conrad was talking about, but it is quite a small amount. It is about the interpretation of those things and being able to make evaluations of them that is important, rather than complicated computation.
The Chair: Thank you. We must move on. We have quite a number of questions to come. Lord Lucas, I think you want to ask a supplementary to this subject.
Lord Lucas: Yes, I do. Would we benefit from having, as it were, a music exam structure—small increments, lots of diversity, making it easy and fun to carry on learning—and one that is recognised? We just have GCSE now. No one wants to go back and do GCSE. Could we not have something that really engages people? Lynne’s organisation could be running that. Lynne, would you like to comment?
Lynne McClure: Interestingly, I had a conversation with the Gates Foundation last week and it is looking to do just this: have a set of badges that people can acquire by doing incremental pieces of mathematics and grow their knowledge gradually. I do not know whether it is too difficult for us to do but it would be interesting to look at it. I am sure we would get much more engagement.
Conrad Wolfram: Along with others, just before the pandemic, I proposed exactly this type of music grade structure. Music grades work very well because people mostly take them when they are able to. They mostly pass them and do quite well at them. We laid out a way to this and a way it could become more specialist higher up. I am very much in favour of a structure like that.
Also, just to be clear here, we need a massive change in content and curriculum later on. Whether that is a structure that can happen within the current A-level, or whether it has to be an additional A-level, I am not sure. That is the question. However, we are talking about 80% computers, things that work very differently from currently. It has been a struggle, in the past, to do anything other than incremental improvements in the set-ups we have.
Charlie Stripp: I would like a kinder assessment structure for mathematics. The high-stakes nature of things such as GSCE maths—high stakes for the school as well as for the pupil—puts lots of pressure on teachers and children and turns people off maths. We talk about people being very anxious about maths and being intimidated by maths. The high-stakes exam structure is part of the cause of that. If we could find a way of examining maths—“examining” is not the right word—but certainly showing students’ progress in maths and being clear, for them and for us, about what they know and understand in a way that is kinder to their progression, that would be good.
Another thing that happens—and Lynne alluded to it—is that a lot of teaching to the test goes on. That means it is almost the function of maths education to get a grade 4 or above in GCSE. Many parents and children believe that. I sometimes think that many teachers think that as well. We should be thinking about the very valuable knowledge and skills that a person wants to acquire that would be useful to them, and whether there is a way that they can be led through an assessment system within education. So, yes, I certainly have sympathy with that view.
The Chair: Baroness Willis wants to come in with a question.
Baroness Willis of Summertown: A very quick question. Earlier, you said that other countries, such as China, achieve much and have a much better attainment in maths. What can we learn from them? Do they have this system, or are they following Conrad’s approach?
Charlie Stripp: As Conrad said, TIMSS and PISA assess ‘old’ maths, if you like, but what they do in the Far East is teach for deep conceptual understanding. Rather than teaching rules and tricks to get answers, they teach for a much deeper understanding of maths, relationships and connections within mathematics. Through the work of the NCETM, and some work we did with Shanghai with exchange visits and so on, we thought about how we could develop that pedagogy back here in England.
Lynne talked earlier about primary maths being in a pretty good state at the moment. I think we have done a lot to improve primary maths teaching and that is also improving secondary maths teaching. However, that is a different question from the issue that Conrad is talking about.
Conrad Wolfram: These other countries are playing an incredibly good game and winning at that. However, it is the wrong game on the wrong playing field in the long term.
The Chair: Okay. We have a lot more questions to ask, so could everyone be as brief as they can, please, both the questioners and the witnesses. Baroness Neville-Jones is going to ask the next question.
Q5 Baroness Neville-Jones: I have a question about what I describe as the lame ducks. How do you help people who have fallen behind? It seems to me that some of the answers we were getting to Lord Lucas’s question may be relevant. Given the existing system, which clearly has considerable shortcomings, what advice would you give to people who do need more maths and are not getting it? What can schools do to bring them up so that, having not understood an earlier concept, they can nevertheless progress? Who would like to tackle that?
Charlie Stripp: I will start, if you like. One of the things that happens in Shanghai and other Far East jurisdictions is that teachers have much less contact time. What this means is that they can diagnose very quickly if a child has not grasped the point of a lesson and can make sure by early intervention—often before the next lesson—that that conceptual misstep has been corrected.
What we are doing here about that—well, at the NCETM—is we have a programme called Mastering Number at reception and key stage 1 and key stage 2 as well. That really helps to embed the fluency and confidence with number in primary children. That programme has been pretty successful.
We introduced something else just this year. Following Covid, particularly, it seems that at key stage 2—that is at the end of primary—the tail of underachievement has got longer and deeper. What we have been doing with secondary schools is a programme called Securing Foundations at Year 7. A large number of schools are involved in it. It is helping secondary teachers. Secondary teachers do not know much about teaching basic number. However, they may have children coming up to them who need that support.
Schools implement the programme in different ways. Some schools provide extra classes designed with research-informed pedagogy to help those children to fill the gaps. It is one of the problems with the nature of mathematics that, if you miss out on key things, everything can suddenly seem completely meaningless. That is why some people have such a bad time.
Conrad Wolfram: I want to add to that. It is the nature of calculating. It is not totally the nature of broader, real-world mathematics. That is more of a scaffolding than a ladder, perhaps, because you have layers, but they are not contiguous in exactly the same way as you would.
Baroness Neville-Jones: We have a system at the moment that makes it a ladder.
Conrad Wolfram: Yes. If somebody starts lost, they more or less stay lost. I have experienced this with my own daughter. It is very easy for misdiagnosis to happen, and it can be highly detrimental. I do think that AI can help with this. If people understood what they were aiming at, because there was context, it would make it much better. The longer-range thing here is more context, making it much better for people to understand what they are aiming at and not get lost in some abstract detail.
People confuse all sorts of things. Take adding fractions, which is following a procedure, basically. People who missed the lesson about which way you add fractions can be labelled as “not good at numeracy”. These extremely confused labels sometimes occur. We need to do much better with diagnosis and AI can help with that; it cannot solve the problem, but it can help.
The Chair: Lynne, would you like to add anything to that?
Lynne McClure: Yes, just briefly. This needs to be done intensively at primary school. In disadvantaged areas, there is a huge gap of eight to nine months among primary students.
A very good project called Every Child Counts trained people specifically to support small people to get really good at number, shape and space. That programme had quite a profound effect but, as with lots of things, programmes such as that go on for a while and are then stopped.
However, ideas of working intensively with small children so that they do not get to the point where they are behind, if we put that stuff in really early, will have more impact than trying to help 11 and 12 year-olds who have had seven years of not understanding.
Baroness Neville-Jones: As a practical matter, is this something to be done during the normal lesson time or is it a question of extra teaching?
Lynne McClure: Usually, what happens is that a very small group would be taken out to work intensively during a time when other children are also doing maths.
Baroness Neville-Jones: I see.
Q6 Baroness Northover: We have covered, or at least touched upon, some of these areas. This is about attainment gaps. The first part of the question is about what evidence base we have for this but it seems to me that you have addressed that. You have referred to differences between regions and groups—perhaps we could dig into that a little more—and the programmes that are put in place or should be put in place. Lynne has just referred to that.
Moving on, how do we address the gender divide in maths, in terms of both perception and the uptake of A-levels, something again that Lynne has referred to? Then there is the wider global question about what we can learn from high-performing countries. The UK, of course, particularly under Michael Gove, was looking in that direction. One of you said that there were all sorts of benefits. Charlie said that there were all sorts of pluses there and Conrad said that those countries were on the wrong track. So I want to dig into some of those things.
Now, I realise that we are short of time, so maybe you could take up the bits where you have particular expertise. Can I come to Conrad first for the last part of my question and ask what you meant about being on the wrong track, and then come to the others?
Conrad Wolfram: It is about the metrics that we are using. We have an ecosystem where we are measuring with exams what I consider largely the wrong subject because it is not what you really need in life. That is affecting all sorts of things about which groups do it well or badly. There are lots of things I could say but, briefly, I think that leading with abstraction in mathematics is a disaster for disadvantaged groups, on average.
People from an academic background are used to hearing lots of abstraction happening. For those who are not, and if what they are learning is not relevant to their lives, apparently, they are more likely to tune out quickly. That does not mean they are not good at it; it just means that they have started in the wrong place. If you happen to be excited about the mathematics itself, that is wonderful; off you go. If you are not, which is true for most of the population—and I think this possibly disproportionately affects girls—and if you are more interested in the context, how you could use it to work something out, than in it itself, the machinery inside, I think you are left not wanting to do mathematics and upset about it. That is a key point.
We can look at other countries but Britain cannot lead by just copying what everybody else around the world has done. We could lead in this area by deciding on a major change that no other country has done. If you take Singapore or similar countries—as Charlie will know much better than I—they have a very sophisticated way in which to learn the existing calculating, hand calculating, base subject. I am sure that there are many things that we can learn from that, but in the end you have to start with the right subject. However well you teach it, the wrong subject will not make it right.
I think everybody is disadvantaged at the moment by not matching with the real world. There are nuances in that. I think that a high-context start in mathematics will improve things for some of the groups that we are most worried about not doing well at mathematics, where they can start from what they are interested in. Each piece of mathematics has many contexts. That is the beauty of mathematics. You can use to work out answers in many, many different contexts. Let us have a plethora of contexts that people can choose between to learn their mathematics.
Lynne McClure: I would like to talk about girls. We know that girls do not do as well in mathematics. They tend to do better at GCSE but not as well at A-level and there are fewer girls doing maths at A-level now. I think that is probably a result of the policy decision to remove AS as a contributory factor to A-level. We know that lots of girls tried AS to see whether maths was a thing that they wanted to do. Now that AS does not count towards A-level, that opportunity has been taken away.
However, there are lots of things going on. For example, there is Maths for Girls, a fantastic charity that puts high-performing women into schools, telling students about their maths careers and how they got to where they are. They are all young women with whom the students can identify.
We have not mentioned anything about the maths schools. The maths schools are going to be, I hope, 11 schools geographically spread across the UK, looking quite often at children with neurodivergent abilities. These are students who are passionate about maths, brought together. I chair the governing body of the Cambridge Maths School. It is quite obvious that girls do not think that they are as good at maths and that they have as much chance of getting into such a school. We have been doing lots of girls-only events, bringing girls together. That seems to have had quite a positive effect on our recruitment.
The Chair: Charlie, we are nearing the end of our time. Can you be very brief?
Charlie Stripp: I can. I can talk about girls, particularly. Maths A-level: 40% girls, 60% boys. Lynne implied that the numbers are getting worse, but it is not significantly worse, I think. It has been stable for a long time. As numbers have grown, the number of girls has grown as well as the number of boys; they have grown in the same proportion.
Further maths: 30% girls, 70% boys. For core maths, interestingly, it is roughly 50/50 and the nature of the subject is rather different. TIMSS and PISA data show that we have an unusually wide gender gap in achievement in maths. Lynne talks about GCSE. At the higher grades, girls do not do as well as boys at GCSE maths either.
We commissioned some research through the AMSP from the Institute of Education a few years ago. The conclusion of that research, which looked at schools where there was not such a gender gap, was that it was not about something that you do in the maths classroom and that the way that we need to address the gender gap is through the culture of the institution, the culture of the school—the culture of our society. It is noteworthy that Core Maths is about something other than maths. That does seem to be more attractive to girls. I heard what Conrad was saying and that is an example.
The key thing is that it is a deeper cultural thing that we cannot fix just by asking what we can do in maths to change it. It is a wider thing and that is the conclusion that the research suggested.
The Chair: Lord Ranger, with the last question.
Q7 Lord Ranger of Northwood: First, I want to thank all the witnesses. It has been riveting, hearing your perspectives and the common-sense requirements. It comes to this question—this session will probably result in a letter to the Government with conclusions and recommendations—like if there was a reality TV show called “How Do You Solve a Problem like Teaching Maths in the UK?”
However, the points that you have been raising have pretty much been around the why, the how and the what. Could you each briefly summarise what your three priorities would be: the how, the why and the what that you would want to see in that recommendation letter? I know we have covered a wide landscape. Feel free to repeat yourself if you have already touched on some of this in your answers.
The Chair: Very briefly, please: three priorities.
Lynne McClure: I would set up a criterion-based numeracy qualification that everybody has to do so that we raise the bar for everybody. I would want to make sure that we have a policy for AI and technology in schools so that we are not wasting money but have a proper structure for it. I would set up a qualifications and curriculum authority—much like the QCA used to be—so that there is a reservoir of knowledge that is continued from time to time and allows the curriculum to be designed by people who properly understand and know what they are talking about.
The Chair: Thank you. Charlie, your three priorities.
Charlie Stripp: I would reform GCSE maths. I would have two GCSEs, one that was the fundamental maths that everybody needs for work and life, and people would learn that properly. I would have a second GCSE[3], which was thinking about going into further study in maths and other numerical-based things. I would want to introduce these relatively quickly.
I would want to try to address the shortage of maths teachers. I think a more formalised career structure, looking at pay, all of those things, is needed. If we do not do that, I feel that there is a danger that the gains that we have made will be lost. I think it is that critical.
The last thing is around post-16 maths. I would want to work with industry and other experts in the field on how maths is used, to try to incorporate and develop A-level maths and further maths so that they were more appropriate for what young people will be encountering outside of education. At the moment, they are in a bit of a bubble. There are badges that you get but you could have an equally good badge that was more useful for progression.
The Chair: Thank you. Conrad, your three priorities.
Conrad Wolfram: In my view, we need an alternative A-level, a computer-based maths or a computational thinking A-level, where it is agreed, particularly with top universities, that it is of an equivalent admissions value for maybe not maths itself but for all the dependent subjects—STEM and beyond. Computers need to be in exams and assumed to be a part of that. That is essential. Establishing the incentive for schools to take it, for exam boards to offer it: all of that needs to be done. The ecosystem is currently completely stuck with respect to subject change.
I think we need to have a sort of subject vision stream function—I do not know whether that lives in the DfE—where the idea of the subject change, looking forward to the AI age, is considered and funded and that exemplars for that are funded. That is distinct from what is happening next term or the problems of the day in running schools.
Finally, we need computers in exams for calculating, as people have in real life.
The Chair: Thank you very much. Thank you, all three witnesses, for your very comprehensive evidence. It has been very interesting and informative for us. You are welcome to stay for the second session, which is about to start, on adult numeracy and functional mathematics. If you have any follow-up evidence, please send it to us. Thank you, all three of you, very much.
