Numeracy for Life Committee 

Corrected oral evidence

Thursday 12 March 2026

10.55 am

Watch the meeting

Members present: Lord Agnew of Oulton (The Chair); Baroness Alexander of Cleveden; Lord Blackwell; Baroness Bull; Baroness Garden of Frognal; Lord Hampton; Baroness Hamwee; Lord Hannett of Everton; Lord Massey of Hampstead; Baroness Spielman; Viscount Stansgate; Lord Stevenson of Balmacara.

Evidence Session No. 2              Heard in Public              Questions 17 - 32

Witnesses

I: David Thomas OBE, CEO, Axiom Maths; Dr Helen Drury, Dean of Maths, Purposeful Ventures, and Co-Lead, Maths Horizon Project; Charlie Stripp, Director, National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics.

Examination of witnesses

David Thomas, Dr Helen Drury and Charlie Stripp.

Q17            The Chair: Good morning, everybody. A big welcome to our witnesses today. Thank you all very much for joining us. We have had your bios, which is very helpful. Perhaps I need to disclose a minor interest in that David Thomas and I have worked together before; he was the head of one of our free schools in Norwich, which is today an outstanding-rated school. He played an important part in that.

We have some questions that you have all seen, and there will be a certain amount of fluidity in how the questions move. I want each of you to get a chance on each question, so I ask for brevity wherever possible, because we want to get through this session by just after 12 o’clock, if you are happy with that. As the chairman, I get first dibs, so I shall ask my opening question.

You are aware that this is very much about numeracy for life, so although there is quite a strong pull back into the education system, for obvious reasons, because that is where the building blocks are, we have to remind ourselves that it is also the adult part of the population that we are very concerned about—the huge proportion who are not simply not operating at a numerate enough level for a fulfilling career or, indeed, making simple life decisions.

I would just like a quick summary from each of you on where you think we are on maths education in the three areas—primary and secondary and at the retake or FE end, which I am also interested in. For example, there is the recent report of AELP, which made some recommendations on the resitting end and the functional qualification. Could you just do a couple of moments on each of those three phases?

Charlie Stripp: On those three phases, with primary we are making good progress. Through the work of the NCETM and the maths hubs, we have been implementing a teaching for mastery pedagogy in schools, which is improving children’s understanding of foundational maths at primary school, moving through into secondary as well.

There used to be a system whereby children were labelled when they started primary school as to how good they might be at maths, and the curriculum that they received reflected that initial judgment. Now we have an understanding that all young people can succeed—maths is not something that you are born good at or bad at. We try to have that mindset in school whereby we cause children to feel confident with maths. Developing the pedagogies that we are adopting in primary through to secondary is around this idea of teaching for mastery. We looked at what was happening in Shanghai and how well they were doing in maths education by comparison. We went and had a look at what they were doing there and realised that it was what we knew was good and effective teaching—it was just that they were doing it and we were not, and they were doing it at scale. Through the work of the NCETM and the maths hubs, we have developed systems for being able to implement that pedagogy in schools through primary and secondary and support teachers to be able to live deliver that pedagogy effectively.

You talked about further education, and we are now moving that into FE as well, working with young people there and with their teachers to develop that. A problem that can happen in education in schools is with accountability; sometimes the pupils, teachers and parents—everybody—think that that the reason you study maths is to pass exams, so what you are doing is essentially a training regime for getting through a GCSE. We are trying to move on from that and say that maths is a fundamental skill that everybody needs—something that will really help everybody in their working life. That attitude towards maths is such that it is a really useful and vital transferable skill, which all of us can learn. If we are taught it well and know how to do that, we can get better outcomes. So I am optimistic about how things are progressing, and the international comparisons in maths education suggest that we are improving relative to other countries in where we are with maths. We are making progress, but there is still a very long way to go.

The Chair: Helen what is your view?

Dr Helen Drury: Thank you for the opportunity to contribute. By way of background, I founded the maths mastery programme at Ark, which first brought the mastery approach to the UK and continues to work with more than 150 multi-academy trusts nationwide. That work grew on this strong national and international evidence base, learning particularly from high-performing systems such as Singapore and Shanghai. As Charlie says, the difference really is not what they think is a good approach—the difference there is that expectations are higher, and there is a coherent progression in the foundational knowledge that all young people need in maths. Reasoning and problem-solving are clearly taken as central to learning maths for every child, which has informed the work of the NCETM and the maths hubs. Before that I taught maths in state schools and academies for over a decade.

Since about 2024, among other ventures I have been co-leading Maths Horizons, chaired by Lord Tarassenko. We have seen both the importance and the potential for all young people to leave education with secure foundational knowledge and have confidence and capability in reasoning and problem-solving and to have many more of them participate in advanced maths study.

I want to emphasise that, as Charlie has said, England has made very significant progress in maths over the past 10 or 15 years; in terms of international performance, it has improved substantially, so that England now ranks 11th in the world in PISA up from 27th in 2009. We have around 675,000 additional pupils getting a standard GCSE pass at 16, since the 2010 curriculum reforms, and today around 80% of our young people by age 19 have achieved that standard pass in GCSE. You asked about resit policy, and it really has helped to strengthen attainment there. Around 50,000 more young people are getting that standard pass by age 19 than were getting it each year before the policy was introduced. Since 2014, that is roughly 500,000 additional students who are gaining that maths qualification, which obviously brings significant entry into the labour market. At the same time, we know that participation at the top end expanded dramatically; it is the most taken A-level, with more than 100,000 students taking it each year.

There has also been progress with the adult population. According to the OECD’s PIAAC survey, between and 1 million and 1.5 million fewer adults now have very weak numeracy skills than a decade ago. Taken together, that shows that we have built a really strong mathematical foundation. The question now is definitely not about rescuing a failing system—it is about how we can move from a strong system to a world-leading one. There is clear headroom to do that: we have around 20% of young people who are still not achieving a standard GCSE pass in maths by age 19, yet research suggests that dyscalculia seems to affect around 3% to 6% of pupils, which is not accounting for that gap. International comparisons suggest that there is scope for improvement. If England were to match countries such as the Netherlands, it has fewer than 10% of students failing to reach that equivalent standard. So we could have around 60,000 additional young people each year achieving that GCSE pass.

The opportunity is not now to narrow ambition in the name of relevance or reduce numeracy to asset of basic fundamental skills; we are on a successful path, and the next phase of reform needs to deepen mathematical thinking for all pupils, continuing to ensure that secure knowledge, reasoning and problem-solving are consistently developed.

Q18            Lord Blackwell: Both of you have spoken about improvements in the last few years, but a lot of the adult population went to school 20 or 40 years ago, and obviously education then was not good at producing the numeracy that they needed. Could you comment on whether it is clear that what we are doing now is better than it was 20 or 40 years ago?

Charlie Stripp: I think that what we are doing now is better than what we were doing at that time. The evidence from international comparisons and pass rates show that. For those adults who are in that position—and I have some experience of teaching adults who did not succeed in maths at school—there are certain types of approach that are working with in our system now. We are emphasising how one idea relates to another and how maths is a coherent discipline that makes sense, rather than an ever-increasing set of rules that you have to remember, which is how many of those people who failed at maths as adults viewed it. That can make a profound difference. I would be very much in favour of trying to provide support for adults who are in that position to be able to improve their mathematics, and I think we know how to do that.

David Thomas: There is nothing that Charlie and Helen have said that I would disagree with. We are rightly concerned with the level of mathematical ability across our population. Given the way that the world is changing, it is only going to become more important to have ever higher levels of mathematical ability in our population. Given that concern, it is sometimes easy to think that we need to turn around from where we are, but, as Charlie and Helen have said, the direction that we are moving in is very strong. If anything, we need to accelerate in the direction in which we are already moving, rather than trying to turn around in some way and do things that feel very different or opposite to what we are doing. We should be figuring out how we build on the successes.

Lord Agnew talked about the three phases. Primary has probably seen the strongest level of improvement. We as a nation should be extremely proud of our primary teachers and what they have achieved over recent decades in the quality of teaching in primary schools. It is a huge national and international success story, and we should be proud of what those teachers have achieved.

We have big challenges as pupils move from primary into secondary school. There is a huge wasted opportunity at key stage 3 as children move from primary to secondary, and that transition is probably the biggest opportunity within the school system that we have. However, we know that by the end of secondary school—PISA is an international comparison—we are seeing increased rates of attainment in both an absolute and a relative sense. As others have said, we have moved up from 27th to 11th in the world, which again is something that we should be proud of.

In FE, as others have said, we are seeing much higher rates of pupils achieving level 2 by age 19, and that flows through into PIAAC, the OECD study of adult skills. In 2012 there was a national outcry about how poor our levels of numeracy were. That outcry was correct because we were in a very bad place but, mostly because the flow of young people coming through into the adult population is much more numerate, we have seen that improve. Still, if 80% of people are achieving level 2 and we should be at 95% at least, there is a big gap there. In some senses, that is unsurprising. If you have a further education system where the funding levels are as they are relative to the school system; where the teacher qualification status is different from what we expect of the school system; where the pay scale and what you are offered and remunerated for is different from what you would get if you were in school; and where, fundamentally, young people going into FE are often offered courses that amount to only a very small amount of their time, then we are not thinking deeply enough about investing properly into that cohort of children. There is something there about numeracy but there is also something there that is much larger. To me, it is unsurprising that we have not been able to close that gap, given how little we have tried systematically. That is in no way to talk down the efforts of the individuals who are trying, but systematically we have not tried enough on that.

Baroness Bull: I have a follow-up question. You have all spoken about the welcome improvements in the PIAAC scores, but could you give us a little nuance on how those scores might be driving disparities? The improvements are at the upper end, not the lower end. It would be helpful to have that nuance on record, if anyone could give us that.

David Thomas: Sorry, do you mean socioeconomically?

Baroness Bull: Yes.

David Thomas: At the moment we are seeing that it is mostly being driven by the younger age groups, but yes, there is a socioeconomic gap, as we see throughout the school system.

The Chair: Which was exacerbated by Covid.

David Thomas: Yes.

Q19            Baroness Hamwee: I want to ask about incorporating maths into other subjects. The review notes that students should be introduced to the relevant mathematical concepts in maths first before being exposed to them in other subjects. We are interested in your assessment of how effective or otherwise it is to incorporate maths in that way. Lord Stevenson and I talked last week about football and the percentage of corners that are successful. In particular, is that effective in relation to financial education? Dr Drury, you used the terms—for the first time, I think, though we are close to the start of this piece of work—"reasoning” and “problem solving”, so can I start with you?

Dr Helen Drury: There are a couple of different dimensions to it, are there not? You mentioned financial literacy. At Maths Horizons, we produced a financial literacy report that drew on polling of about 4,000 young people from as young as 11 through to 30. It revealed, unsurprisingly, strong and consistent support for financial education, but not as a strand of maths—not as a thing that happened with maths teachers in maths classrooms. Ninety per cent of the 11 to 18 year-olds said it is very important, and well under one-third of them think it should be delivered through maths lessons. A world-class maths education would undeniably increase young people’s confidence in managing money, and that is important, but we should not think they are one and the same thing. There is an awful lot of knowledge about the way that finance works which rightly happens, as the young people themselves say, outside the classroom. You mentioned football.

Baroness Hamwee: We had been thinking about possible real-life examples, yes.

Dr Helen Drury: Is it okay if I say a little about real-world maths? We should be a bit careful about the assumption that the answer to weaker numeracy is more real-world maths. It sounds intuitive but misses the important point that applying maths in real-world situations is actually cognitively quite demanding. To use maths successfully in a real situation, you have to do at least four things. First, you have to know the maths itself very securely, so you have to know the number facts—the proportional reasoning, the percentages, the graphs, the algebraic relationships. You need to know that maths very securely, and if that is insecure then the context does not make it easier; it usually makes it harder.

Secondly, they need to make the connection between the secure mathematics that they have and the situation. That is often the hardest bit. In the real world, no one says, “Here is a percentages problem” or “Ratio time!”, so you have to recognise the mathematical structure of the situation for yourself. Thirdly, you have to apply the mathematics correctly to the situation. You have to translate between a messy real-world context and the mathematical representation—the numbers, the equations, the graphs, the units, the diagrams. Fourthly, you have to have the confidence and flexibility to check whether the result makes sense, and then to go back and try a different one if that fails. So there is a huge amount going on when any of us uses our maths in a real-life context, and it feels easy but is actually very complicated. Real-world maths is not a short cut around secure mathematical knowledge; it is about what becomes possible once that secure knowledge is in place.

Baroness Hamwee: Charlie, you were nodding at some of that. Perhaps you would like to include a comment about the example I gave—which I accept was facile—and whether that sort of approach actually pulls in students who might be resistant to the idea of learning maths.

Charlie Stripp: The great thing about maths is that it is the ultimate transferable skill. We want young people to learn about maths and how it works, and then to be motivated to apply it in situations that are relevant to them. For example, with financial maths, we should get the sequencing of the curriculum right so that, before some people meet financial maths in another context, they have seen how some of the things they are learning in maths are directly applicable to that, and they can go on to use that in a different context. Analysing the percentage of corners that Arsenal manage to score goals from is something that as an Arsenal fan I find interesting, and it can be motivational to say, “My knowledge of maths can help me to do some analysis that I am really interested in”. Drawing from what happens in the maths curriculum and getting the sequencing right across subjects so that it will work in other areas is great.

There is a level 3 qualification called core maths, which has been designed for students who have succeeded at level 2—they have passed their GCSE, if you like—and they have a grade 4 or above, but they are not people who necessarily want to go into STEM-type disciplines where maths might be useful to them, or they do not find maths particularly attractive but it would be useful for them to learn how to apply the maths that they learned at GCSE in contexts that are relevant to them. Core maths was designed for that purpose. It has grown in number. Currently, around 15,000 people take core maths every year. It has grown over time.

The issue is that the cohort could be more than 200,000 young people a year who pass mathematics at GCSE, then drop it. This is something that we as a country do but other countries do not do. It is almost as though the reward for passing your GCSEs is that you can stop studying maths. The whole point of core maths is exactly this idea. Young people do it; they are 16 or 17 when they start. They learn about student loans, mobile phone contracts, the finances in running a car, and so on. At that stage, those things are really motivational for them. They suddenly see how the stuff they learned in school is a fantastic transferable skill that helps them make sense of the world and their lives.

David Thomas: Every year I taught, including as a head teacher, I taught foundation GCSE maths. Teenagers are incredibly smart and incredibly proud. I do not think I have ever taught one for whom the barrier in mathematics was that they did not believe that it was important or useful. By the time you talk to a 15 year-old who might not pass foundation maths, their barrier to maths is that they do not know things, which is frustrating for them. It makes them feel silly; they are concerned about looking not clever enough in front of their peers. The barrier is the knowledge, which is the thing we need to fix.

You run the risk of going into a class of those teenagers and saying, “Right, boys, you’re going to get some football maths. Girls, you’re going to get some handbag maths”. They see right through it—rightly. They see what you are trying to do, and you get the most colossal eye-roll. They say, “Please can you just teach me because, by this point, I’ve been taught percentages for seven or eight years of my school career and I still don’t understand them. I would really like someone to just teach me the thing so that I know it properly”. That is the reaction you get from a room of 15 year-olds when you try that out; I say this from bitter experience.

Q20            Baroness Garden of Frognal: My question follows on from that. It is about different approaches to effective maths teaching. In my teaching experience, if you could make it relevant to something they were always interested in, it worked better. Football is good, but I can remember a class being happy to play darts and boys being really interested in cars, so they could do all the measurements for that—or girls for cookery, for example. This is terribly sexist, is it not? If it was something they were interested in, they could work out the numbers, but put them in a maths class and they would sit there looking completely dim. What effective ways of teaching maths and numeracy can you recommend to make them relevant? You have given some examples on this already.

David Thomas: Charlie and Helen will be able to talk better about teaching for mastery. The general approaches that we have worked on in this country over the past 15 to 20 years are moving in the direction of trying to help children not to see maths as a list of calculation rules to remember but to see the connections between things so that they develop a conceptual understanding of things such that they can apply it to all kinds of different things. That is what is important.

You can do that in all sorts of ways, from working up through concrete and pictorial representations to abstract mathematics. It is about making sure that you spend lots of time reasoning, problem-solving and exploring mathematics by looking at problems that allow you to interact with all of the different angles and aspects of something; and making sure that you do not consider something just taught and done but loop back to it and solve problems with it, even years later. All of those things build up that mathematical knowledge and allow you to apply it in lots of different places. Of course, the knowledge in itself is only useful if you make use of it. You want to make use of your mathematics, which means applying it to all sorts of things.

I would still urge caution around saying that the best way to develop that knowledge in the first place is to place it in a real-world context for everyone, not least because, if you have a room of 30 people and you say, “I need to find the thing you really care about”, doing that in an authentic and meaningful way for 30 people is extremely difficult. People do not like being told, “You’re a boy so you must like football maths”. It does not work for people. What you need to do is teach them really well through the approach of building up a deep conceptual understanding and making sure that you are fluent so that, when you try to apply your mathematics to something, you know what to do. As Helen said, it is about making sure that that knowledge is secure so that you can make use of it and realise both that it is transferable and that it can be helpful in different circumstances. Good teaching is grounded in building the knowledge in the first place.

Dr Helen Drury: It is fascinating because, obviously, motivation and attainment are closely connected: the more motivated you are, the higher you attain, and the higher you attain, the more motivated you are. However, more and more studies now show that, although it goes in both directions, the impact of attainment, knowledge and understanding on motivation is double that of the impact the other way round. So finding ways to explain and model mathematics, and getting young people to a place where it is meaningful, is purposeful and makes sense, is the thing that is motivating in itself. It is a stronger and more important point than the effect the other way round.

Charlie Stripp: I want to make one further point on this. If you are taught a piece of maths in a certain context, you may get the impression that the rules and instructions for the maths work only in that situation and do one thing, rather than realising that you can apply them universally. One of the things that sometimes happens in vocational education post 16 is that young people are taught how to do particular things in the vocational field in which they are working—they are able to learn how to do something as a set of instructions or whatever—but that is the only way in which they are taught to them and in which they receive them, when maths is about much more than that.

I mentioned earlier the idea of trying to make it so that the curriculum is coherent not just within maths but across subjects in terms of when young people meet the maths they need, so that, when they have to apply it in different subjects, they have already started to get a conceptual understanding of it through really effective teaching. I cannot emphasise enough how important really good teaching is; it is absolutely fundamental.

Q21            Lord Massey of Hampstead: Your last point relates exactly to the question I had. Clearly, maths is about learning a skill, not just a bunch of facts. Teaching is, therefore, extremely important.

One thing we have talked about in other sessions is the difficulty in recruiting really good maths teachers, as I am sure you are aware. One thing that came out of this paper—I am very interested in your views here—is that the Royal Society says that the problem in finding teachers comes about at key stage 3 because, understandably, schools prioritise key stage 4 as that is where the results come in. However, if the teaching is not that good at key stage 3, a lot of people may fail, drop out and not get to key stage 4. What do you, as practising teachers, think about that? Is it true? If so, is it something that needs to be addressed?

David Thomas: The way in which you just articulated it is absolutely correct. There is a shortage of teachers. What do you do if you are the head teacher? In timetabling your school, you are faced with all these classes and you can cover only three-quarters of them with somebody who has a background in mathematics and has been trained as a mathematics teacher. You cannot look your year 11s in the eye and tell them that they are going to be prepared for the most important exams of their lives, which they think will get them the college place or sixth-form place they want, if they are going to have a teacher who has not been trained as a mathematics teacher. That would be very difficult so, naturally, you end up prioritising that direction.

However, that does exactly what you said: it creates a cycle whereby people are coming up having been taught in years 7 and 8 by people who are not trained as mathematics teachers. We know that that ends up affecting children in disadvantaged schools more than it does children in other schools, which is a big problem. It is always going to be difficult to recruit maths teachers.

In the coming years, the demography should start to help us. When you talk to head teachers about recruiting maths teachers now, they are starting to say, “We are seeing it become a little easier”. They are by no means saying that the recruitment of maths teachers is easy, but they are saying that they are seeing signs of it becoming easier.

Part of that is because the cohort sizes are dropping. We have fewer children coming into secondary schools, so it is becoming a slightly less pressured situation. But it remains a problem.

Q22            ​​Baroness Bull:​ I am interested in the influence of the very early years on establishing basic numeracy skills in children, prior to any engagement with education. I have been reading the UCL research, which uses the Millennium Cohort Study. It found that early maths skills were stronger than early reading skills at ages two to four, but once children went to school, it very quickly reversed. This was even though parents and carers tend to read to their children five times a week, whereas they do number problems probably once a week. Even so, the symbolic knowledge was stronger in maths than the alphabetical knowledge in reading.

It suggests that phonics might have had something to do with this. Prior to the election, the Government talked a lot about phonics for maths, but we have not had any further discussion on that. I do not want to sideline you into phonics if that is not your answer, because the real question is: why are we not using the natural advantage of two to four year-olds being stronger in maths than in reading? We are basically tipping it immediately the other way once they come into school. Charlie is desperate to answer.

​​Charlie Stripp:​ I am desperate to answer because I am director of the National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics and we have a new emphasis on the basic start in life, early numbers and reception side of things. You talked about phonics in maths. We have a programme called Mastering Number, which is aimed at different levels in primary. That programme is in key stage 1, and we are now working on it in reception as well. The idea of it is to get a deep understanding of the fundamentals of number—additive reasoning and all the things that are important at that stage.

We have not yet started the reception work, but we are about to. The work of the programme in key stage 1 has been very well received by schools and teachers and seems to be having an impact. It is too early to have data to support that, but the idea of a systematic pedagogy and methodology for supporting key stage 1 teachers to teach maths really well, and do so universally across the country, is something that we are working on right now.

​​Baroness Bull:​ Is that being trialled, or is it rolled out? Is there going to be a research study around it?

​​Charlie Stripp:​ I am hoping that there will be research evidence to support it, but the programme itself is now under way in key stage 1. The early evidence from it is positive, but there is no large-scale research evidence yet. We currently have an EEF study going on with one of our Mastering Number programmes, so hopefully that will reveal some serious data.

​​Baroness Bull:​ Is that in every school?

​​Charlie Stripp:​ With the NCETM maths hubs, we have a national structure for supporting professional development in schools. We cannot compel schools to participate, but a very large number of them do. Through the maths hubs, we are working one way or another with about 60% of primary schools and 60% of secondary schools across the country. As I say, there is no compulsion for them to work with us, so that is positive. 

​​David Thomas:​ There are two things to say about early numbers and phonics for maths. First, phonics for maths is in some ways a great analogy and in some ways a terrible one. There is no equivalent of phonics in mathematics, but if what you mean is a structured scheme that breaks down the components of mathematics and makes sure that you are fluent in those so that, when you meet them in some sort of context, you know what to do and do not have to stop and think, and perhaps freeze, that is fantastic. Of course, that is what we should be doing, and it is what great teachers have always done. But it is important that we offer support to our teachers to be able to do that and embed it in all settings, including, as you say, early years settings, before the start of the national curriculum and in an age-appropriate way before people are in schools.

Secondly, although you are right that there is a study that says that maths attainment is better than the comparable English attainment at a certain age, we could still do more. The Government and the NHS have a website to tell you what you should be doing with your child before they start school, and it does not include the word “count”. The developmental window for learning to count is between ages two and four. We do not even suggest that that might be a thing that parents should consider when we are writing our formal advice to parents.

​​​​Baroness Bull:​ That is a really easy win. We like easy wins. Thank you.

​​Dr Helen Drury:​ There are lots of brilliant initiatives and good work going on in early years maths and key stage 1; Charlie has named a very strong one. I can follow up on that afterwards.

​​The Chair:​ Please send that through.

Q23            ​​Lord Hannett of Everton:​ We have heard lots of examples today and in the past about maths being relative so that people are interested and learn more, and examples have been given. I am particularly interested in the classroom—the pupils and the psychology of it—where some people are higher flyers and progress. This may be a political question but what about the pupils who are not as quick or as fast? Do you think there is enough support in the classroom, or does this become a resource issue? I wonder whether enough is being done to support those who fail—that may be the wrong term—or are not as quick as others. Is that a resource question? Am I asking a fair question, or is it more complex than that?

​​Dr Helen Drury:​ We have made great progress in attitudes, beliefs and expectations in maths, but your question speaks, importantly, to some myths that are still quietly sitting beneath a lot of our national conversations about mathematics, three of which are relevant here.

One myth is that there are two kinds of maths. There is the mathematics for real mathematicians, which has beauty of proof, structure and deep ideas. That is for those who go on to do A-level maths and beyond. It is for a minority of people, and it is special and different. Then there is something else—numeracy—which is what everybody needs for life. That is a false distinction. The capabilities that underpin that numeracy—understanding quantity, reasoning about relationships, judging whether results are reasonable, interpreting data—are exactly the same mathematical capabilities that underpin success in maths. Numeracy and maths are not two different things; we are talking about the same maths.

The second myth is that those two groups of people are somehow inevitable—the idea that we can predict, at ages 16, 14, 11 or, in some cases, seven or four, which children are “maths” ones and which are not. The evidence does not support that idea. Across the world, the highest-performing education systems show that far more young people can succeed in maths than we often assume. As we have already said, in England, we have already seen significant improvement. Mathematical capability is not fixed early in life; it is developed through teaching, curriculum and opportunity. We have to build a system where the curriculum, the teaching and all the professional development that teachers get rest on the belief that all young people can succeed, and we have to skill and support our teachers to make that happen. We have a bit of a cultural issue in thinking that maths is for some and perhaps not for others.

The third myth is around the measurement of that divide. Maths feels easy to assess because we have ticks and crosses and the percentages feel very precise, but actually, we are just assessing performance on a certain set of questions at a certain time. We tend to assess at quite a young age, thinking we are doing it diagnostically, and then, where children are perhaps not performing as well as their peers, rather than thinking, “That means that I need to approach this differently, explain it a different way or take a different approach”, we make a judgment about the child and their potential. That is where we go wrong and where we are different from the jurisdictions that are more successful. We need to raise our expectations of all.

Q24            ​​Lord Hampton:​ We have heard and talked quite a lot about maths teacher recruitment. Helen, you asked about how we can move from a strong to a world-leading system, and David said that we should be proud of our primary teachers. We hear quite often that, obviously, primary teachers teach a class, and they teach everything. We are hearing from different sources that quite a lot of them do not feel number confident or maths confident. How can we build that in the teachers we already have?

​​Charlie Stripp: Through the maths hubs and the NCETM, we have a mastery specialist programme for both primary and secondary. Secondary is making quite good progress as well, although we are talking about primary. The idea of that mastery specialist programme is to work with primary teachers—there is a primary and a secondary teacher programme—to make them confident about the mathematics that they are teaching at that level and where that maths is going. Primary teachers, who you have characterised as being not that confident about maths, although they might be well qualified in maths from their school experience, are really up for this. They really want to be able to learn deeply about the maths that they are teaching and how to teach it really well to their pupils. A lot of the gains that we have made, so far most notably at primary, have been because of the way in which we have managed to upskill primary teachers’ confidence and understanding of mathematics itself but also how to teach mathematics really well. That is an area in which we are doing well.

Dr Helen Drury: I would just agree with Charlie.

David Thomas: Can I build on something that comes from both of those two answers? There is a risk in conversations about numeracy that we assume that numeracy and mathematics are somehow at odds with each other and somehow battling and competing and that it cannot be resolved. The committee heard last week that we should not tarnish the very important with the brush of the beautiful, but I think we should be getting out the brush and painting away. You would never make an argument in English that the way to have a more literate population is to spend much more time on spelling drills and keep away from the great stories, plays and poems that have inspired millions of people through time. That is absolutely what we should be doing.

Link that with thinking about teachers who have not trained as mathematics specialists; that can be very hard. What you want to do is to equip people with a sense of what mathematics is, where you can take it and what you can do and what the wonderful problems are that you can explore with your class—the things that you can get them pondering, which will bother them so much that on the way home they are still thinking about it and talk to their parents about it at the dinner table. That is what we want to be doing, and it is knowledge of mathematics that allows you to do it—and that is what we need to develop in all our teachers, but more to help our primary colleagues to be able to do that when they do not have much of a deep background in mathematics. That would be very helpful, because that is how you inspire.

Q25            Viscount Stansgate: I want to look more into the future. I know two people aged nought and three, and heaven knows what type of world they are going to live in in 10 or 20 years’ time. We already know that it is going to be a world changed by AI in ways that we do not yet know or understand. When I looked at the television news this morning, it was full of bar charts and pie graphs to help to explain why blocking of the Strait of Hormuz is going to affect the oil and petrol prices, and so on. That is the world in which these young people will grow up. I want to look ahead a bit and for you to tell us whether you think that the curriculum might evolve in certain ways to deal with the new world in which we are going to live—and, if we are sitting here in 10 years’ time, what would it look like?

Charlie Stripp: The underpinning of mathematics that makes all of those things possible will not change. I think that what we are doing in terms of teaching at primary and secondary school up to the age of 16 will not change dramatically as this develops. What needs to develop is how maths is used to make sense of the world. When you have that knowledge of fundamental maths and develop it through your schooling up to age 16, how is it that you can use that knowledge and those skills that you have developed to be able to make sense of all that is going on in life and work?

I go back to core maths, which I was talking about earlier, in the context of things like students loans and running your first car. But with core maths, let us also look at the information in the media and ask what it is telling us and what it means. Are those things reasonable? What does that graph mean? That is a really crucial skill. That is one thing.

I turn to another thing we are doing at the moment. I am the chief executive of a charity called Mathematics and Education in Industry, which runs something called the advanced maths support programme. Something that we are doing through that is to develop a course, which is running at the moment for students and teachers—a pilot programme on maths into AI, looking at the data science and how AI works, and doing it in a way that relate it to maths. There is lots of talk about AI—it is kind of a buzz thing—but many people have no idea of what it means at all. The idea of this programme is that it helps people to make sense of it.

The whole area of data science will develop particularly in post-16 education. How that will affect the curriculum pre 16, time will tell—but my fundamental point is that the maths that underpins all this will not change, and developmentally that maths needs to be learned in that period through primary and secondary school.

Viscount Stansgate: Is anyone doing maths stuff on TikTok?

David Thomas: TikTok has a STEM feed that is automatically put on to everyone below the age of 16—you automatically get a STEM feed on your front page.

Viscount Stansgate: Do the other two witnesses have any thoughts on the future?

David Thomas: I am very glad you asked your question—it is exactly the right thing for us to be thinking about. My concern is that what we conceive of as within the boundaries of numeracy today is going to become increasingly out of date. I am not disagreeing with Charlie at all, but what we should be conceiving of is building on exactly the same mathematics—but the bar for numeracy will rise, and we have to consider more and more things to be fundamental, if anything.

We are no longer going to be in an age where it is necessary for everyday life to be able to calculate the cost of your holiday from a brochure, because your large language model will do that for you. It is no longer going to be sufficient for you to get a well-paying job by being able to do some percentages in Excel, because AI is doing that for your employer as well. So both those two reasonings behind what we include in the scope of numeracy are disappearing, but that does not mean that we should not be learning to calculate and learning the same maths—it means that we should be going harder after it. What matters is that you have the mathematical intuition to have a feel for relationships with numbers without having to sit down and calculate—you can be in that moment and have that argument presented to you on the news and have a sense of how big a problem it is and of whether those statistics feel right. You cannot do that unless you have had a good mathematics education—of course in proportion, algebra and those things, but also in statistics. You should have a sense for whether this thing is going to be statistically significant or whether it is noise, and whether that is within you.

The other thing is that we need to be considering what you can do with that mathematics. Can you solve problems or recognise the structures of something that is going on? Being able simply to perform the calculation ceases to be something that is particularly useful. You want to be able to solve problems and think for yourself through the interesting and inspirational problems that we talked about before. That is important, and we need to not consider it as a lovely optional extra for a few children in the class and start considering it as something that will be fundamental for human cognition, as we go into the next few decades.

Dr Helen Drury: I just want to echo that that is numeracy, for everybody—for 95% to 100% of young people to be successful in—so we need maths with all the recognition of patterns and relationships and the representation of situations and reasoning about quantities and judging of numerical claims. We need that to be for all.

Q26            Lord Hannett of Everton: Do the review’s recommendations go far enough to address persistent concerns regarding GCSE maths resit rates and success at achieving GCSE-level maths?

Charlie Stripp: I can start with that. The review recommends the introduction of a stepping stone qualification post 16 for students who have had a lot of difficulty with maths pre 16. That is a step in the right direction. It is really about those young people who are struggling with maths pre 16, who do not achieve a grade 4—their schools know that they are not going to achieve a grade 4 and they know that they are not going to achieve one. At the moment, they are still pushed towards taking an exam everyone knows they are not going to pass at the age of 16. I would like to see some recognition of the idea that education is something that happens until you are 18, and it is unnecessary to put somebody through that. We should, in that period when they are 15 or 16, rather than preparing them for an exam, be supporting them to understand maths more deeply. But that is quite a complicated problem to solve because of where there are breaks in the education system, and accountability measures and all kinds of things.

Many young people who struggle with maths do not get a very good experience of maths, and that almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. It can also influence their attitudes towards maths and perhaps their families’ attitude towards maths in the longer term. If there was a way of making it so there was a more considered progression for students who are finding maths difficult, so we could see where they get to by age 18, rather than compelling them to sit an assessment where it is quite clear that they have not succeeded, that would be a good thing.

​​David Thomas:​ I will refer to my opening comments and say that what the review came up with was good for what was within the scope of the review, but there is an awful lot that needs to happen outside the scope of that particular review.

Lord Massey of Hampstead:​ Let us clarify what you said. I thought it was quite important. Were you saying that there should not be an assessment or formal exam at 16, that that does not help and that it would be better to defer that until 18?   

​​Charlie Stripp:​ It is a very high-stakes thing for young people to feel that they have failed, and they do not need to.

Baroness Bull:​ Do you mean that for everyone or for the ones that are deemed to need the longer time?

​​Charlie Stripp:​ I would certainly mean it for the ones that take a longer time; for everyone is a bigger question. But within the scope of the question, I think that for those young people who really struggle with maths pre 16, and where it is clear they are not going to get that level 2 pass, I do not think that it is necessary or useful in any way to put them through that experience.  

Q27            Baroness Alexander of Cleveden:​ Thank you. I want to note that I did not record my interest in the register last week. I am chair of the Joint Industry Board, which looks after the training of electricians and so may have tangential relevance. We have already touched a little bit on the disparities in attainment in maths that are sometimes seen in respect of gender, ethnicity, socioeconomic background and geography. We have touched on it, but I just want to give the panel the chance to reflect on any other corrective actions we might take to reduce any of those disparities that should be on our policy agenda.

​​Charlie Stripp:​ One thing that is writ large for me at the moment, because we have a programme that is trying to address it, is young people from disadvantaged backgrounds who do well at the end of key stage 2. They are performing highly; their key stage 2 SAT identifies them as high maths performers. Of those young people from disadvantaged backgrounds—let us say the ones on free school meals—around half will go on to get a grade 7 to 9 in GCSE maths. If they get a grade 7 to 9, they are as likely as anybody else to choose to study maths at A-level. But if you are not a disadvantaged student, you are not on free school meals and you do very well at the end of key stage 2, 70% of those young people will go on to get a grade 7 to 9 and progress from there.

That is definitely a failure of our system. There is no kind of cognitive difference that you might note with reasonable confidence based on that evidence. Yet, between ages 11 and 16, those disadvantaged young people do not end up doing as well as their more advantaged peers, and that has big impacts on their life chances.

Through the advanced maths support programme and working with the maths hubs, we have something called the higher-level maths achievement programme, which is working with schools that have high proportions of disadvantaged pupils. We are not exactly sure why this is, so we have got a pilot programme that is trying to think about what we can do about that and try to make sure that those young people can go on to succeed as they ought to. That is one good example of that.

I will say something very quickly about gender. There is quite powerful research that shows there should be no difference in attainment between boys and girls in maths. There is no “boys are good at maths, girls are not”; very powerful research suggests that is simply not true. But in our school system, boys do better than girls in maths and that starts quite early. If you look at the high-attaining end of key stage 2 SATs, the proportion of boys is greater than the proportion of girls. If you look at the top grades in GCSE and A-level maths, that is still true. I suspect there is something strange going on there to do with our society. 

​​David Thomas:​ There is a great Nature study from France, which maybe links a little bit to what Lady Bull was asking about earlier on, which looks at the gender gap on entry to early years settings, and then during the first year and at the end of the first year. It finds that there is no gender gap on entry to early years settings. One opens by one term of being in an early years setting and is large and then sustained for the rest of your schooling by the end of the first year.

Baroness Alexander of Cleveden:​ We have a diagnostic. It is very human to say that we have not solved it yet. Is there anything else that we should have in mind or give a nudge to when we come to recommendations?  

​​Dr Helen Drury:​ It is interesting that where we find effective pedagogies, effective teaching approaches and effective approaches to curriculum, they often have greater impact with more disadvantaged socioeconomic groups. One striking finding is the impact of spatial reasoning on mathematical performance. There is a strong correlation between spatial skills and maths achievement. You can improve children’s ability to think spatially, but children from disadvantaged backgrounds show more benefit from that spatial training and curriculum than their peers. So where there is high-quality professional development that shows teachers effective pedagogies, we see those having a disproportionate effect on the young people.

Baroness Alexander of Cleveden:​ Let me ask a daft lassie/laddie question about spatial reasoning in this context. At what age? What would that mean practically?

​​Dr Helen Drury:​ Mentally manipulating shapes and space.

​​Charlie Stripp:​ If I can come back on gender: at A-level, 60% of maths students are boys, 40% are girls; for further maths, it is 70% and 30%. There is a girls progression programme, run through the advanced maths support programme, trying to address that issue, but that is a very hard nut to crack. As numbers at A-level have risen really splendidly, the proportions of gender participation stay the same.

On disadvantage, oracy is something that the curriculum assessment review report made a big thing about. We are trying to think about oracy within maths. There is quite strong evidence that greater use of oracy in teaching does help to close disadvantage gaps. We do not know specifically how that works in maths. That is something that we are trying to address and work on.

The Chair:​ So the reality is that there is no cognitive difference in the genders—it is a cultural thing. Is there anything we can do about that? How do we break that cycle of culture?

​​Charlie Stripp:​ The girls progression programme certainly is trying to think about that at the key stage 4 to post-16 interface. As David said, the research from France was quite striking. It is something that we do not know the answer to yet.

​​David Thomas:​ In most cases, the best bet you could have is to    invest in teachers becoming better teachers. With every single one of these disparities, the most impactful thing that you could do would be just to support the people who are teaching those children. There are lots of little things that we can do around the edges. We see differences in how people play with baby boys versus baby girls and how that ends up impacting it. To your point earlier about the UCL study, one of the reasons that we have better early maths is that it is play-driven. But we see gaps.

There are lots of things we could be doing around the edges, all of which would have some marginal, positive contribution. But ultimately, the biggest thing you could do every single time is invest in the teacher in front of that child.

Q28            Lord Blackwell:​ I will come back to the link between numeracy and maths. We know you have to learn how to read fluently before you can appreciate reading Shakespeare. If you want to learn to play the piano, you have to know how to hold your hand and fingers and how to move them instinctively to where the notes are before you can learn to play a Beethoven sonata. Similarly, is it not right that in maths you have to become familiar with numbers, and the links between them, and with manipulating numbers—what we maybe call arithmetic, including percentages and averages—before you can really get comfortable with solving equations or trigonometry or what one might call mathematical formulae? In the teaching and the curriculum, as they are developing, is there enough emphasis put on building those fundamental skills before people are pushed on to things that they find more difficult to understand? How is that being addressed in the way the curriculum is developing? 

​Charlie Stripp:​ One of the things we recognise from looking at teaching in very high-performing jurisdictions is that, certainly at primary level, they go more slowly and more deeply. Perhaps we have not gone slowly enough with some of those more deep, conceptual, fundamental things that everything needs to be built on.

You talked about key stage 3 earlier. Lots of children were not cognitively ready for quite important elements of the curriculum up to key stage 2, so they are retaught at key stage 3. That is obviously not efficient. It is not nice for the children or teachers particularly; it is bad that that happens. One of the emphases from the review of the curriculum was to really look carefully at that sequencing, so getting that pace right through the curriculum is absolutely key. In responding to the review, that is something that is being paid a lot of attention to.

Lord Blackwell:​ Is there an argument for saying that those children who are slower or find it more difficult to get those numeracy skills should actually spend longer doing that before they move on to the later stages?

​​Charlie Stripp:​ The concept of teaching for mastery is that it is depth rather than acceleration that you need. You want to make sure that all children have a fundamental understanding of what they need to progress. Children who find maths easy will have a deeper understanding of that, but you want to make sure that everyone has got the understanding to the depth that they need to make good progression.

Accelerating and singling out children as being particularly smart in maths and making them go faster sounds attractive, but there is actually evidence that it does not really work, and it is not what they do in high-performing jurisdictions. You need to make sure that you are teaching the fundamentals really well and really deeply and then building on that in the right way. Certainly, through primary and early secondary, that is the key thing to get right. But the sequencing and the pace at which ideas are met, recognising how children develop cognitively, is very important.

​​Dr Helen Drury:​ I completely agree that those fundamentals are fundamental. We have made good progress. We have a better understanding of the importance of number bonds; that is being able to add and subtract small numbers. Then there are the times tables and the importance of developing from addition and subtraction through to thinking about multiplication and division, and then proportional reasoning and ratio and how, at each stage, you do need to be very secure with that fundamental knowledge.

But, as Charlie says, it is important for everybody. In primary and early secondary, it is the same knowledge and experience and fundamental capabilities that everybody needs to spend time on; people need precisely the same foundations. For most of most people’s education, it is that focus on those fundamentals that is vital for everybody.

Lord Blackwell:​ Helen, earlier you were saying that there was not a distinction between numeracy and maths, but in saying that are you saying it is not important to build these numerical skills? 

​​Dr Helen Drury:​ I think the fundamental concepts are vital to this thing, which I do not think is numeracy or maths—it is all the same thing. To do mathematics and be mathematical, you need to have those fundamentals. That is true for everybody.

​​David Thomas:​ Your music and pianist analogy is in some ways exactly right and in some ways a bit wrong, if I dare say so. You are absolutely right that there are a set of fundamentals that you need to master—all the things that you listed: you need to be able to sit correctly, weight your fingers correctly. There is a set of very similar things in mathematics. If you cannot do the basics and you do not have strength in those basics, you are not going to be able to go and do anything else.

The way in which it is different in mathematics is that even if you can only do a few of those early things, there are still wonderful bits of mathematics you can do. You do not need to wait until you have been able to do everything, to wait until you are a grade 8 pianist, to be able to play a Beethoven sonata, because there are equivalents of beautiful Beethoven sonatas that you can grasp at a much earlier level once you have got the components.

I in no way talk down the importance of having those components. They are essential. You must have them. But one of the beautiful things about mathematics is that you can do fantastic, interesting problems that grasp you without needing to know a huge amount, as long as you are secure in what you know. At every level, it is possible to do mathematics. Mathematics is not something you must sit in the waiting room for until you have been able to do quadratic equations. You can get there really early.  

Lord Blackwell:​ Earlier I asked about the progression of standards over 20 to 40 years. Is there some evidence you could give us on that relativity?

​​David Thomas:​ You can look at TIMSS, which is a study of year 5s and year 9s, which goes up and to the right. You could look at PISA, which is a study of 15 and 16 year-olds, which goes up and to the right. You could look at the PIAAC, which is adult competencies, which goes up and to the right. I am sure all of us could share links to those for you, if that would be helpful.

Q29            Lord Stevenson of Balmacara:​ We have touched on this, but I would be grateful if you could return to it a little bit. We have heard that there is a cultural divide about maths, in the sense that I have heard my children talking to their friends and some of them have said, “Oh, I cannot do maths”. You never hear them say they cannot read or write, but you do hear it about maths. Do you recognise that as being something that is there, and are the measures you have been describing very well today going to take that trick as well?

​​Charlie Stripp:​ A fundamental, underpinning principle of teaching for mastery is that everyone can succeed in maths and that it is a kind of myth that some people cannot; it is just not true. It is interesting when you talk to people about other things that they do, like swimming or playing the piano. When you sit at the piano for the first time, you are absolutely rubbish, and then you put some work in and practice, do the scales, learn the things, and then you make a breakthrough and you are able to do it. Maths is just the same as that but, culturally, that view has not prevailed. There has been a view that there are maths people and non-maths people.

Through the maths hubs and the NCETM, we have been doing this Teaching Mastery pedagogy since 2014. It takes time to change that, but I think the trajectory is right. If you talk to people in the Far East about maths, you do not get people saying, “I cannot do maths”. Another thing that happens that is very notable there is that we can reinforce almost unconsciously, because you will talk about how clever somebody is because they are good at maths. Praise in a school in Shanghai will be, “You have worked really hard, and therefore you have done well”, not, “Aren’t you clever?” That is really important and something that we are trying, throughout the work we are doing with the mastery pedagogy, to emphasise, that idea that it is through effort that you get better at something; it is not because you were touched by some miraculous ability.

Obviously, as in anything, there are people who are absolutely off the scale in maths, and there are people who really struggle with it, but it is much less prevalent than the black and white of, “I am a maths person” or, “I am not a maths person”. We are making headway with that, but it is a long-term thing.

Interestingly, post Covid, it looks like a gender gap has opened up that was not there before in the TIMSS data. It is very difficult to understand exactly why that happened.

Evidence of exam results in this country since then suggests that the gap has opened but maybe it is not that dramatic, and maybe it will close. It is interesting how these things pan out.

​​Dr Helen Drury:​ I completely agree with that issue. In England, we have built an education system where we use maths as the nation’s sorter and sifter. It is a very different way of thinking about the subject than happens in high-performing jurisdictions. Of course, we want the GCSE to do that; a major part of its purpose is to see who is better and worse at the subject; but as to the logic of that sorting, it is such high stakes. The GCSE sorts; the mock predicts the GCSE; the unit tests predict the mock. Key stage 2 at the end of primary school determines what sets you go in or what the school’s expectations of you are.

Each classroom exercise, each homework and each question starts to feel, maybe particularly for girls or some socioeconomic groups, like an opportunity to prove whether the child is a maths person or not. Rather than an opportunity to think, or an experience of curiosity, or to have a go, it becomes about whether they are the sort of person for whom this question is easy or the sort of person for whom it is hard.

It becomes a societal Pygmalion effect, because we know that expectations really matter in education. Because being asked a question in maths can feel like being tested in a way that perhaps is not quite as true of some of the learning experiences you might have in other subjects, you can end up very early on with children and teachers coming to believe that some people are or are not maths people. It is a real cultural challenge. ​​

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara:​ With respect to both of you, you seem to be saying quite diametrically opposite things. You are saying there is a real problem, and you say we are solving it.

​​Dr Helen Drury:​ There is a real problem, and we are solving it.

Lord Stevenson of Balmacara:​ I need a referee here.

​​David Thomas:​ I think Charlie is saying there is a stock and a flow problem. The stock has a set of views that come from their educational experience. Charlie is saying we have changed the educational experience, so the flow-through into the adult population have had a different one. Hopefully, that will change it. I feel optimistic. I do not think that will be enough to close it, partly because what do people mean when they say that? I am struck by how often somebody says to me, “I cannot do maths, so I am no good at maths, I am not a maths person”. Then you follow up and ask them, “What set were you in at school? What grade did you get? What grade did you get in your maths A-level? Don’t you have a STEM PhD from Oxbridge?”

People say this with a wide variety of different meanings. There is something peculiar in mathematics where people believe they must be a prodigious genius to qualify as a maths person and cannot identify themselves as somebody who can do maths unless they have won some medals at an extremely early age. That is not helpful and that, in different ways, cascades its way through the population in terms of how people think about it. But there is a problem there where people believe that they must be exceptionally gifted or they cannot do it.

Q30            Lord Massey of Hampstead:​ I want to touch on a point Lord Stevenson mentioned; I think you said your daughter said she cannot do maths. The other area where this might apply is when people say they cannot do languages—I have experienced this. The reason I raise that is because, in terms of gender, my anecdotal evidence is from going to my daughter’s graduation, where 90% of the language graduates, of which she was one, were women, and about 80% of the maths graduates were men.              

That is maybe slightly off-piste, but is there something in the make-up of men and women that is a little different? I raise the subject because one could devote a lot of resource to trying to equalise the balance between male and female, and it may not be that useful because there could be a fundamental difference.  ​​

​​Charlie Stripp:​ Is it the make-up of men and women ​or is it cultural? That is a very big question.

​​David Thomas: I do not know what the final end state, if you did everything possible, would be, or whether you would be able to say with confidence that the men and women would be exactly the same at the final end state. But I can say with confidence that the gap we have today does not need to exist and should be closed.