16
Examination of witnesses
Kate Ambrosi, Lord Baker and Sarah Waite.
Q85 The Chair: Good morning, everybody, and welcome to the Numeracy for Life Committee. We are very pleased to welcome our witnesses today, Lord Baker, Kate Ambrosi and Sarah Waite. We have sent you our broad questions that we want to focus on today, so, without further ado, we will get cracking.
Baroness Bull: Good morning. My question is around numeracy skills for life—of course, that is the focus of this panel. We are very interested to hear from everybody about what skills people will need in their adult life, so beyond education, personally and professionally. Also, in terms of a functioning society and democracy, what are the numeracy skills we need in order to fulfil our personal, professional and civic potential?
Sarah Waite: Thanks for inviting me to speak today. Just for a bit of background, I am the CEO and founder of a charity called Get Further. We support students from disadvantaged backgrounds who have not passed GCSE English and maths at school. We help them to gain these qualifications and functional skills qualifications in further education, and we have just expanded our work to support young people who are NEET.
Going back to the question that you have asked, when people think about numeracy for life and those skills, what they are really thinking about is a solid grasp of financial literacy. They are thinking about percentage change, managing budgets, profit, loss and compound interest. We know that all of those types of skills are really important. The Richmond Project did a piece of research just a couple of weeks ago that found a really strong link between the proportion of young people and adults who have strong financial literacy and the proportion of those people who have strong financial security, so there is that really close link.
We definitely want young people coming out of the education system with a really strong grasp of basic number skills, because those are the skills that underpin solid financial literacy, but there are also other maths topics that are really important and which support young people to be able to do things such as understand and handle data, such as probability and statistics, as well as algebra topics, which are essentially the building blocks of coding and AI. They are really important too.
Then you have more general problem-solving skills that cut across all of these different topics, and those skills support young people and adults to be able to look at a problem and identify what is relevant to be able to solve that problem, and what is distracting and not relevant, and to attack those multi-step, complex problems. That is a skill in and of itself.
All of these things are really important, but the common theme that we see with the young people who we work with is that, if you do not have a really strong grasp of basic number and foundational numeracy skills, you are going to struggle with all of them.
Baroness Bull: That is really helpful, thank you. You went straight for financial literacy, and I can see that. Can you explain, Kate, some of the other areas? There is quite a lot of evidence around the impact of poor numeracy on one’s ability to participate—you touched on this with data and statistics—in terms of managing health, for instance. Are these things that concern you, or is it primarily financial literacy that you are thinking about? That is in answer to my question, rather than in answer to your work.
Kate Ambrosi: I am the CEO of the Baker Dearing Educational Trust. We support all 44 UTCs and 21,000 students around England.
I absolutely agree with those points. Some really fundamental needs for work and life were outlined there by Sarah. We are now being expected more and more to manage our own health and to understand the statistics of health. While we will absolutely talk about preparation for working life and contextualised maths being certainly more relevant and interesting to many of our young people, being able to manage your own health is going to be fundamental as the NHS stops having the capacity to do so. We have to do our own measurements now and then report them in, and so, if we do not understand that, we will not be looking after ourselves.
Also, you cannot understand democracy without understanding the statistics of it. You can believe that you are not being represented by your politicians if you do not understand the statistics of it.
Although you are thinking about numeracy skills, some of the skills behind decoding are literacy skills. In fact, probably the most challenging aspect for some young people is the literacy required for maths, driven by, of course, the GCSE, which dominates secondary schools entirely. It is about decoding the question I am trying to answer for myself, even from the instructions a doctor sends via an app, or from a newspaper explaining something about the voting system. There are so many aspects of maths in life.
Baroness Bull: That is a really helpful, round answer. Would you like me to go on to Lord Baker? I am sure he will have something to say.
Lord Baker of Dorking: Your ambition is very high indeed: to improve adult literacy and numeracy. You will not make any progress unless you improve youth numeracy. It is as simple as that. From the experience we have in university technical colleges, where we recruit at 14, largely, we find in literature and literacy that 14 year-olds often have reading ages of six or eight. We also find they have a lower maths attainment as well, so something has gone wrong at a very early stage in the primary education of our country. That is where adult numeracy has to start. There is no question about that. I feel that very strongly.
The exam system that we have in our country is now archaic. We are the only country in the world that holds a life-testing test at 11, and we do not do it very well. There is a very low level of attainment at level 4 in literacy and numeracy, and that is not declining; it is increasing. It is making it worse, and so there should be very radical change. It must begin by looking at the extent of the maths curriculum. I do not know how familiar you are with the maths curriculum, but it is an enormous curriculum that starts with children in nursery learning the numbers, then two times tables, and then on and on to two first-class degrees at Cambridge, which is the highest reward you can get.
One of Kate’s predecessors running UTCs was Simon Connell, who got two first-class degrees in maths in Cambridge. His view now is that it was an utter waste of time. He has never used them in his life. He went into the City first and did rather well, and now he is helping charities. He said, “It was a big mistake I made, and I persuaded my son to do it, so he has made the mistake that I made”. It is not necessary.
You should address, in your studies, the content of the maths curriculum. It is absolutely immense. For example, have any of you ever used simultaneous equations since you left college or school? One. That is some improvement. How many of you cope with quadrilateral equations? Two this time. That is a remarkable achievement. For the most part, you do not come across these, and you have to address the content of the maths curriculum very seriously.
Lord Baker of Dorking: There should be a functional maths available to all children, which is, basically, number. “How much does it cost to get me to school every day? How much does my holiday cost? Compare the two holidays we are looking at”, or whatever it may be. “Is it better to buy this bag of plums at this price, or do I have to go and get a bag of plums at another price?” You have to get children using number with facility, and I would put that as a major priority, but that would form a fundamental change to the GCSE system and, in fact, to the level of leaving ages as well. That is a very radical proposal. You may not come up with that, but you have to start young.
Baroness Bull: Yes, and others have said that=, so thank you very much.
Q86 Baroness Garden of Frognal: Lord Baker has pretty well answered my question, but he and I were both on a committee a couple of years ago on the 16-to-19 curriculum, where we came out with the solution that the current curriculum did not equip young people for life. My questions are: do existing level 2 qualifications provide students with the necessary numeracy skills, and are we equipping students with the skills they need for their future lives and participation in the workforce? You have partly answered this already. The answer seems to be pretty well no, does it not? Is there anything positive that you would like to see in the curriculum in the future?
Sarah Waite: I have a more positive assessment of the situation. The place where I would start is looking at the OECD’s PIAAC survey, which I know has come up in evidence given to this committee. If you have a look at what was happening in 2012, and the set of young people and adults who did that survey then, we had a situation where 25% of young people had low skills in numeracy. Then something changed in the next 11 years, because, in 2023, when the survey was taken again in the country, that proportion had fallen to 14%, so there was an 11-percentage-point drop in the proportion of young people with low numeracy skills, which is a huge improvement. We were the only country in the OECD to see that type of improvement.
The researchers who have analysed the surveys have looked at the different policies that were introduced during that timeframe to try to understand what may have happened. Some of the hypotheses that they are pointing at suggest that things such as raising the participation age played a role, so more young people staying in education for longer improved their basic skills. Also, things such as the introduction of the condition of funding meant that more young people with the lowest skills in maths were studying maths for longer.
Alongside that, every year, the Department for Education publishes the proportion of young people who reach a pass in GCSE maths by the age of 19. It publishes it at 16 but it also publishes it by the age of 19. We can see that the proportion of young people getting a grade 4 or above—a standard pass—went from 62% in 2012 to 81% in 2023, which is a phenomenal improvement in that time period.
We are not doing as well as other countries. We are still behind places such as the Netherlands and Japan for literacy and numeracy, but something has happened to put young people’s literacy and numeracy skills on an improving trajectory in England.
The thing that I always come back to is, when you look at those GCSE exam scripts for those who are ending up with a grade 1 or a 2, so the very lowest grades, you can see that they have very low-level, weaker underlying numeracy and maths skills and are struggling to answer the questions and solve those problems. That is the reason why we are not doing better.
In terms of thinking about where the next improvements should come from, it is really thinking about that group—those with the very lowest basic skills in numeracy—and what we should be doing to improve things for them.
Kate Ambrosi: I would agree that the condition of funding point has made a massive difference. That concentration on what happens in post-16 has been important. It also meant that young people pre-16 were more engaged in getting the grade, because they knew they would have to carry on with it for ever—as far as they are concerned, three years is for ever.
Baroness Garden of Frognal: It is a perverse incentive.
Kate Ambrosi: Yes, absolutely. If you were a science committee, it has been detrimental to science, which has gone to the bottom of the pile in terms of young people’s determination to get great grades. That absolutely has made a really big difference.
In terms of UTCs, 38 of the 44 have an atypical point of entry. They have done their key stage 3 at another school. What we have found is that young people are losing ground in maths and English during that key stage. They leave primary school with an expected grade of 4.6—these are our students—and then we assess them on entry to see where they are up to and where the gaps are, so that we can start to fulfil their requirements and, if they have additional needs, we can meet those.
We found that they have gone backwards in their education. They were expecting 4.6 when they left primary school, and they are now expecting a 4. That is a lot to do with the investment in key stage 3. A lot of those young people come to us disengaged with education in general. They have had lots of teachers. The specialist maths teachers are teaching key stages 4 and 5, but not so much key stage 3, so there are lots of non-specialists in there.
Baroness Spielman: Can I just ask a quick follow-up? What I think you just said may create a bit of confusion in that you said that the forward expectation of the key stage 2 outcome was between a 4 and a 5—you said 4.6—and, by 14, the expectation has reduced to a 4. That means that they have made less progress than they would have been expected between 11 and 14, not that they have gone backwards.
Kate Ambrosi: That is now the expectation when they sit their exam.
Baroness Spielman: I understand that the expectation has declined, but that is not the same thing as having regressed in absolute terms between 11 and 14. That is the thing that is important to get straight.
Kate Ambrosi: Thank you for doing that.
Lord Baker of Dorking: You mentioned recently that the Netherlands does better than us. Germany does better than us. Germany has technical schools, grammar schools and high schools. The Netherlands is particularly good in technical training below 16. It is almost impossible in an ordinary school in Britain to have any technical training at all at the moment. It is very difficult, and that is not acceptable.
I would hope that you may all be able to visit a UTC to see the transformation of youngsters between 14 and 16. What we do is quite remarkable. We give a lot of chance to children who have been written off. Many of the youngsters who start at 14 have written off education. They do not want to do any more, quite frankly. They want to leave as quickly as they can. You have to start there, and this is not really accepted by any party.
The Tories made a mess of it because Gove imposed the EBacc, with eight academic subjects. The present Government have abolished it, hoping that other things will flourish. The only other subjects that will flourish easily are the cultural subjects of dance, drama, the performing arts and media studies, because you do not need much expenditure and it can all be done in classrooms.
However, when you need technical work, you have to have machinery and technicians, and they have to measure accurately. That is very important when they are making things with their hands. The teaching of the hand has almost dropped out of English education. This was not during my school life. The only lesson I can remember from the grammar school that I went to just after the war was the two hours I had of carpentry, when I made dovetail joints and T-joints. If pushed, I could still do it. That requires accuracy, understanding and measurement, and this is lacking, so I hope you will be very radical in your proposals.
The Chair: We are certainly being warmed up by you to be radical, Lord Baker. Lady Alexander, you can build on that.
Q87 Baroness Alexander of Cleveden: I was going to ask about technical subjects, notwithstanding what Lord Baker has said about their relative sparsity. Our focus is on how numeracy skills are better embedded and assessed in technical subjects.
Lord Baker of Dorking: Kate can answer first and I will only embellish what she says.
Kate Ambrosi: We certainly believe that this is what will make a difference, not to all young people, but in preventing the number of young people who leave with poor numeracy and literacy skills by embedding those skills into a really clearly purposeful education, which is what a technical or vocational qualification can provide.
That means that our young people attend more frequently, are motivated in class, and can see the reason behind the maths they are learning. Embedding it into what they are learning is really important. We have a lot of engineers, and I do not think anyone would question the role of maths in engineering, with lots of accuracy about measurements and tolerances and so on. We also have a lot of health students, and they also need very good numeracy and literacy skills. We have media students and lots of digital students, and all of them need and learn really great numeracy skills to help them with that.
In order to do that, we have to upskill our workforce. That means that, if you teach health and social care, you also have to have really good literacy, numeracy and digital skills, and you need to be confident in them. In engineering, the maths goes on to a level where maths teachers teach engineering, so they need upskilling because they need to really know how that works in context. There is a lot of development of the teaching workforce that is needed to make numeracy work in technical education.
Lord Baker of Dorking: I look upon the teamwork as one of the best bits of UTCs, when you get five students working together on making something. Some are brighter than others and they have to get used to that. At the end of it, one of them has to explain what they have done. I love listening to their explanations, because these are not plummy public-school voices; these are working class voices saying what they have done collectively in making something work, and that is the sort of thing that has to be injected into the whole education system, and it can now only be done by the sleeve, because no new schools are going to be built over the next 10 years.
You have two streams in a comprehensive school. One is academic, which you are familiar with, and the other is technical, which would be, basically, our curriculum, with great involvement of local employers and the local university.
Sarah Waite: I agree with the points that have been made around upskilling the workforce. Certainly, teaching numeracy through vocational and technical courses is not going to harm the outcomes for those young people. It takes years to train to be a specialist, really highly effective maths teacher, and not as much thought across the country has gone into what that looks like for a teacher of health and social care or early years engineering, so more thought definitely needs to go into what it looks like to do that well.
We should also not teach numeracy only through the vocational or technical area that these young people are studying, because we might risk making those skills weaker for them over time, given that they also have to apply numeracy skills outside of those areas in life—as I mentioned, financial literacy but also just in day-to-day affairs. Also, if they ever did change career later down the line, and we have only ever invested that time in teaching them to upskill in one vocational or technical area, we are going to leave them really exposed to labour market shocks.
Going back to what I said before, it is important to give them a really strong foundation in fundamental numeracy and those building blocks so that they can transfer it across different contexts. Literacy and numeracy are the ultimate transferable skills. They are not just academic subjects. They are vocational and technical subjects in and of themselves, and they should be able to be applied to all contexts.
Q88 Baroness Spielman: Looking particularly at post-16 and young people who are resitting GCSEs or taking another level 2 qualification, what do you see as the most effective ways to teach and support those young people and encourage them to engage more positively with maths?
Sarah Waite: The biggest challenge that the post-16 system has grappled with in terms of GCSE resit pass rates is coming from those with the very lowest prior attainment. At the moment, fewer than 4% of those with a grade 2 at the age of 16 go on to achieve a pass by the age of 19. For those who got a grade 1 at the age of 16, just 0.5% go on to get a grade 4 or above by the age of 19. The figures in terms of those making a grade of progress are not much better either.
We have a problem whereby those with the very lowest attainment are not getting exactly what they need to come out of that 16-to-19 education system with the really robust numeracy skills that they need. They often bring with them low confidence and self-esteem. What they need to experience is something that feels different to what they got at school.
We build our programmes at Get Further around one-to-one and small-group tutoring because we know it is the most effective type of intervention in education. The Brookings Institution has pulled together all the randomised control trials that have been done across the world on tutoring, and it found that over eight in 10 of them have positive, statistically significant impact.
We also know that these young people often have not come from families who have been able to afford to have a private tutor. What we do at Get Further is about putting that effective intervention in front of young people who would really benefit from it and who have not been able to benefit from it before.
Tutoring is effective because tutors can provide really tailored and personalised support to young people in a way that is much harder to do in a larger classroom. Because of those really small ratios, tutors can provide really immediate and specific feedback on the very precise gaps in knowledge and skill that these young people have.
The third reason why tutoring is really effective is because humans are, essentially, social creatures and we learn from who we trust. Just as a strategy, it really lends itself to building really trusting, warm, effective relationships. That is why we pooled that intervention and built our programmes for the retake cohort around one-to-one and small-group support.
Just to give an example, when we expanded this year to work with young people who are NEET and have disengaged completely from education within that 16-to-19 phase, we were told, “They are not going to turn up for English and maths. No way”, but they are. We have attendance rates that are 75%, which, for a cohort who were completely disengaged, is good and something we are really proud of.
Again, we were told that these young people would not step foot in college or engage in that way, but they are turning up to youth centres and meeting with a tutor every week to receive English or maths tuition, so it is a really effective strategy to help with supporting that group.
Kate Ambrosi: I agree entirely in that society has labelled young people who do not have a grade 4 with not achieving what everybody is supposed to achieve, and so the confidence is certainly lacking post-16. Having a trusting and respectful environment is really important. Having materials that suit their age group, that are appropriate and that are clearly linked to the world in which they want to function well and excel in career‑wise is really important.
We develop projects with employers. For example, we are developing one at the moment around live events. It is a live event planning project with music events or festivals, so they can plan a festival in their local area. It is a project entirely designed to improve their maths skills, so they are going to be learning about volume, about financial budgeting, and about which speakers they need for the park they are in and the audience they are meeting. So they are going to apply those skills in order to achieve that goal.
In fact, for literacy, we are developing with EAL a whole “literacy for engineers” qualification, which just means that all the materials they use with the engineers to help them upskill in literacy will be relevant to engineering. They feel respected and that this is for them. They have chosen what they want to do. Let us build on that.
That is not to take away from a need for tutoring to fill basic skills at all. There is a lot of that, but it is just about making sure that the materials show that we know who they are, that they are older and that they are not at primary school, so we cannot just give them the older, basic materials.
Baroness Spielman: One thing that was very disappointing when we evaluated the national tutoring programme at Ofsted as part of the Covid recovery was that, at the margin, tutoring is great, but we found that, in the hands of schools, it became reductive and very directed towards teaching exam technique. The other problem was it started to cannibalise the teaching workforce. At scale, there was a risk of losing all the good teachers to tutoring. That is an interesting systemic finding.
Lord Baker of Dorking: You asked about post-16. One of the most important things that the last Government did was to introduce T-levels. We are very strong supporters of T-levels. We have lots of them. For example, in Tower Hamlets we have a UTC that deals with health. If you were born in Tower Hamlets, your chance of going to university is 6%. But our students in Tower Hamlets do the technical T-level in care and health at 16, and most of them—virtually all of them—go to university. That has been a transformation. T-levels are very important. We are rather inventive. Kate, you told me yesterday that we have created a new T-level ourselves in measuring the weather or something.
Kate Ambrosi: It is in aeronautical engineering. We have two new T-levels—one in aeronautical engineering and one in motorsport engineering. We have a Silverstone UTC.
Lord Baker of Dorking: We have invented these.
Kate Ambrosi: It is taking an existing, very successful course and applying it to a particular industry, which is working very well. Those young people are going on into great destinations.
Baroness Spielman: I visited that UTC.
Kate Ambrosi: Good.
Q89 Lord Hannett of Everton: This is a bit of an overlap with the previous question. We talked about supporting students. Do these approaches that we have talked about up to now specifically address the inequalities in GCSE maths attainment? Do you have any ideas on what else may address the gaps?
Sarah Waite: The studies that have been done on interventions, such as one-to-one and small group support, show that they are disproportionately more effective with young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and young people with lower attainment. They are also really effective for young people with special educational needs and disabilities.
I read a study just last year from a younger cohort than the post-16 one, which showed that, with that small group support, children with SEND made just as much progress as their peers but needed more sessions. They needed about double the number of sessions than their peers received, so that is the difference, really. The strategies are really effective with groups that, typically, have struggled with these subjects, but they sometimes need more sessions than their peers who are starting off from a higher base might need, so that is something that I would recommend.
It also goes deeper than just recruiting a tutor and placing them in front of a student. I completely agree with what was said about lessons learned from the last national, large-scale tutoring intervention, because you really have to think very deeply—this is what we do at Get Further—about how to pitch the material that the young people are going to get at the right level. If you go too hard, they experience, essentially, cognitive overload and completely shut down and switch off. If you go too easy, they feel patronised.
This links to what Kate said about making sure that those materials are age-appropriate. We are thinking at the moment about how we build a curriculum in literacy, for example, for young people who have really low reading ages and need to go back to phonics and decoding. You cannot use primary school materials to do that with a 17-year-old. That is not going to work, so we have been thinking about that quite a lot.
It is about doing those diagnostic assessments, finding out where the gaps are, and then building that curriculum, sequenced really carefully to support them to experience success really early on. There is quite a lot of research that tells us that that experience of success fuels motivation. Once they feel, “This is different. I am making progress”, that then motivates them to put more effort in, and it reinforces each other. It is about building those sorts of strategies, not just into tutoring, as we do at Get Further, but into teaching across the whole in 16-to-19 education.
Kate Ambrosi: Young people with disadvantage are our key focus, particularly at key stage 4 but also at key stage 5. UTCs, perhaps other than Silverstone, have been built in areas where there is a need for regeneration—let us put it that way. The intention is that those young people would stay in their community or at least return to it when they have been to university. Partly, they just need more time. They need more attention. They need smaller groups.
It is also partly about investing in those young people. We have a very high level of employer engagement in our learning. We feel that that is really important because those employers are showing a huge amount of respect for those young people. They often are mentors for those young people. They are providing networks that they do not have access to otherwise, and are helping them develop their own self-belief that they could achieve something great.
Lord Baker spoke about our young people going into the Royal Navy, but I was hearing recently about a young person, 18 years old, who went to work for Amazon on a starting salary apprenticeship of £32,000. That is the highest salary in that household. Numerous industry partners have invested in that young person’s education and career, including mentoring and signposting that maths and numeracy skills are very important, in their work with the young person.
Now, they are supporting the family and the community to have higher aspirations and confidence. It is about building self-esteem, showing respect for the young person and also saying, “Your maths skills are very important, but so are your personal skills, and your ability to work in a group and in a team and to present well”. Combining that and making it clear that the whole person is important to them really works for our UTC students.
Lord Baker of Dorking: The other allies you have, strangely enough, are the chambers of commerce. The only reason that Doncaster has a UTC is that the chamber of commerce said, “We want it, because our members want it”. This was the voice of local industry—small and medium-sized companies—saying, “We are just not getting them from the schools in Doncaster”. They pursued it for three years, with no real help from the Government at all, and we just helped them on and on. They have one that is now very successful; it is so successful that they have been given a second.
We tend not to be in the leafy suburbs; we tend to be in the areas of towns and cities. We deal with a lot of disadvantaged students, and we manage to turn them around. We are changing the life chances of tens of thousands of students, and that should not be denied, even to those who live in the leafy suburbs, because the only way the leafy suburbs will get it is through the sleeve in a comprehensive in a leafy suburb.
There is one in Barrow that is starting this September, and 90% of the students at the school have opted for the sleeve, because they know that British Aerospace is behind them and that is where their jobs are going to be. The one that we are doing in Manchester next year, and I am very grateful that Andrew Burnham is a strong supporter of it, is going to deliver his MBacc, and that is very numerate indeed.
Q90 Lord Blackwell: I would like to go back to Lord Baker’s opening comments, where you were saying that the fundamental problem is that children do not get core numeracy skills early enough. I was a governor of a primary school in the early 1980s, before you were Education Secretary, where the teaching of multiplication tables was frowned upon as old-fashioned and outdated. Things have moved on since then, but we have had evidence that some children find that the curriculum moves too quickly into more abstract areas, and they never get that foundation of core skills.
I know you will have views on this, Lord Baker, so I will maybe start at the other end of the table. Are there practical approaches that we can pick from best practice or, indeed, internationally in terms of ensuring that children at an early age build those numeracy skills so they have that foundation?
Sarah Waite: There definitely are lessons that can be applied earlier as well as later into adulthood. Quite a lot of work has already gone into that primary school phase in terms of thinking about really effective teaching and learning strategies. I would say that, in my ideal world, we would still have that stream of one-to-one and small-group support running alongside all of the school system, so that, if, at any point, a young person falls behind, that really effective intervention helps them to catch up and stops them feeling like they fall into that spiral of disengagement. If they have been out for a period of absence, they need that support so that they can make progress along with their peers and not disengage.
Probably some of the really effective stuff that has hit primary schools has not yet filtered its way into the early years. I am saying this as a parent more than as an early years practitioner. I have two young sons who were in nursery, and I was talking about the concept of manipulatives, which we use in maths teaching to support with some of that development, and I got a really blank face back at me from the nursery staff. I thought, “Maybe I have opened a can of worms here”, but I was a bit surprised, because I thought the EYFS may have supported more of that on a national scale, and I am not sure it is happening. I know you have another session later on early years, so it is probably worth looking at that.
I would also say that we should not fall into the trap of thinking we can fix all of this early, and then we will not have anyone reaching the age of 16 who has low basic skills. Even the countries that do this the best, such as the Netherlands, all still have young people coming out at the age of 16 without that strong grasp of numeracy. What they are even more effective at than we are is providing that really strong focus of catch-up, basically, for those groups. They really embed it in their technical and vocational areas of study as a mandatory thing, so that, essentially, no young person comes out of that system without having reached that standard by the age of 19 or 20. They are more effective at the later stage than we are.
There is also quite a lot of neuroscience in the past few decades that has shown that there are multiple windows of opportunity for learning. In particular, that late adolescence window could be an optimal one for learning skills associated with numeracy. A study done in 2016 at UCL showed that it was more effective for young people in that late adolescence window to pick up those skills than it was when they did them earlier on in secondary and primary.
Our education policy system has not caught up with those developments. It still defaults to, “Earlier, earlier, earlier. We can solve it all if we get it right by the age of five”, but it does not really work like that. You need sustained support and intervention in the early years, throughout school, in 16-to-19 education, and then into adulthood as well, so that we do not let young people fall through the cracks at any stage.
Lord Baker of Dorking: I have just one small point. During the war, my family had to move from the Blitz in London to Southport, and I went to the local Church of England school—my parents could not afford to send me to a private school. I remember doing a lot of shouting aloud in class, with everybody working together and learning their times tables. We all got up to 11 12s. It is embedded in my memory forever. We had to answer lots of questions. This was an ordinary school; these were not the brightest pupils in Southport. That is something to be learned.
Kate Ambrosi: I would just reiterate the point that I have seen a lot of excellent practice in primary schools. It may not be spread across the country and there may be gaps, but there is already a lot of exceptional provision that we may need to learn from more effectively. It is possible that they are learning from each other within MATs, and then that is not spreading beyond that, so that is definitely worth a look at, but there is a lot of exceptional provision in primary schools.
Q91 Lord Stevenson of Balmacara: This is quite a narrow question. Have you been able to make an assessment of the functional skills qualification? Perhaps Sarah could answer first, because I know you have been supporting it. Could you give us an assessment of where you think you have got to on that?
Sarah Waite: We use functional skills qualifications for the cohort of young people who are NEET and who we are working with in Essex. The main benefit of that qualification is its flexibility in terms of how and when it can be assessed. Once you have a young person who is NEET, and you have re-engaged them in maths and developed their skills so that they are ready to take an assessment, you do not want to wait months and months for a GCSE exam cycle to roll around. You want to make sure that they secure that qualification, stay in the system and do not disengage, so it has been a really beneficial qualification.
It is a shorter qualification than a GCSE. GCSEs are about double the recommended guided learning hours. In terms of the level of content, it is a level 2. Level 2 functional skills is as robust as a GCSE in maths. It is really interesting, because lots of people assume that, because it has been put in this applied, real-life context, it is going to be more accessible or easier to pass for young people who really struggle in maths, but what we see is that they find it just as hard, particularly in those wordy problems where they have to have a really strong grasp of numeracy but also be able to read and interpret the question and identify what it is asking of them and how to solve it. That is just the same as doing the five-mark, wordy questions on best buys at the back of a GCSE maths paper.
We see this in Wales as well with GCSE numeracy, which they have created there. Fundamentally, the pass rates end up being similar, because you are still not solving the problem that young people with the very lowest attainment are still struggling to access the curriculum, whether it is functional skills, GCSE maths or GCSE numeracy.
Lord Stevenson of Balmacara: Kate, do you have anything to add to that?
Kate Ambrosi: We do not do the functional skills courses.
Q92 Baroness Hamwee: We have heard, just in the last answer, the term “context”. Kate, you used “contextualise”. I cannot think of anything more motivating, although not for me personally, than going on a course that has “Silverstone” in its title. Are there differences in ages in terms of how important this is, or is it simply what one points to as examples? Importantly, what evidence do you have about contextualisation?
Kate Ambrosi: UTCs are all about contextualisation. In terms of a young person choosing to go to a UTC, Silverstone has a business event part and an engineering event part to it, and some digital provision. They do not study just motorsports, and it is a normal set of qualifications. It is just taught in that context. Even driving up to the UTC, which is on the track, is a different experience.
Really, it is the businesses that put it into its real context, and that is across all UTCs. The Dartford UTC has lots of SMEs, alongside some very big companies, and they will come in and just indicate the purpose of the learning and what they value, and ask them questions and do projects with them in which they are utilising their numeracy skills in the way that they would do at work. Then they meet with apprentices and people who were at their UTC or a local school, and they can see who they can become and what sort of roles they can go into.
They are constantly aware that the skills they are developing are of use and are important, and that they will be valued in the long run. It is all about context, and it is not determined by the student, so long as the opportunities are there. Rather, it is not limited to certain students.
The one in Mulberry, in east London, is a theatre, film and health UTC. Those young people can access a number of ways of learning, but it is all supported by industry. The theatre and film is supported by, in particular, the National Theatre. So they do a lot of work around the National Theatre, but they are learning the skills they need to get a good GCSE grade in maths, English and science.
Lord Baker of Dorking: We sometimes have a bit of luck as well. In Plymouth, the UTC is right outside the dockyard, which is the largest employer in Plymouth by a very long chalk. When I first saw it 12 years ago, it was a secondary school about to be closed. I persuaded them not to close it, and we started it up. We got a lot of support. It went through a difficult time to begin with, but it is now one of our most successful. It is so close to the dockyard and to the apprenticeships there. That is a lucky siting, as it were.
Sarah Waite: In terms of how that motivation varies by age, there are a few things. There is one thing we have probably not talked about. We see, with the 16-to-19 age group and those in their early 20s, that the motivation increases the older that they get. That is because, essentially, they have got closer to the labour market. They have tried to get jobs and to progress, and they have hit against that barrier of not having GCSE English and maths, and have struggled to get on to the next steps that they want. That speaks to the fact that it is still the case that not having these qualifications is the single largest shared characteristic of the NEET cohort, so that is the thing I would add around the variation by age.
Q93 Lord Massey of Hampstead: Is there one recommendation that you would like to give to this committee? Our purpose, as you know, is about numeracy for life and how we get people to that basic standard of financial literacy that you mentioned in your first answer. Do you have one specific recommendation that you would like to propose to us as we get to our recommendations?
Sarah Waite: This is probably quite a big one that will make you wince, but we urgently need to fix further education funding. We are talking about a sector here that takes two-thirds of young people who are missing GCSE English and maths at the age of 16, 60% of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, and a significant number, around 50%, of young people with EHCPs. The funding that they are getting is just so woefully inadequate for them to be able to really effectively raise standards, drive up outcomes and put in the interventions that are needed to make sure that they can transition into the workforce and life with really strong numeracy skills. That is a big difference compared to how other countries such as the Netherlands treat 16-to-19 education.
I appreciate that fixing FE funding is not going to be something that is done overnight, because there are so many gaps in terms of how we treat schools and colleges, but, as a first step, what we think should happen is that the Government should address what is, essentially, a cliff edge that is happening at the age of 16 around disadvantage funding, which is a hangover from when education ended at the age of 16. We are seeing things such as no pupil premium past that point, and funding just dropping off a cliff.
That means that colleges and training providers are just not able to put in place, at scale, the really effective types of interventions that we have all been talking about, because they simply are not resourced to be able to do so. We think that the Government should create a 16-to-19 student premium that follows these learners into post-16 education, supports with that transition, raises their attainment in numeracy and also literacy, and supports them with that transition into employment and their next steps.
Lord Baker of Dorking: If I were Education Secretary, which is an unlikely eventuality now, I would introduce an exam on functional maths at 11 for children who want to take it. They would have a choice of functional maths, which is, basically, basic number, basic number, basic number, all the time. There would also be available traditional maths, which would do complicated algebra, trigonometry and other things of that sort. The students and the teachers would choose which one they want to follow. That is what I would do now, because that would make a very big difference across the country as quickly as possible. You would make the functional maths a very practical, financial, statistics maths—things of that sort that children need in their lives. Once they have them, they will have them for life. Once you can master numeracy when you are young, it is with you. It is all in our minds. You all know what 12 11s are, do you not?
Lord Massey of Hampstead: Can I come back on that? Did you say at age 11? I thought you said, in your opening remarks, that you were against exams at age 11.
Lord Baker of Dorking: Yes, I am totally against an exam at 11. I do not think it is necessary any longer.
Lord Massey of Hampstead: Do you mean year 11?
Kate Ambrosi: Lord Baker, do you mean year 11 or age 11?
Lord Baker of Dorking: No, at the age of 11. I would not have one at the age of 16. That is the exam that I would remove, but that is rather too radical for you to consider. I would bring in functional maths at the age of 11, and that could be an exam that could be conducted by the school itself rather than going out and sitting in a damp hall for hours doing things. On the other hand, the school would also have a stream for the traditional maths of today.
The Chair: Thank you so much, everyone. We have run out of time, but you have given us plenty of food for thought, and we will be carrying on with our inquiry over the next couple of months. If any of you have any thoughts you would like to send in as supplementaries, do let us know. Thank you very much.
