22
Examination of witnesses
Rishi Sunak, Lizzie Gaisman and Bodil Isaksen.
Q142 The Chair: Good morning and welcome, everybody, to this next session on numeracy for life. We are very happy and pleased to welcome Rishi Sunak and his team from the Richmond Project, which is campaigning for maths and numeracy education, so very closely aligned to what we are also looking into. Thank you very much. All three of you, feel free to come in on answers, but do not get too overly voluble in your answers, so we can get through the questions that we have put. You have seen the questions and there will be some freeform ones. To open the batting, Rishi, would you like to tell us a little about the Richmond Project, what drove you to set it up and your key objectives?
Rishi Sunak: Chair, thank you so much for having us today and inviting the Richmond Project team. Thank you to the committee for your focus on this issue. Obviously we are passionate about it, but a committee with your weight and standing focusing on the issue and publishing findings will do wonders for the debate and raising awareness. I appreciate the effort and time that you have shown.
My wife, Akshata, and I started the Richmond Project last year. It is a charity whose mission is to improve social mobility through education, and specifically via numeracy. We did that because we believe that, if people have more skill and confidence with numbers, that will open doors for them at school, at home, at work and in their general lives. In doing that, ultimately, we hope that we will transform people’s lives.
The first piece of work we did last year was a very deep research project into the country’s attitudes and attainment with numeracy. I think it was the largest study of its kind, which we did with King’s College and Public First. It showed, in a quite heartening fashion, that the vast majority—90%—of the country think that this is really important and would like to improve as well. It also highlighted that there is a challenge: 40% of the country does not have strong numeracy. There is a need for attention and focus on this issue.
The evidence in the research is clear that this can make a difference. People with poor numeracy end up earning less and are much less likely to be in employment. It turns out that, if you look at very young children, perhaps the best indicator of their future socioeconomic status is their attainment in numeracy. For all these reasons, this is something that is worth focusing on.
You will hear from Lizzie and Bodil later. They are a brilliant team. Our plan at the Richmond Project is not just to conduct research to help us understand what is happening, but also to partner with, support or indeed initiate projects and ideas that we think can make a meaningful difference and we hope, over time, scale to have national impact. We welcome the opportunity to talk about our work to date and what we plan to do in the future.
Q143 Baroness Garden of Frognal: Thank you very much for being with us. What do you see as the impacts of low numeracy levels on individuals, the economy and society as a whole?
Lizzie Gaisman: As you mentioned, the impacts of low numeracy are felt right across the spectrum. That is to do with the individual who cannot access the future that they want because they are prevented from accessing opportunities, right the way through to stagnating growth for the economy and society.
It is also really important to say up front how emotional this topic is for people in the UK. That has come through loud and clear in our research, and it is also important. Respondents in our research were more anxious only about public speaking than they were about maths. We know—possibly not for this group—that public speaking for most people is an extremely frightening and debilitating fear. That speaks a lot to how people perceive numbers. That lack of confidence impacts how people perform. They feel overwhelmed and like they do not want to seek help. There is a normalisation of avoiding maths.
For individuals, coming to them first, outside of the emotional aspect, there is really concrete value to strong numeracy. I know you had Sarah from Get Further here in one of your previous sessions. Get Further has found that there is an earnings uplift of over £70,000 when someone achieves a pass at maths GCSE versus when they do not. That number is even higher than the equivalent number for achieving a pass in English, so it is clearly vital that we help more people access that life-changing qualification.
Beyond that, we have also done some research into people’s financial literacy. Our research very clearly illuminates that link between core numeracy, so maths in the classroom, and financial literacy in adulthood. That is about people being in control of their finances, which in turn is about them being in control of their lives. There are very profound consequences for individuals throughout our society in terms of low numeracy.
For the economy, I know you are speaking to National Numeracy later today—and they are here. Its research has found that the cost to our economy as a whole of our situation of low numeracy today in the UK is over £20 billion a year, which is over 1% of GDP.
On the society point to your question, there is this very troubling and clear intergenerational pattern of low numeracy. This is particularly pronounced in mothers, and we can talk about that later. The confidence and competence of parents with numbers generally in the home is observed and then absorbed by their children. There is evidence that, if you grow up with family who are less confident about numbers, you will perform less well in schools. That is a very difficult pattern to break, but a very important one.
Baroness Garden of Frognal: It still seems more socially acceptable to be bad at maths than to be bad at English for instance, does it not?
Rishi Sunak: Yes, I think that you have heard that from many of your other panellists, and we would agree. It speaks to, as Lizzie said, part of what we are trying to do at the Richmond Project, which is to change the culture around numbers in our country. Let us be clear: that is a very ambitious thing to do. Having had experience in government and out, it feels to me that, while government can do many things and implement many policies, culture change is something that all of us, in all our different ways, have to contribute to.
We would love to look forward to a world where nobody feels either the need or the necessity to say that they are not a numbers person or that maths is not for them. Our fervent belief is that everyone, with the right support and encouragement, can be more confident and skilful with numbers and, in doing so, live a more fulfilling life. That is, I hope, the work of many years, but something that we can all work towards.
Encouragingly, when you bring that up with people in the media or positions of responsibility, they are very receptive to the idea that they find themselves or others saying it and recognise that it is not a good thing, particularly, as Lizzie said, because children pick up on what their parents or adult carers say and do. It is not good if children at a very young age are seeing that some people are good at numbers and some people are not, and numbers is something to have anxiety about. That is why breaking this intergenerational pattern through positive language and positive experiences with numbers, starting very early, is critical.
Q144 Lord Hampton: My question has just been asked. I was going to talk about the fact that it is normalised and perfectly acceptable to say that you are not good at maths. You talked about the intergenerational low numeracy. Could you talk a bit further about how we stop that? Adults, as we have found, are really difficult to get back into education if they have had a bad experience at school. How do we deal with that so that the adults become the ambassadors almost?
Rishi Sunak: Lizzie will talk a little about our broader approach. Bodil could also helpfully add something, because we have been thinking about this and ended up supporting a programme called Learning with Parents that looks at engaging parents with their children at an early age. Lizzie, do you want to give our overall sense, or, Bodil, talk a little bit about that?
Lizzie Gaisman: That is absolutely right. That is why so far as a charity we are deliberately working across early years, some interventions around school and even into adulthood. To give some context to the numbers, we found that, in particular, low-income mothers are those who struggle most with both number confidence and number competence. In our research we literally tested the maths as well as the attitude to the numbers. Hearteningly, coming back to Rishi’s overall opening comment on appetite for change, they are also disproportionately more likely to want to seek help with that skill. We are pushing against an open door to some extent.
We can talk about adult numeracy programmes specifically, because that is one of the toughest nuts to crack. Bodil can go into Learning with Parents in a second. Briefly, on our approach to family maths, we very much see this as part of the culture change piece. It is all about meeting parents where they are and not giving them—and we hear this a lot—anything else that makes them feel like they have let themselves or their child down or have an endless list of tasks that they need to work through in order to stay afloat as parents. We know that parents feel stretched and busy, and we want to make it feel the opposite of any of those things. Instead of emotional and scary, we want to make it fun, enjoyable and a moment of connection with the children.
There is really good research that backs this up. Stanford DREME found that, with all those early number concepts, learning through play is genuinely effective. The EEF has also found that parental engagement adds at least five months of progress to a child. It is not fluffy just because it is fun. It is actually credible.
In terms of our own work, we started an initiative called Books Count at the beginning of this year. As a team, we talked about the solution and the equivalent of reading your child a story at night, which most of us know that we want to do and aspire to do. It feels like a lovely activity to do together. It turns out that the numeracy equivalent, in some ways, is in fact to still do that, but to find, in those much-loved stories, number concepts, counting, shapes, pattern recognition and so on, and practise those gently with your child in a low-stakes, accessible way.
That is an example of the sort of initiative that we think can really help families. It is something that takes their own daily routine and helps layer in numeracy very gently, rather than making people feel like they need to fundamentally change the way that they talk about numbers with their child. It is more about incremental progress. Bodil, say something about Learning with Parents.
The Chair: On that, I am presuming that that is something parents should start when the child is two, three or four years old, or very early.
Lizzie Gaisman: Yes, if not earlier, honestly. The story that we used to launch Books Count, I am hoping, is a familiar book, but we took The Very Hungry Caterpillar, which is very simple. Usually the child has it as a board book, so very early reading. Most people do not look at this book and think that this is a maths book, and that is ideal. We do not want them to think that. We want them to think that this is a lovely story to enjoy together, and then gently, with the child, you can introduce, “This is what one apple looks like”. I am now struggling to recall all the fruit. It ends with five oranges, but you are counting up.
It is that example, so a story you might read to a child even younger than two, and just very gently introducing those concepts. What is heartening in terms of that initiative is the response we have had from what I would call the literacy community, so literacy charities with whom we have partnered, but also publishers we talk to. Everybody is aligned that building these habits early is great for children, whether it is about their reading for pleasure or their numeracy. It has been really great to see that positive reception.
Bodil Isaksen: Under five there is still so much that we can do, and it is so important that parents understand. I heard about a nursery that sent three year-olds home with a worksheet of “three plus seven, two plus four”. That is completely inappropriate and not what we are asking under-fives to do at all. It is things that are so traditional, such as snakes and ladders, which is brilliant for doing what is called subitising, which is noticing five dots and knowing that it is five without counting.
Too often now, we are shifting away from playing snakes and ladders with our children, sometimes in a very well-meaning way, to, “I’m going to give them an app on a screen that says that it is going to develop my child’s numeracy”. It says that it is going to teach them all these things. Much more traditional activities, such as blocks, which are introducing some spatial reasoning skills, are fantastic for under-fives.
When we go through primary school, we find that parents see worksheets coming home with maths homework and say, “I don’t know how to help my child with this”, or, “When I try to help, my child says, ‘That’s not how we do it any more’”. We do not do subtraction with a column subtraction any more. We do it with a jumping frog on a number line. Then the child says, “I don’t want your help”. They go into school and they say, “My mum told me to do it wrong and now I got in trouble”.
There is something here that is a lesson for parents, but also for schools. If you want parental engagement, which I think they do, you need to think carefully about how you are approaching homework with your children. It could be a session that they do for parents to say, “Here are the new methods. Here is how you can support them”. Do you know what? If the child comes into school with column subtraction and they got the answer right, can you at least celebrate that the homework is done, they got the answer right and their parents supported them? Those are wins, even if we do not get the jumping frog. There is something about that.
What I really love about Learning with Parents, which is one of the projects that we have supported, is that it talks about three categories of ways that parents can support through primary school, right up to age 11. Those are talk, play, and exploration. For example, if you are doing kilometres and metres in your maths lesson and converting between the two, over dinner that day can you have a conversation about, “How long is our journey to school? Is it more or less than a kilometre?” The parent might need to look up quickly how that converts from miles. “What’s the longest journey that we’ve ever been on?” Whether that is a caravan trip up north, or across the Atlantic, you can still have that conversation. That is not something you need to do with a two year-old. That is a really valuable conversation you can have over dinner with your 10 year-old. Exploration is going out into the local area and saying, “We can spot odds and evens going down the street”.
It is normalising these aspects of numeracy and maths in our everyday lives, which means that they go beyond a maths lesson or something that is put in a box to something that we see as part of our everyday.
Rishi Sunak: To add to Bodil’s point, these things all come together. If you are able to engage parents in their children’s learning in the way that Bodil described, you are doing a bunch of things. You are helping the children’s development with foundational numeracy at a critical stage in their development—tick. You are dealing with this intergenerational issue at the same time, because you are showing the parents that they do not need to be anxious about this and that there is a fun and accessible way for them to do this with their children.
That is why we love this intervention, because you are doing something good for the parents and changing the culture around adults and how they think about numbers at the same time as giving the children the developmental benefit that they need. The combination of those things will—and again it is in a small way—over time change the culture around this. That is why we particularly like these early years interventions that engage parents in the activity or conversation, because they have this extra benefit.
Baroness Hamwee: To check for the record, when you talk about parents, do you include grandparents?
Bodil Isaksen: Yes, absolutely. It is anyone with parental responsibility and who is spending that time with children. Childminders who are doing after-school care, for example, are also really important stakeholders. These spaces are where those messages of, “I can’t do maths. Maths isn’t for girls. I’m an English person” can start to emerge. If we can pick up on those and say, “You know how to do snakes and ladders. We can do this”, that can really make a difference.
Q145 Baroness Bull: I am conscious that we have strayed a lot on to early years. I am happy to come in now. My question is to Mr Sunak and it wraps up. You have talked about the need for culture change. You have talked about some initiatives for changing how we live. This is what I am keen to ask you, as somebody who understands the levers of power. We seem to have a policy mindset that puts literacy first. We have a year of reading. We fund libraries. We have books for babies. We do all sorts of things. What could we do, in policy terms, to have a must-have-regard-to mindset for numeracy alongside literacy? Is it about changing our libraries to be centres for words and numbers, for instance? I am keen to know, from somebody who has had his hands on the levers.
Rishi Sunak: It is an excellent question and one that we have reflected on a lot. You are right; literacy charities receive enormously more funding than numeracy charities. There are more literacy volunteers. The worst thing that we could do is to make this an either/or, or some type of competition. We are very reluctant to do that, which is why, as Lizzie spoke about, Books Count was a way that you could bring these two worlds together. We are in a year of reading. Everyone is focused on reading for pleasure. If we are a little careful or deliberate with the books that we are putting in front of the kids, we can achieve some great numeracy outcomes as well.
What are my reflections? One is, and Bodil can talk about this, that government has levers over curriculum. We should take a moment to reflect that the progress in the PISA scores and everything else over the past 10 years or so has actually been very positive. There is still work to do, but we have made progress in all these areas and the education reforms have helped with that. The times table test has been a big success.
Where are the incremental areas that one might look at there? Only government can do that. There are two that spring to mind. One the Government are doing and deserve recognition and credit for. That is the financial literacy addition to the curriculum that they have made a priority. We are delighted to be working with the Department for Education on testing the right curriculum, how to deliver it, how to support teachers to deliver it and what should be in it. We should save that for a separate question. That is one area that government have to do.
The other area is early years. We are struck. We asked ourselves the exam question. We know that phonics has been a huge success. Many of you have been engaged, in your other lives, in your school trusts in seeing the success that phonics has brought for literacy. We set ourselves the exam question: “What is the phonics for maths?”
We think we have an early potential answer, which is a team that we have supported called Rethink Maths, which I will get Bodil to elaborate on. It is developing a specific, structured approach to teaching the early years foundations of numeracy to replicate the strength of the phonics curriculum and the method of teaching. We have supported it. We will roll that out and evaluate it. If that ends up being very powerful, you can imagine that, similarly, government would have to pick up the mantle and roll that out.
Those are probably the two particular initiatives in the school curriculum. The other thing, which I will save, because I do not want to tread on anyone’s toes, but I think we will probably end up talking a little about, is adult education. We have some thoughts there. We have uncovered some policy anomalies that I do not think are deliberate in the way that we fund adult education in a way that may be hindering the uptake of potential programmes. We can get into that at the appropriate moment, but that is probably the other specific policy area that I would point to.
The last thing I would say is that government always has a bully pulpit. I said I wanted to make numeracy a priority and maths to 18. People will all have their views on that, but government can put some things on the agenda. It has that ability. That is up to the people in charge and what they choose to prioritise. They cannot prioritise everything. There are lots of things that are important, but that is always an option. I do not know whether I am missing anything.
Baroness Bull: I am hearing that interventions before you capture children in school are the hardest for policymakers. Is that right?
Rishi Sunak: That is always the case. In my ministerial life, I was responsible for sitting on a group that tried to bring all the different departments together to focus on the early years. Andrea Leadsom was very involved in that work and has spoken about this a lot. It is tricky because the Department of Health and Social Care has some interventions; local government has some interventions; the Department for Education has some interventions, et cetera. Trying to pull that all together is not easy and there are fewer touchpoints.
That said, there are things that outside bodies can do. I would also say that government cannot do everything and we cannot expect government to do everything. Whether it is organisations such as ours or ones that we can support, they can probably, more nimbly, at a grassroots level, make a difference there. Government should focus on doing the big national interventions that it can do.
Q146 Lord Blackwell: To continue on the schools theme, we know, I think, that half of adults have an arithmetic ability equivalent to an 11 year-old. They have clearly been failed somewhere along the route. Would you like to talk a bit more about what you think could be done at schools and the rethink programme, so the phonics that Rishi was talking about?
Rishi Sunak: I do not know whether you have everyone’s background. Bodil, you should tell them a little bit about your background, which is why we defer to you on all topics related to schools.
Bodil Isaksen: I feel very strongly about this. I was the founding head of maths at Michaela, which has had year groups where every single child has achieved a 4 in GCSE maths, including children who came to us with an EHCP and statements of special educational needs, one of whom could not count to 10. It is possible to make more progress than you can possibly imagine between year 7 and year 11. It is also the case that secondary schools should not necessarily have to, but we know that, from five to 16, children likely have 2,000 hours of maths education. That is a huge number.
My frustration is then when we look at the foundation GCSE paper at 16 and say, “X% of people at 16 are failing this. Let us make that exam easier”. I do not think that you would think that that was acceptable for your own children or grandchildren. If you look through a foundation GCSE maths paper, the vast majority of it is actually numeracy, arithmetic and proportional reasoning, by which I mean, “If you have a triangle that doubles in size here, what is going to happen to the square if you also double it?” That is extremely practical for our day-to-day life. There are some questions at the end that go into algebra, with some expanding brackets and things, which is appropriate if you are talking about children who are taking the foundation GCSE and aiming for that 5, so that strong pass.
I do not think that we should be playing around too much with the GCSE exam curriculum. The problem is that we have 16 year-olds who come to that exam paper and too many of them cannot access, let us say, the first two-thirds of that foundation GCSE paper, despite the many hours of teaching that they have had.
For me, one of the most powerful interventions that I saw as a teacher was when the multiplication tables check was introduced in year 4. There was emphasis and understanding that those times table skills were so foundational for everything that came beyond them. It was really understood because there was that degree of accountability for that skill. Those kinds of gates, which are actually on an extremely defined part of the curriculum—we are not saying, “Let’s test everything in lots of disparate contexts so that the teachers do not know where to focus”—are extremely powerful.
I know that the Government are talking about potentially doing something similar for key stage 1. If we can get that right, so that is the right gate, so that teachers really understand, “This is what we need to focus on for six and seven year-olds so that we know that they are numerate”, that could be really powerful. For me, that is something like those addition skills to complement those multiplication skills. The children who are predominantly failing maths GCSE, by which I mean getting a 1 to 3, are often still counting on their fingers at 16. Something has gone wrong there.
Absolutely, you have teachers who are throwing everything at the wall when those are 15 or 16 year-olds. It is extremely high stakes for the school to get those children through. We need to be going further downstream and looking earlier and earlier, so that we can get as many through in a keep-up way, so keeping them up to date with where they should be in the curriculum. Then we can target the children who will not get that pass mark in those gateways, and target the interventions to get those children to catch up.
Rishi Sunak: Do you want to spend a second on that Rethink Maths for Lord Blackwell’s question? It is potentially very interesting.
Bodil Isaksen: Rethink Maths is all about saying, “We have the phonics screening check in key stage 1”, and that is so powerful for lots of reasons. It is not just the fact that it is phonics as a topic area. It is the fact that it is short daily practice, or more or less daily practice. It is 10 to 15 minutes of whole-class practice. There is termly assessment, so your child does a five-minute assessment at the end of each term. It is not high stakes and they do not worry about it, but it allows you to triage the children into which children need more support next term and which children are on track, so you can target, “The teaching assistant is going to spend more time with these children”.
Rethink Maths is applying a similar philosophy for everything from three and four year-olds in nursery classes through to year 1, with a year 2 catch-up year, so very similar to the timescales in which you would do a phonics scheme. It is this little and often daily practice. People say, “Oh my goodness, I can’t believe you’re going to sit four year-olds down and teach them stuff”. They love it. It is really interactive. There is lots of call and response, and they can see themselves getting better. That gives us a really solid foundation for these six and seven year-olds to go on.
We talk in reading about how you learn to read so that you can read to learn. The equivalent in maths is that you learn those maths skills and get that done, so that you can use these maths skills and apply them to problems. You can do mathematics, rather than just arithmetic. If we can apply that philosophy to numeracy and maths, we will be well on our way to seeing some real changes.
Rishi Sunak: To Baroness Bull’s point, this is a great example of what organisations that are not government can do. We set ourselves that intellectual essay question: what does phonics for maths look like? The team went out. We spoke to lots of people. We came across a brilliant set of educators who have come from that world and similarly were focused around this area. We were able to fund them to go away and develop this curriculum. We will fund it to be trialled and evaluated in a couple of hundred different schools and early years settings.
We can move far more quickly than government can. At some point though, we have to be able to hand over to government and say, “We think this works”, but ultimately it will require government to make a decision to do something nationally.
Before we leave the early years and school bit, maybe Lizzie can say a few words, going even earlier than that, about what we should expect children to be able to do by the time they get to school in the first place. I know that you have had a couple of other comments on that from previous panellists.
Lizzie Gaisman: It is to underscore how much we agree with the recommendation to integrate numeracy into school readiness, so pulling together that early years and schools piece in one place. I know that David Thomas and perhaps others have said that it is an issue that the guidance today does not say anything about counting. He does not mean specifically counting. It is a proxy for saying anything else about numeracy. We know that counting to 10 is a really important piece of the hierarchy of maths learning.
If you are a reception teacher and children come in—I think the stat is that some 36% of children come in not able to count to 10 in reception year—you really have your work cut out for you to get them to where they need to be even by the end of that first year. Being able to put something concrete in school readiness guidance that is saying that that is an important skill to build is really key. In an ideal world it would be with the deep understanding of number that sits behind being able to count to 10. What does it really mean to grow a number of things from one to 10? Even being able to understand the order of the numbers and how they come is still a really important building block. Something that succinct and clear would be very helpful to parents and educators alike.
Lord Blackwell: I have a quick follow-up. The ambition to get every young child familiar with numbers through the kinds of programmes you have talked about is terrific. You say you would not water down the GCSE, which for best-able children is clearly an important benchmark. Is there a case, as has been put to us by some people, that there will be some children who are slower at numeracy and will take longer, and the curriculum leaves them behind as it moves on to algebra and geometry? Is there a case for having a parallel numeracy qualification so that employers could see that these people have the numeracy skills without requiring GCSE?
Bodil Isaksen: I find this very interesting. People have put to you the idea that you could have the equivalent of an English language and English literature GCSE but for, let us say, numeracy and maths, where maths would be geometry and your more abstract and more difficult algebra. English language is taken by the whole gamut of students. You require that differentiation in an English language paper between a grade 9 and a grade 8. That actually makes it worse for those children who are struggling the most. Let us say that we were replacing foundation and higher with numeracy and maths GCSEs. The numeracy paper would have to be sufficiently challenging to be able to discriminate between a grade 9 and a grade 8. I do not think that that works for maths, because maths is so intrinsically hierarchical.
There are two distinct domains in the English analogy of language, so linguistics et cetera, and literature, so books, poetry et cetera. There is not really an equivalent for that in maths. When we are talking about these numerical skills, they are the foundation of every direction in which you can take maths. They are the foundation of the geometry or of the financial literacy if you want to take it in a more practical direction. It would be really hard to serve the children who struggle the most with a numeracy GCSE that spanned that whole grade range from grade 9 to grade 1.
Rishi Sunak: I am conscious the Chair is looking at us; we will keep our answers shorter. I know that we are going to move on to adults. When we get on to talking about adult education and how best to take adults, we have thought a lot about this. I have thought a lot about it. As Bodil said, it is the right thing to encourage and support everyone to try to get that GCSE. We should come on to what we do with those children who do not quite get it. The Government have put forward options for different qualifications after that. We have views on that and we should get into that in our broader conversation on how we support adults.
Our base case is that, given that the foundation GCSE largely is core numerical skills and you can pass by knowing those, that is the right thing to aim to support people to do. We should have an open conversation about what we do thereafter with those who do not quite get there.
Q147 Lord Massey of Hampstead: Moving on to adult education, as you mentioned, much of the evidence that we have heard points to a major gap in adult numeracy, especially after the end of the Multiply programme. Do we need a co-ordinated strategy for adult numeracy? Can we have your reflections on Multiply after its published evaluation, which we all received, I think, a couple of sessions ago?
Rishi Sunak: I can spend a moment on Multiply; then Lizzie and Bodil could give you our broader thoughts on how best to support adults. We will probably separate that into how we support young adults, i.e. those children who have just missed out on the GCSE, because we have a specific set of views on that, and, more broadly, the adult population. When I initiated Multiply as Chancellor, it was because, as we have all been discussing, I think numeracy is important and foundational, and would be good for those individuals, as well as society, the economy and the country at large.
I was encouraged by what I read in the evaluation report and what Multiply seemed to do successfully. I was not involved in the intimate detail of delivering the programme, but it seemed to do a very good job of widening and broadening participation in adult numeracy programmes, significantly increasing the number of adults, from a wide variety of backgrounds, who engaged with the programme who otherwise would not have. In that sense, it was hugely additive. You always want to make sure that the policy you are doing is additive, rather than duplicative or replacing other things. That was a success.
The completion rates were very positive and then adults went on to further courses and study, which again is positive. I was actually quite struck. The calculation was that 85% of people on these Multiply courses would otherwise not have done a numeracy-oriented adult education course. That is pretty striking. It covered almost 250,000 people. The completion rate was around 97%, which is again very positive for programmes such as this.
On reflections, if one was looking at doing something like this in the future, which obviously I would be supportive of, there is this open question as to whether there should be some type of accreditation and whether this programme should be focused on giving people something that they can walk away with. That also would mean that the programme itself could be measured and evaluated from that perspective. There is a strong case for that. I know that they debated it apparently at the time of the programme and felt that it would harm participation, but that is a sensible thing to look at.
The other reflection, hearing from everyone, was that those involved in delivering it or benefiting from it all thought that it was excellent and good, but they all said that there should have been greater national visibility and awareness of the programme—I made this point before about a more co-ordinated effort—for everyone to know that this programme and topic is important and foundational. That should be slightly distinct from the general skills messaging that government put out. Whether it is jobcentres or central government, everyone needs to be saying a bit more about this. That seemed to be quite a strong message that came across from everyone. Those are some reflections on Multiply.
When it comes to adults, picking up from your question, Lord Blackwell, it is worth differentiating between what we do with those children who have missed out on a GCSE and, separately, how we help adults in general more foundationally and specifically with financial literacy. Bodil and Lizzie could take either of those. Each of you do one of those, because that gives you the full picture.
Bodil Isaksen: From 16 to 19, the GCSE resit policy is very important for those children who have got, let us say, a 3. They have just missed out. They are nearly there. Let us give them another chance to get that piece of paper, which can be absolutely life-changing for them. I am very curious to see what the stepping-stone qualification will be for the children who got 1s and 2s.
We have spoken to lots of colleges and learners over the past six months. The functional skills qualification, which is often meant to be this alternative, has lots of problems. That stems from the fact that it needs to be made functional with lots of different contexts and fair to learners. Let us say you are doing welding and know the world of welding very well. You would not need paragraphs to explain that context, but all the other learners who are also taking this qualification would. It is very hard to do that in a way that is not extremely wordy. It is often quite niche topics that you are trying to do and the maths gets lost in that. It becomes a test of, “Do you understand this context and have the literacy ability?”, rather than the functional skills maths focus that it is intended to have.
There are definite advantages and reasons why people take that qualification. For example, Sarah Waite said that it works well for NEETs who would otherwise not be coming into college. They are not going to wait until June to sit their test. Let us get them to do it in a much more flexible way. That is the inherent challenge of something that is as broad as functional skills. In order to be fair, it needs to apply in lots of different contexts. It is really hard to do that well.
Rishi Sunak: The last thing on that is that there is something incredibly foundational about having GCSE maths. When we think about alternative qualifications, the challenge you always have is whether they will be valued by employers. They can help people in their day-to-day lives if they get these skills, but, ultimately, if they are going to translate to better employment and earnings outcomes, you need to make sure employers understand and value them. My reflection, from thinking about this when in government, is that that is quite a hard thing to do. It takes time and requires an incredibly concerted effort from government, working with businesses, to make sure that they value it. Whatever you do that is not a GCSE, you very quickly need to make sure has some currency; otherwise it will not end up benefiting people actually in the labour market.
Supporting these young adults to get this foundational qualification is vital, because it has an enormous impact on their lifetime earnings. I think that Sarah has given evidence from Get Further, which is a fantastic organisation that focuses on this area. It is a tricky thing to get right, but it is worthy of attention. Maybe Lizzie can talk a little about, given that we believe this is really foundational and important, how you help people in their 20s, 30s and beyond who did not pick it up the first time around get that qualification.
Lizzie Gaisman: It is a different picture there, because they are coming back. The programmes that we have seen so far are people coming back to maths, maybe observing its effect on their employment and broader life. That is great because it speaks to that intrinsic motivation and recognition of numbers being important that we mentioned earlier. There we would see a different set of potential opportunities to improve the space. There are some great examples up and down the country of programmes that provide to those older adults, so people whose age does not end in teen, but it varies. It is patchy. You might live in a postcode where the provision is fantastic or you might do less well.
We see an opportunity to improve online delivery. We have spoken to some fantastic online providers that are turning away applicants in their thousands, because the funding rules today mean that you need to be from the area where the physical college is in order to enrol. We see that as quite a crucial missed opportunity. It also shows up, incidentally, in where the individual takes the exam. Studying online but doing an exam in person presents challenges with the distribution of funding locally versus nationally. We think that that is a very interesting prospect that people should consider.
We should be thinking more broadly about how we can encourage more organisations to offer provision digitally where they are currently focused in colleges. I know that you mentioned the financial literacy piece. It is related.
Rishi Sunak: We should probably get on to that separately. Baroness Bull, to your point on what government can do, Fran, who is on our team, has done great work on this. We set ourselves an essay question: “We want to support adults later in life with gaining this foundational qualification that at least now is the best way for them to get the skills they need and signal to employers that they have them. How do we do that?” An online delivery is the most cost-effective way to do it, but also means you can standardise the teaching and reach people at a time that is convenient for them. Adults are busy with their lives. They are not schoolkids where you know where they are during the day and they are captive to you.
As we try to find a solution, we run up against these policy issues where we have devolved these adult education budgets. To take a step back, everyone is entitled, if they do not have a level 2 qualification—it is something that I changed in government—to get this level 2 qualification at any stage in their life, which is a good, positive step. The local authority likely is going to say, “You have to do it at a provider that is in our area. It has to be delivered in person”. Then you have, “Hang on, we have this brilliant online provider that could do this nationally, with a very high-quality, standardised curriculum”. Adults prefer to do these things online because it is flexible, but there are these funding and policy things that stop that from happening. That is one area that the committee can look at in its recommendations, because we certainly are going to spend more time and more of our financial resources to help adults who want to do this. We are likely to want to find a technology-enabled way to do it, but it will ultimately run up against some of these challenges down the line.
To pick up on what Bodil said, from a policy change perspective there is this transition from school to college on the resits and sharing of information. You might want to tell the committee. This is a practical thing that the committee, I hope, can put a bit of pressure on to help these children who do not get the GCSE and who are then off at college.
Bodil Isaksen: We heard from 16 year-olds who then went on to college. Let us say they are doing hair and beauty as their main course, but they are required to go to maths lessons, often against their will, because they got a 3 in their GCSEs at 16. We saw that, if you are retaking English, you are likely to gradually nudge up and improve a little bit every single time you take it. That is much less likely in maths. You can understand that. You are writing in your coursework every day for your health and social care, or whatever course you are doing. You are not using those maths muscles in the same way, apart from in these maths lessons.
If we believe this piece of paper is really important, there is something about making sure that we really seize the moment on that transition from school to college. A year 11 teacher can tell you backwards and forwards what the gaps are for each individual pupil. They can tell you, “They are in the bag. They are not in the bag”, but that knowledge is lost when they go to college. The information flow does not pass through.
Individual learners are entitled to the entirety of their script from the GCSE that they sat. It could be something as simple as telling students that you can request that, pass it on to your college and say, “This is where I lost the marks”. If they take their GCSE in November, so that term, that is really not long. You have September, October and November to go from that 3 to the 4. They have a much better chance of bagging that qualification. There is something about that transition from school to college, which is where many of these students who do not get a pass go, that we can improve.
Rishi Sunak: Improving those data flows between those institutions would really help the kids.
The Chair: We are running rather tight on time. There is so much to discuss, but we could be a little more succinct.
Q148 Lord Hannett of Everton: I want to ask you about the role of employers specifically. My previous experience, as a preamble to the specific question, was around lifelong learning in the workplace, where many large employers and employee representatives supported courses. Of course, these courses were of specific interest to the individual. We have heard from businesses about the role of some employers in providing training and support for their workplace in numeracy, but this is a very mixed picture. We have also heard about falling investment in training. What do you see as the role of employers, if any, in addressing numeracy skills? What is their incentive to do that?
Rishi Sunak: That is an excellent question. We think that there is a role for employers with adults. When I talk to them and when I am visiting businesses, the pitch would be that there are a couple of aspects to this. Your employees are more likely to do their job better and progress in your organisation if they have these skills. Also there is a benefit to you from having a more financially literate and confident workforce. Most employers agree that, if their employees have financial issues that they are grappling with, it distracts them from their work. They are ultimately going to be less focused, engaged and productive for you at work if there is financial anxiety elsewhere in their life. Given that, there is a strong incentive, or should be, for employers to do this.
Many do it very well. I remember visiting those businesses in government and hearing incredibly inspiring stories of people who had been working with companies, starting as young children or 16 year-olds without any qualifications, where the company had supported them over their career to move up. That is brilliant for everybody.
The other reason that we would like employers to do it, and we are going to try to find ways to do this and it speaks to what I said earlier, is that it is quite hard to reach adults. It is easy when we think about schoolchildren, 16 to 19 and even early years. It is difficult to co-ordinate, but we broadly know how to get at them. Adults are tricky. Unless you are doing it through their employers, you are reliant largely on them doing an online course, which is certainly easier than physically showing up to their local education college.
If more employers do this, you are more likely to be able to get to adults, because you should always meet people where they are. That is a good bit of advice we got when we were setting up. Lots of people who have been in this for longer than we have said that. It is good advice, and workplaces in that sense have a unique opportunity to engage with adults and then support them, not in a self-interested way alone, but also more broadly for the individual.
Bodil Isaksen: There is an interesting example in Scandinavia where quite often you find that an entry-level employee does not necessarily require a maths qualification, but they might never be able to progress to the next stage to be a manager or supervisor because they do not have one. This scheme supports the employer to send that employee off to get the qualification. They come back, they are promoted into managerial position and their entry-level role is then backfilled with someone who is unemployed, so it is win-win.
Q149 Baroness Shawcross-Wolfson: I should declare for the record that I worked for Rishi Sunak in Downing Street and that I am now a trustee of the Richmond Project. You have mentioned your work with the DfE on the financial literacy curriculum in schools. I wonder whether you could tell us a little more about the priorities in that area for both children and adults.
Rishi Sunak: I will cover one particular aspect of it called the big three, and then maybe Lizzie can talk to you about our broader work with the Boston Consulting Group on financial literacy education in general. Then Bodil can pick up about how you deliver this in classrooms. There is a professor at Stanford, Annamaria Lusardi, who, for over two decades, has pioneered research into financial literacy education and specifically come across what she terms the big three. She has concluded from all her work that there are three straightforward questions that are the best way to gauge people’s financial literacy, competence and understanding. There are three foundational concepts.
One of those questions is around inflation, another is around compounding and compound interest, and the third is around risk diversification. Her and her team have tested those questions rigorously across multiple countries over multiple years. For the first time, in a similar way, we conducted that research here in the UK earlier this year. The findings were, in many ways, a wake-up call, because 40% of adults could not answer the big three. That puts us below lots of peer countries, such as Germany, the United States, Canada and others. There is work to do here.
When it comes to the curriculum and the work that we have been doing with DfE, we are keen to make sure that these concepts find their way into the financial literacy curriculum. They have been proven, based on decades of evidence and research by brilliant academics, to be incredibly important to helping us understand. We are thinking a little more broadly, beyond that financial literacy curriculum for young people, about how we can get a greater awareness of those big three in the adult population as well. I will hand over to Lizzie to talk a little bit about the broader work that we are doing with DfE and Boston Consulting Group. Then Bodil will pick up the school delivery bit in the classroom.
Lizzie Gaisman: One reason the big three is so compelling is that it is manageable. We were struck, when we released our financial literacy report, by the resonance of three things. You see that in lots of other different areas. They are memorable and engaging, which is important, especially when we think about not only the children in the school but their parents and their own financial literacy. The “what” really matters, and, as Rishi said, we have been emphasising that in our discussions. They interplay with all sorts of concepts, from borrowing through to planning for retirement. It is quite holistic, despite being this manageable set of three things. The “how” is also really important.
We were lucky enough to do a big piece of research with Boston Consulting Group, as Rishi mentioned, on best practice financial education programmes globally. Its recommendations were really revealing. In terms of the “what”, being rooted in numeracy sounds like a given, but it actually is not, so it is important to say that out loud. Financial literacy should be explicitly connected to numeracy. The “how”, so how it is actually put into place, is just as important in terms of getting people engaged.
That looks like a few specific things, most notably regular revisiting of topics in age-appropriate ways, with sequencing so that, for example, you might learn about the very basics of borrowing in key stage 1, but you would come back to interest as a percentage later on. It is that building and repetitive nature that is really important. Intuitively, it is situating it in the child’s real-life context, with as many opportunities to be as practical as possible. Coming back to the work with the Department for Education, we have shared all that knowledge with it in our interactions, because I think that will be key to success. Bodil can say a little bit about the testing in schools, which we will also be doing for the department.
Bodil Isaksen: When you tell teachers that you are going to be adding some extra things for them to teach and they already have busy schedules, it does not always go down well. Particularly on this one, we did some polling and found that teachers’ financial literacy was worse than the general public’s. We have a lot of work to do before we are entrusting this extra demand to them. Testing how that works in practice is something that we are going to be doing with schools, primary and secondary, over the coming year and seeing what works and what does not.
Rishi Sunak: On that, I want to put on record our thanks and appreciation to the department, the Secretary of State and the Minister, who are very passionate about getting this right. They are talking to lots of people, but we feel very good about the engagement that we have had with those in the department and their willingness to take ideas from organisations such as ours. Where we can, we will help them move things along quickly and test things to get this right for the country. They have been very open and willing to do that and deserve credit for that. It is not always easy in government, as Eleanor and I both know, to get things like that happening so quickly. They are absolutely committed to doing that and we are delighted to be able to play a small part in it.
Q150 Viscount Stansgate: My question was about early years education, so we have covered a lot of this already. I have had to wait all this time to ask what has already been asked and dealt with. I do not want you to reopen all of that. My colleague here intervened earlier and said, “What about grandparents?” I am a new grandparent, so I feel this very strongly and I look very carefully at what could be done. Is there anything you can add, as a result of the work you have done, on the way in which grandparents have a role? People are living longer and there will be greater opportunities for grandparents to play a part in a way that perhaps 50 or 100 years ago they could not or did not. Also, there are the family dynamics. As you said yourselves, parents can be unconfident about how to deal with numeracy with their own kids. Having their own parents intervene could perhaps cause problems. Is there anything you want to add on the grandparental angle, please?
Lizzie Gaisman: Congratulations. That is very exciting.
Rishi Sunak: That is the most important thing to say.
Lizzie Gaisman: It is a new life phase. There are a few things. Interestingly, our research threw up that the people with much the strongest financial literacy were, in general, older. Even controlling for education, those above 55 who had left school at 16 were doing better than people in their 30s with a PhD.
Rishi Sunak: That point is incredibly strong. I want to make sure everyone got it. To your point about how valuable grandparents can be, it is so worth repeating, because I genuinely thought it was a mistake.
Lizzie Gaisman: Yes, it is true, so I will say it again. The one key area of wisdom is in financial literacy. Our research has shown up that the older age groups, even those who left school at 16, will outperform a younger postgraduate degree-level educated person. Make what you will of that challenge for us nationally. Clearly those generations have something very specific to offer there.
Beyond that, I would say a few things. First, if you hear negative discussion about numbers—“You won’t need this, darling, because I didn’t. I always hated maths too. You’re not on your own”—you can, at your own risk, as you say, gently intervene. The conversational piece is very important.
We have actually had this question before. We did a piece for Good Housekeeping, which has mothers and grandmothers, and some fathers and grandfathers, among its readership. It was raising this exact question and we were delighted that it asked for practical tips, so I will share some with you now. It might be about observing shapes. Rishi’s favourite is the triangle slice of pizza versus the square box. They are those sorts of things.
Rishi Sunak: There is the rectangle napkin and the circle plate.
Lizzie Gaisman: We could go on. If you are taking a trip out for a pizza or anything like that, observing shapes is really nice. There are also lovely number games, such as making a pattern with your grandchild and asking them to continue it, or doing it wrong on purpose and having them correct it. You can measure everyday items around your house, largest to smallest. It is about, when you are playing with them anyway, thinking, “How can I make this a number-themed game?”
Viscount Stansgate: Thanks. I will remember that next time I take them to Pizza Express.
Lizzie Gaisman: Yes. Good luck.
Q151 Baroness Hamwee: I want to ask you about technology. Before I do, though, related to this, can I just pursue shapes and spatial issues, and whether and how much that figures in education for adults? Earlier this week, I was told that, if you want to pass your driving test, you are now tested on whether you can use satnav. To me, satnav does not replace maps. Does this come into your thinking?
Bodil Isaksen: The spatial reasoning research is really interesting and quite counterintuitive. It is not just that, if you have done lots of spatial reasoning in your early childhood, you can do geometry questions better; you can also do arithmetic questions better. It is something to do with you being able to visualise a number line and what is going on. Something happens in your brain if you have that.
With adults, I have not seen the evidence that you can intervene and magically transform someone’s ability to do maps in their head—I certainly struggle with that—but there is definitely something there.
Baroness Hamwee: Thank you. Well, here is the real question. What will the role of numeracy be and how will it change as technology advances? What are the challenges here? Will numeracy remain important? Will there be a mindset of, “I do not need to be able to do that because a machine will do it”?
Rishi Sunak: That is a big question, Baroness Hamwee.
Baroness Hamwee: That is what we were just discussing.
Rishi Sunak: I am a passionate believer that AI in particular is going to transform every aspect of our economy, our society and our lives, and, if we get it right, for the better. We have to prepare young people for that world and to be able to use those tools. In my mind, there is absolutely no change in the importance that we should place on them having foundational numeracy. When I was in government, I thought people should study more numeracy all the way to 18. I absolutely still believe that today.
The best way to prepare young people for this world, on top of making sure that they can use these new tools, is for them to have a breadth of understanding and knowledge, because, ultimately, human judgment is going to get more and more important. We have to make sure that we understand that there is a difference between knowledge and wisdom, or knowledge and judgment. These machines are going to be great at having lots of knowledge, but the ability to critique it, to judge the output of it, to know what the right question to ask is and to sense check will remain critical human skills. If you have not had the cognitive education all the way up to 18 in numerical concepts, I do not think that you will be well placed to thrive in that world if you are overly reliant on the machine without that ability. That would be my quick answer on that.
The Chair: Lady Alexander, would you like to take our last question and weave any of your own thoughts in with it?
Q152 Baroness Alexander of Cleveden: This is a particularly exciting one to ask of a former Prime Minister, but we will happily have everybody else comment as well if they so wish. We have asked this question to everyone. As you will be well aware, the challenge is what we ask of government, because, fundamentally, that is the report. We will make recommendations to different stakeholders. If there was one recommendation that you would like to see the committee make to government in its final report, what would that be?
Rishi Sunak: We will all have a go, Lady Alexander. As we have been going through, we have been trying to give you a sense of some very specific micro-policy areas that I think are worthy of your attention and time to recommend to the Government.
We organise our work in three buckets: family, foundations, and financial. Maybe I will speak to the family aspect of it, which many of you have asked about. Certainly, our recommendation is that we focus on the intergenerational and cultural aspects of this. Part of dealing with the cultural issue around numbers, and the lack of confidence and the anxiety that people have around them, is by tackling this intergenerational issue. We were just talking about grandparents, but it is so clear that that link between parents or grandparents and little children is absolutely critical.
I am not going to pretend that it is an easy thing for government to get at, but it is probably the kind of thing that government is not well set up to even think about in the first place. On this, we should be thinking about how we break that intergenerational link. If we do not, we are going to be here in years to come still talking about the fact that people do not think that they are numbers people, or are scared about maths.
We really want to break that cycle and have everyone feel confident around numbers, because it is going to unlock greater opportunities for them and better control in their lives and, ultimately, transform their life for the better. That requires us to think about breaking this intergenerational loop. We talked about lots of ways that you can do that, but the macro observation is thinking about that in the first place. That would be my quick thing. Lizzie, do you want to pick one of the others?
Lizzie Gaisman: Thinking about the financial literacy piece, the genius of the big three is how simple they are. I would say, “Focus on that”. It is great that we are having the conversation about schoolchildren, but we should also think about adults. It is an incredibly measurable way to track progress. As far as we can, we need to adopt the big three as the yardstick for progress. To come back to it, our research found that four in 10 people have poor or very poor financial literacy—i.e. can answer only one or possibly none of those questions. It is very easy to track that and see, I hope, that number coming down with time.
Bodil Isaksen: In terms of schools and foundations, we really need to make sure that we are not throwing the baby out with the bathwater with any new qualifications and ideas. There is not much point in having a new qualification if it is not valued in the big, wide world. You cannot just make a new qualification and demand it be so. That is not how it works. There are real opportunities to introduce some checks, such as the times table check that has been introduced in year 4, so I would encourage the Government to think about whether there are one or two points in a schoolchild’s journey where we could add some other foundational concepts there.
The Chair: Thank you so much. I am sorry we have overrun, but I think you had very important contributions to make, so we will bear all of those in mind. Thank you very much indeed. We are nearly at the end of our evidence sessions, but, if you have any further thoughts that you would like to send through to us, we would be very keen to hear them.
Rishi Sunak: Chair, thank you so much again for inviting us and for the good, thorough conversation we have had. I think there is a lot of alignment between your work and how we see the world, and we would be delighted to follow up. Likewise, the offer is there. If you have any follow-up questions or thoughts provoked by this that we can add a little more information or shed some light on, we and the team would be delighted to do that. Again, thank you for today, but, more importantly, thank you for your attention to and focus on this matter. It will really raise awareness and give it real weight, for which we are all very grateful.
The Chair: Thank you very much.
