Jeremy Hodgen: We need maths to age 18 now

We’ve known for some time mathematics education in England needs to be improved. England is very unusual in that very few of our students study mathematics after the age of 16. Only around 20% do, whereas across the developed world the majority of 16-18 year olds continue to study maths. In Germany more than 90% study maths to age 18. Yet, the evidence suggests that our students’ understanding of mathematics is not good enough. My own ICCAMS study shows that at age 14 English students’ mathematical understandings have actually fallen in most aspects of algebra and multiplicative reasoning since the 1970s. Currently, just 30% of English 14 year olds can correctly convert 24/800 to a percentage.

In today’s study, we looked at what mathematics people need at work. We reviewed more than 50 studies from across the world. Overwhelming these studies indicate that, in most jobs, the mathematics that people need is relatively simple. Almost all of this maths is covered in GCSE, but people need to be much better at applying these concepts. Of course, engineers and the like do need much more advanced mathematics. But, for most others, what’s needed is a better understanding of how to use, make sense of and communicate with the mathematics they have already covered at school – particularly proportional reasoning, estimation and simple statistics.

Mathematics matters in all sorts of jobs. Nurses need to work out the correct drug doses. Personal finance advisers need to be able to explain why they are recommending a particular product. But it’s not just the obvious jobs. Journalists need to be able to challenge politicians and other about the claims they make. A cut of £20 million may sound like a lot. But put in the context of the £109 billion that we spend on the NHS, say, it’s hardly anything – less than 0.02% of the total budget (and only 0.1% of the £20 billion savings that are being sought).

Maths is hugely important to our economy. Increasingly, in industry, routine calculations are computerized, and employers need people who can use maths to control and improve the production process. It is no surprise then that Richard Layard and his colleagues estimate that this vocational skills gap accounts for around half of the 20% productivity gap between the UK and German economies.

So what can we do about it?

First, it’s not just about maths. Together with my colleagues, Louise Archer and Justin Dillon, I coordinate the ESRC’s Targeted Initiative on Science and Mathematics Education (TISME). Drawing on the TISME research, we have argued that young people in England specialize too early. Today, in the Times, Sir Peter Lampl makes a similar point very powerfully. Here, we can learn from two countries that do better than England: New Zealand and Singapore. Like England, both allow their students some choice over the subjects they study post-16, but, unlike England, both encourage students to study a broad range of subjects. New Zealand offers a statistics and modeling option that is particularly popular with students and employers.

Second, now that Michael Gove has accepted Alison Wolf’s recommendation

that those without a good GCSE should continue to study maths, we need to focus on those students getting a C or B grade at GCSE. But we cannot simply repeat GCSE for these students. We urgently need to introduce a maths option that provides an interesting and compelling case for the value and relevance of mathematics. The study we publish today suggests that focusing on the “simple maths in complex settings” that is needed at work is one way of doing this.

Jeremy Hodgen is Professor of Mathematics Education at King’s College London.