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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
The writer is chief executive of Axiom Maths, a charity
Any household inhabited by a teenager doesn’t need reminding that we’re approaching exam season. The ritual of revision and practice papers is back on kitchen tables across the UK. But in maths, where last year performance had dropped back to 2017 levels, things are not normal.
Maths should be the greatest leveller in an education system. Unlike many other subjects, it doesn’t care what kind of family you come from or about your accent. It shouldn’t matter how many books your parents had at home or whether they took you to museums.
And yet in England today this is not the case. Half of children from disadvantaged backgrounds who were top attainers in maths at primary school don’t go on to get top grades at GCSE. These aren’t children who never liked maths or weren’t good at it. They have a talent and taste for it, but found the odds stacked against them.
This comes at a great cost — for those children and for all of us. They lose out on the £500,000 lifetime earnings premium that a maths graduate can expect relative to other graduates: this equates to more than 15 additional years of median earnings. Even those who do maths to A-level enjoy a 10 per cent earnings premium relative to someone else in the same job.
Imagine how much stronger the economy — and tax revenues — would be if we kept all our best students on track to achieving their full potential. Every year, 30,000 children who were top attainers at the end of primary school don’t go on to get top GCSE grades. That’s almost double the 16,000 specialist skilled Stem-related job vacancies registered in England in 2022. Stopping the loss of talented mathematicians from the school system would be more than enough to fill these gaps. Ironically, you only need simple arithmetic to see this.
So what goes wrong? Things go downhill after primary school. In our survey of 2,000 pupils we found that high-attainers find maths less fun and more boring once they are in the first year at secondary. They tell us that in the teachers’ quest to plug possible gaps from primary they are retaught the previous year’s curriculum. The intellectual stimulation vanishes.
On top of that, they face teenage social pressures and the fear of being branded a geek as they try to make friends. Disadvantaged pupils, particularly the most high-attaining, are more likely to move into social groups that have negative attitudes to learning.
Tens of thousands of children veer off track in maths every year during this transition to secondary. At primary school they were often given puzzles to stretch them, free from pressure because their teachers knew they would do well in their Standard Assessment Tests. At secondary school they are going back over the primary curriculum — bored but fearful that if they make a mistake in the end-of-term test they will be moved down a set. It’s little surprise the shock of this change turns them off maths.
These pupils are missing out on the key to the modern world. Maths is vital across all areas of work and life. In a recent conversation with some senior figures at one of the country’s top universities, I heard about a new trend — that the students they end up admitting even to non-maths degrees are increasingly students who take further maths A-levels. In a wide variety of subjects including biology, geography, psychology and even linguistics, students with an edge in maths perform best.
It’s no wonder: maths is going to drive the next wave of economic progress. From artificial intelligence to big data, every significant innovation increasing productivity boils down to maths.
Britain’s future depends on us being able to ride this wave. The way out is to raise a new generation of children who believe that every problem is a puzzle to be solved — a generation of mathematicians. To do that we must ensure children from all backgrounds succeed, not just some.
