Rishi Sunak sets up review to tackle 'anti-maths mindset'

It&#x27;s important to understand the context behind this, Rishi Sunak went to one of the top private schools in the country, he went on to study PPE, went to Goldman and then was parachuted in to a safe tory seat, he then took on various positions at the treasury before becoming Chancellor and then PM.<p>All this is to say- Rishi Sunak has literally never in his life had any contact at all with state maths education in this country. This is just one of those weird idiosyncrasies of a guy who has a really strong opinion that maths is important having done absolutely nothing to study the issue.<p>So what we end up with is a policy where Rishi Sunak plans to make maths education better... whilst massively cutting school budgets. Teachers unions are all voting to strike because he tried to negotiate a pay deal with them that involved them getting a pay rise that had to be funded out of existing school budgets (ie, you can have a pay rise, but it&#x27;s going to mean you have to turn the central heating off in your schools and stop mending the holes in the roofs). It&#x27;s just a completely out of touch approach. This new initiative won&#x27;t touch the sides against the damage childrens eduction will take due to the failure to pay teachers properly.

&gt; &quot;The prime minister needs to show his working: he cannot deliver this reheated, empty pledge without more maths teachers,&quot; shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson said.<p>Correct. Important context for this is the ongoing balloting for strike action over teachers pay. Anyone who can do maths can read their own payslip and know when they&#x27;re better off in the private sector doing anything else. The recruitment shortage is serious: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;committees.parliament.uk&#x2F;committee&#x2F;203&#x2F;education-committee&#x2F;news&#x2F;194283&#x2F;education-committee-launches-new-inquiry-into-teacher-recruitment-training-and-retention&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;committees.parliament.uk&#x2F;committee&#x2F;203&#x2F;education-com...</a><p>&gt; A 2022 report by the National Foundation for Educational Research shows that the teacher supply challenge is marked particularly by a lack of physics, chemistry and maths teachers. For physics, only 17% of the target to recruit 2,610 trainees was achieved, with only 444 new entrants. The Committee was recently told that at this current level of supply, it would be impossible to carry out the Prime Minister’s proposal of requiring pupils to study maths until 18.<p>In other words, this is already impossible, and no amount of &quot;mindset changing&quot; (wishful thinking) is going to change otherwise. You&#x27;re only hearing this now because the local elections are soon.

It&#x27;s not mentioned in the article but I think there&#x27;s a big gender split as well. This is only anecdotal, but my sister was told all the way through school that she wasn&#x27;t good at maths, despite being in a Grammar School (requires an exam to get in). She ended up doing well in her exams despite years of criticism, and is now a teacher, teaching maths among other things. Again, anecdotally, I more commonly see women laugh off terrible maths skills as &quot;oh ha ha yes I&#x27;m not good with numbers&quot;.<p>It&#x27;s just sexism. From teachers to exams to parents to pop culture, we&#x27;ve decided that women are worse at maths which is obviously both untrue and incredibly damaging. Maybe we should be tackling that.

Just another hollow promise from a prime minster and administration that are staring electoral defeat in a years time.<p>The trend at the moment is to announce &#x27;reviews&#x27; that capture headlines while doing absolutely nothing about the actual problems. When this doesn&#x27;t work, get back to fighting the culture wars.<p>For example, we&#x27;ve had multiple reviews, and actual announcements on the legal side, which replicate already existing powers. It&#x27;s a joke.<p>It&#x27;s cliche to say that the current administration is the worst we&#x27;ve ever seen ... but the last decade has demonstrated that cliche as fact in the UK&#x27;s case.

My reading of British popular culture is that having an elite disdain for maths and engineering is not disqualifying.<p>The engineer, while appreciated, is not admired in Britain.

The vast majority of people do not need to be buried under calculus, it&#x27;s almost as stupid as teaching kids to write with joined up handwriting, it&#x27;s of no relevance to the real world and it turns people off.<p>However we have a population that have no idea about how things like interest rates work, how loans, mortgages, savings etc work, what pensions do, how to determine if that 2-for-1 deal is better than that separate 50% off deal, the total cost of ownership for a 3 month phone bundled contract vs buying the phone upfront (or with a loan), etc.<p>None of that is taught in maths. It could be taught in numeracy or finance or some other lesson, it should be taught, but there&#x27;s a big difference between doing matrix transformations of imaginary numbers and working out that you&#x27;re being fleeced by Tesco

Why work hard on math when they can be taken by foriegners from China, India, and Russia? They have stronger STEM skills and they are KEEN to come to the UK even if they get paid below their worth? So locals can&#x27;t compete so don&#x27;t bother.

Probably aiming for the soviet model, to have more people with STEM capabilities inhouse...Rather than depending on external immigration..

This is silly.<p>Learning maths was fine for me, up to university level.<p>However I would not make the mistake that this would work for everyone, people do have different strengths. I would not have coped with e.g. Art or Music to that level, and there is no point in forcing maths on people who have those strengths. It&#x27;s not one-size fits all. Aptitudes do vary and education should lean into that.