Just when you thought we had entered the Abyss of Despair, Prime Minister Sunak has pulled the answer out of the air – the fundamental and long-term solution to all of our problems is (roll of drums)…making Maths compulsory to the age of 18. It’s almost like the moment in ‘Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ when after seven and a half million years Deep Thought announces that the answer to ‘Life, the Universe and Everything’ is 42.
As a Headteacher who has worked in education all of his life, I want to profoundly agree with Mr Sunak that ‘better thinking, including mathematical thinking’ is part of the answer to ‘life, the NHS and the political crisis in our country’, but at the same time dismiss this announcement as ‘Tory wokery’!
First of all, what do I mean by this? Surely ‘woke’ is the stick used by the Right to beat the Left. Don’t get me wrong, the whole phrase is an absurd piece of political theatre, designed to attract unthinking boos. But let’s give it a little objectivity – ‘woke’ means political thinking which is ideological, rather than pragmatic; simplistic political wishful thinking.
The reasons why Mr Sunak thinks these extra years of Maths are so important to our people fall exactly in this category. Almost the first justification we see for the policy is that this is something being done by our international competitors. This is the first evidence of ‘woke’ thinking. It is wishful, lazy thinking because you cannot take one part of a totally different education system entirely out of context and try to transplant it into our system, even if it was the best idea in the world. Take one example – Germany. Yes, the German education system produces much better engineers on the whole than the British. But that is the result of a whole, organic education system – including investment in the equal status of vocational education – which has evolved largely free from political interference. Mr Sunak, you cannot base such important educational change on such narrow, flawed logic. That is ‘woke’ thinking!
The flawed logic goes even deeper. It is true that after years of under-investment British students are underperforming. Another figure for you. British public expenditure from GDP was 3.9 per cent in 2019 (source - Commons Library), the 19th lowest figure out of 37 OECD members. But then to argue for more of the same is nonsense. Two more years of poorly funded Maths teaching is likely to worsen the situation, not improve it.
The second ‘why’ is even worse. We are led to believe this is a ‘personal mission’ for Mr Sunak. We can all believe how important Maths has been in the life of a high-performing financier (although we must also ask about the role of social status and networking). But for now, lets just do the Maths.
Mr Sunak’s personal success in Maths came from his education at Winchester College. Annual fees at Winchester are £33,900 for a day student, £45,936 for a boarder. Not all of that will translate into expenditure per student, but parents will be expecting significant returns for that kind of money. The highest net expenditure per student in UK government high schools is in London and that figure is £8,384 (statista.com - 2021 figures). If you’re unfortunate enough to be born in the East of England this figure falls to £5,633. On its website Winchester proudly states ‘class sizes are small, allowing for a flexible curriculum that is shaped to individual progress’. How many state schools would love to be able to say that?
As a headteacher, I can tell you categorically that class size is one of the most critical numbers in education because of the ‘personalisation’ to individual learners it allows. In the ‘Maths’ section of the Winchester website, it states ‘the emphasis is on dialogue between the class and its teacher. This approach enables pupils to think critically and to challenge assumptions’. Again I say ‘yes, a thousand times, yes’. This is exactly what EVERY CHILD deserves from our education system, but have you ever tried to do this with a class of 30? It’s not impossible. I’ve seen gifted, dedicated state school teachers who could deliver all this and more. But here’s a final bit of Maths, Mr Sunak. Winchester, as an independent school, can offer its own salary scale – from an average of £24,070 to a maximum of £55,964. In UK state schools teacher salaries range from £23,720 to £35,008. Speaking as an investment banker, where would you advise the highest performing teachers of Maths to ply their trade? Go figure!
So Mr Sunak unless you are prepared to extend the conditions at Winchester to every child in every school in the UK, your announcement is ‘woke’! An ideological scam.
So what are the alternatives? I know it’s deeply unfashionable to look to China for the answers to anything, but as a teacher who has lived and worked in China for ten years, I can share long-term and sustainable answers that are nothing to do with ‘quick fix’ attention-grabbing electioneering. My students in Beijing achieve outstanding success in Mathematics at all levels. Many of them go on to study Maths, Finance and Engineering at the sort of universities we would want every child to be at. Yet these are ordinary middle-class students, very similar to the students I taught in the UK. Here are some of the lessons I would share.
Teachers can solve the majority of learning problems, including the most complex Maths, if they are trusted, stable and empowered to work in collaborative teams to meet their students’ needs. This is what has been observed time and time again about Maths teaching in Shanghai schools, where students lead the world in the PISA Maths tests. Indeed in 2019 the UK government set up the Shanghai-England Maths Teacher Exchange to share lessons from Shanghai across UK schools.
One teacher, quoted on the government website said: “Seeing maths teaching in Shanghai and observing how lessons are planned and then discussed and refined by teachers there has been the most interesting and rewarding professional experience of my career. I’ve literally questioned everything I’ve done for the last eight years of teaching. It’s really inspired me to be a better maths teacher.”
Why isn’t Mr Sunak talking to us about the results of this? It’s the nadir of wokery to broadcast ideology instead of focusing on the pragmatic reality of programmes that we know work in the real world.
But I want to finish by emphasising Green values and ambitions. What is an appalling betrayal of leadership is that Mr Sunak has put out these headline grabbing policies, not as a solution to the mess that is public life everywhere in our country, but as a distraction. I’m sure he calculates they will stir up a culture war about education and obligingly the Labour Party has already jumped in. Of course every child deserves a Maths education to be a functioning citizen in our country. In the words of Winchester College every citizen should be able to ‘think critically and challenge assumptions’ about the important data in our lives, salaries, pensions, mortgages, investments, etc – the ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’ that make up so much of the modern political landscape.
Is this what our Prime Minister has in mind? His solution of ‘more Maths’ is ultimately a failure of vision, because it fails to put Maths in the context of the emerging sustainable world. Maths is at the heart of the transition to new technologies which will replace the failed industrialised consumerism of the decades since the 1970s. There are already innovative, environmentally-minded schools where students are capturing and using real time data about energy use in their school buildings to improve efficiency and reduce waste. I’ve no doubt that in the privileged teaching conditions of Winchester College, students are already using mathematical modelling to conclude that regenerative economic policies – the sort proposed by ‘Doughnut Economics’ – will prove of a better holistic benefit than current ‘take, make, use, waste’ approaches to resources, both natural and human.
The tragedy is then that we do need to ‘wake up’ as a society to the real potential of educating all of our students to be better thinkers, including mathematical, scientific and logical thinkers, in the context of active citizenship, including environmental citizenship and not just being ‘intelligent consumers’. Mr Sunak is so right and so wrong at the same time. I’m sorry Rishi, this homework doesn’t add up. Please do it again and come back with all of your working out, as soon as possible.