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Tag: Maths to 18

  • Gillian Keegan on Maths to 18, apprenticeships and why Sadiq Khan is good for Conservatives

    Gillian Keegan

     

    Now that we’re coming into a General Election year, I feel confident that we’re going to see Rishi Sunak’s strength and leadership come through and prove the doubters wrong.

    So how do we win? I think it’s very important that we provide a great focus on business education; we need to work harder on encouraging young people in setting up their own businesses.

    Rishi Sunak’s Maths to 18 policy is sometimes misrepresented, but it’s of huge practical importance to understand about working capital and the administrative side of business, all of which obviously goes back to the importance of mathematics as a core subject.

    There’s an entrepreneurial element to the policy which has been missed in too much of the commentary. What we need to champion is the acquisition of knowledge about the pragmatic side to life.

    That’s why citing our educational achievements is going to be a big part of our strategy for the next election. Many of our universities have now set up entrepreneurial centres, and the government is already thinking about ways in which we can help entrepreneurs: they’re the lifeblood of our economy.

    But I do accept that when it comes to Maths to 18, it will be absolutely crucial how we sell that policy. Young people already know that Artificial Intelligence (AI) will transform their lives within their lifetime – in fact, it’s already doing so. What we have to do is to demystify that and sell it as something that’s going to help you in your life. This stuff is going to be changing how our houses work, our jobs, and our education: we have to make sure it’s something that people don’t see as a threat. When the Maths to 18 policy was raised, everyone imagined it amounted to making it compulsory to take the subject at A-Level. That’s not what we’re talking about, and we need to make sure we bring everyone along with us according to a proper understand of what the Prime Minister is really championing.

    As I look ahead to the next General Election, I sometimes think that the current London Mayor Sadiq Khan is doing rather a good job for us. Take the free school meals policy that he’s introduced. It sounds fantastic on the face of it, but it costs a fortune and is only for the course of a year. Also, nobody in City Hall seems to be thinking about how you deliver it. This is where Labour is always weak: in the crucial realm of reality.

    By stark contrast, the Conservatives have been very pragmatic: Rishi Sunak knows how to get things done. So, for instance, we have an international student strategy which we’ve developed over the past couple of years which targets international students, and seeks to recognise that our education system is one of our biggest exports.

    I recall vividly one trip to Egypt where everybody was talking about how fantastic our education system is: at King’s College London, we train most of the world’s defence leaders, as well as most of the senior army figures. Of course, we all see the immigration figures, but I’ve put the case firmly that immigration can be vital to the economy and to the health of our world-class universities. It’s a question of balance.

    Another area where Rishi Sunak has been highly strategic is on creative industries, where the government has put a range of policies in place to recognise that this is our second biggest sector. We’ve tried to make sure that student loan finance is available in the short term and in smaller chunks. On a separate front, we’re also seeing an increase in nursing and medical schools, as well as full time or part time apprenticeships: but we need to change the culture around recruitment. My local hospital for instance recently returned from a trip to the Philippines to recruit nurses over there; and I explained to them that it’s perfectly possible to recruit them here.

    There’s so much more to do. I have also spoken to recruiters at big companies and corporations: what they find is that a lot of kids do well in school but then lack the social skills and understanding of social interaction suitable for the working world. But a lot of that will come back to the Maths to 18 policy: we need to create a numerate and pragmatic workforce which understands the realities of life.

     

    The Secretary of State for Education was talking at the In and Out Club

  • Opinion: Why Rishi Sunak needs to think beyond STEM

    Finito World

     

    We know that Rishi Sunak thinks about mathematics a lot because he has told us this is the case. This is a prime minister who, as the almost clicheic saying goes, ‘inherited a mess’, and is now beginning to think about what his priorities going forward might be.

    He has sorted out that mess to some extent. Certainly, he has shown he can handle the work – a low bar perhaps, but one which his predecessor Liz Truss never managed to clear. He also has some victories to his name: the Windsor Accords should in time spark a return to power-sharing in Northern Ireland; the AUKUS submarine deal shows he is capable of operating on the world stage; and most importantly, he has begun to get control of the public finances, though inflation remains stubbornly high and his decision to promise to cut it in half was an own goal: in politics, never promise something which isn’t in your control to deliver.

    None of his achievement are showy, and all of his progress is incremental. All is not lost: due to a low energy opponent in the shape of Sir Keir Starmer it may enough to put the Conservatives in touching distance of a 1992-style election victory in next year’s General Election, though that remains a long shot. What’s needed to pull off victory is leadership, and direction. So far, we have the ‘maths to 18’ policy, stipulating that all students should have some maths education right up until the end of secondary school.

    It is well-intentioned, and the prime minister has a point. Many young people do indeed, as the prime minister said in his speech at the start of the year, leave university without a basic understanding of finances, and experience difficulty when it comes to negotiating their mortgage deals.

    But in framing the question of mathematics in such limited terms he has made the matter seem dull, thereby making it hard to bring people along, and earning derision in some quarters for a ‘cookie cutter’ approach. A tax return is a good thing to have sent in on time, but it doesn’t speak to the human heart. It was Albert Einstein who said: “Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.”

    In politics it is best never to express an intention aloud without having fleshed out the consequences of choosing to pursue it. In rushing into the debate without a full appreciation of how more maths teachers will be delivered – and doing so during such a febrile atmosphere of teachers’ strikes – Sunak has raised more questions than he has answered, leading to a series of jokes about not having done his sums.

    This isn’t to say the policy is dead. It simply needs to be recalibrated and, of great importance to this magazine, tethered properly to the realities of the jobs market. Sunak would do well to read the Institute of Engineering and Technology’s report Engineering Kids Futures. This highlights a shortfall of 173,000 workers in the so-called STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) sectors. The cost to the UK economy of this shortfall is projected at £1.5 billion.

    It might be that the economic cost is the least of it. Children need wonderment and inspiration; they need to feel early in life the joy of creating things – and also to learn from the experience of wrestling with the difficulty of making things work.

    Of course, mathematics isn’t separate from the importance of engineering; an engineer who can’t count won’t get very far. But maths isn’t a siloed subject – quite the opposite. Sunak now has an opportunity to reimagine ‘Maths to 18’, by tethering it to employability. How might it transform our children’s careers outlook?

    While he’s about that he might go further. A glance at the sector output of the UK economy, ought to persuade the prime minister to think not just in terms of STEM but also STEAM.

    The ‘A’ stands for art, of course, a word which can still seem wishy-washy to the conservative mentality – so perhaps we might be thinking in terms of STEMCI – where the CI stands for Creative Industries.

    That ought to get recalcitrant Conservative minds to pay attention: the creative sector is big business. Year on year, the sector continues to boom – and that’s in spite of the restrictions placed on many businesses during the Covid-19 pandemic. For instance, according to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, the creative industries grew by 6.9 per cent in September 2022 compared with the same month in 2021. Growth across the UK economy as a whole was 1.2% over the same period.

    Perhaps we need to think not just of Einstein’s contributions to maths and science, but to remember his violin-playing. A new generation of renaissance men and women is possible if Sunak gets this right.

    It also happens to tally with what he needs to do politically. He has made a good start and is probably the best-suited to the role of any of the occupants of 10 Downing Street since David Cameron. But he is yet to make anything approaching a powerful speech. And if he can’t make one about maths, he needs to think again.