The government has pushed adult numeracy into the headlines yet again. But their initiatives show that they don’t have a grip on the underlying problems. It will only get worse for future generations unless a different approach is taken to get to the heart of the problem.
The school report for the numeracy skills in UK would fall under the heading of ‘must try harder’. It is in the bottom half of the OECD numeracy skills ranking along with the US, France and Italy. About half of all adults have the numeracy levels expected by the end of primary school.
Adult Numeracy is close to Rishi Sunak’s heart. As Chancellor he introduced the Multiply initiative, at a cost £560 mn, to help improve adult numeracy. We are waiting to see how it has performed. In his recent Building A Better Future speech he made numeracy a central objective for the education system. In particular making all children studying some form of mathematics up to the age of 18. But there isn’t any detail about how the target will be reached.
The level of discussion in the media and the socials was predictable. A group held up Pythagorus’ Theorem as an example of being taught something that was never going to be used after school. Then there was the group who had an opinion about how numeracy was taught but were proud to claim that they ‘couldn’t do maths’ and they didn’t need it anyway ( I wrote about the negative social perception on mathematics in a previous post: The Future Of Maths ). Educational experts moaned about the organisation of the education system and lack of resources. This is an ongoing complaint. In the late 80’s the Cockroft Report concluded that there were not enough maths teachers and judging by the current level of adult numeracy this short fall has never been addressed.
Numeracy means understanding how maths is used in the real world and being able to apply it to make the best possible decisions. Today, the cost of living crises requires numeracy skills to be at their sharpest. Being skilled in maths is the foundation for living in a digital economy as well as the first steps for further maths skills to open up a broader range of career options.
Analysing the problem of poor numeracy skills needs to be looked at in a different way. Rather than assessing adult numeracy skills through a survey there should be a series of in-depth interviews with a sample of adults to get a better understanding of the underlying problems. There are many questions that could be asked as part of the interview. For example, I recently read about an MP’s experience of maths education where a black board duster had been thrown at him when he struggled to answer a question. Hoepfully that doesn’t happen today. But a question could be: what was it about maths education that turned you off?
New research shows 47% of parents dread maths and therefore offer little support to their children. A question would be: what type of support did you get from your parents? There appears to be no real analysis of the effect of maths skills on other subjects such as physics, chemistry and geography. Another question would be: how did your maths skills affect your progress with other subjects at school?
Singapore, who usually top the the international OECD’s Pisa Ranking, are making changes to their education system to spark joy in learning and in particular life long learning. Based on this another question could be: After leaving the education system how did you use your maths skill to continue learning? As mentioned above celebrities and TV personalities are having a negative approach to maths. Therefore: how did people of influence affect your perception of maths?
There are many other questions that could be asked to dig out the underlying blockers for improved numeracy. For example, why is it OK to say I’m no good at maths but nobody likes to admit to be poor at reading skills? If proper interviews were done, rather than surveys, then the information gathered would be used to take a root and branch improvement to maths education. There are over 50 mn adults in the UK which would provide a wide range of people where sample interviews could be carried out. It may take a lot of resources but the results would be better quality than from a survey and they could be used to radically improve maths education.
Numeracy skills have always been the poor relation of the three R’s ( personaly I would add a 4th R - Art - but that is a subject of a future post ). Without maths skills then children achievieng their future potential is very limited. Not only will they have less control of their lives in day to day living such as managing household budgets but their career potential will be restricted. As a nation, if we had stronger maths skills we would have a stronger economy and create the fertile ground for the next Microsoft, Google or Alan Turing.