Maths education is failing UK students - FT中文网
登录×
电子邮件/用户名
密码
记住我
请输入邮箱和密码进行绑定操作:
请输入手机号码,通过短信验证(目前仅支持中国大陆地区的手机号):
请您阅读我们的用户注册协议隐私权保护政策,点击下方按钮即视为您接受。
FT商学院

Maths education is failing UK students

To combat worrying GCSE trends, we must make the discipline relevant to young people

This article is the latest part of the FT’s Financial Literacy and Inclusion Campaign

The writer is a maths teacher, author of ‘The Life-Changing Magic of Numbers’ and co-host of Maths Appeal podcast

If you are paid £9 per hour, what would your hourly rate be if you received a pay rise of 5 per cent? If you correctly answered £9.45, you’re in the top half of UK adult population. 

Unfortunately, research from the charity National Numeracy (where I am an ambassador), shows that nearly half of all working adults in the country have numeracy skills no better than those we’d expect of an 11-year-old schoolchild.

Coupled with recent GCSE trends, this is a gloomy outlook. In England, students need maths (and English) GCSEs at a minimum of grade 4 to qualify for further study. Results this week show that maths papers graded 4 or above have fallen to 59.5 per cent, down from 61.1 per cent last year. (Eagled-eye analysts will observe the pass rate for 16-year-olds was 72 per cent, meaning the total was dragged down by older students resitting exams).

How can these results be improved? Perhaps maths teaching should be more inspiring and relevant. Outside Stratford station in east London, I recently bumped into a former student who said, “Mr Seagull, you were a lit (Gen Z for excellent) maths teacher, but we didn’t learn things that matter to us.”

There is an intrinsic beauty in understanding the mathematical forces that underpin our world. But some students might need persuading that abstract algebraic notions or the allure of prime numbers is actually useful. 

Certainly these skills are not the same as numeracy, an essential subset of the discipline. Competent numeracy skills enable adults to have confidence in day-to-day life when working out discounts in shops, checking recipe ingredients, holiday budgeting or calculating loan repayment rates.

For young people, numeracy can easily be taught by strategising the values of football players during their Fantasy Premier League or calculating the overall cost of Taylor Swift concerts.

As a maths teacher for 10 years, I’ve always believed the talent is equally distributed but opportunity is not. It deeply saddens me that regional educational divides are widening. The worst-performing region in these GCSE results, the West Midlands, was nearly 10 percentage points below London.

The CEO of the Northern Powerhouse partnership says that this gap largely reflect “differences . . . in the proportions of long-term disadvantaged children by region”. While the previous government’s phrase “levelling up” has been retired, maths education doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It reflects wider societal conditions.

Amid all this gloom, you may be surprised to learn that maths has been the most popular A-level subject for a decade. More than 100,000 teenagers took the exams this year. Despite that, the overall proportion of students studying maths at university has shrunk, leading to several universities cutting provisions and closing departments, according to the Campaign for Mathematical Sciences.

This will further destabilise the supply of maths teachers. One in eight maths lessons are already taught by someone without a maths degree and almost half of all secondary schools are using non-specialist teachers for maths.

Given that half of children judged to be falling behind at the age of five end up not passing their GCSEs and that around 80 per cent of young people “fail” resits on their second attempt, the system is clearly not working.

The UK has to tackle a broader cultural issue where it is deemed acceptable to say you can’t do maths. Yes, the subject can be tricky, but all of us can learn to be confident and competent in it, especially when it comes to using numeracy in our day-to-day lives.

The curriculum is in desperate need of an update. Financial and data literacy must be included if we are to ensure that our young people become mathematically literate citizens able to compete in the modern world.

版权声明:本文版权归FT中文网所有,未经允许任何单位或个人不得转载,复制或以任何其他方式使用本文全部或部分,侵权必究。

Lex专栏:亚洲将遭遇“特朗普交易”的冲击

汽车行业保护主义抬头的定价过程才刚刚开始。

马斯克对特朗普的押注得到了回报

特斯拉和X的首席执行官将成为特朗普总统身边最具影响力的政治和商业顾问之一。

巴尼耶削减养老金的计划触动了法国人的神经

法国总理的这一省钱提案遭到反对,尽管人们呼吁加强代际公平。

英国学费上涨对学生和大学财务状况的影响

专家称,这些措施不足以解决高等教育经费问题或吸引来自贫困家庭的学生。

这次美国大选对美国企业意味着什么?

大选结果将对能源、汽车和制药等领域的企业产生重大影响。

德国的商业模式失败了吗?

德国三大主要产业同时陷入低迷,经济也停滞不前。政客们终于清醒过来了吗?
设置字号×
最小
较小
默认
较大
最大
分享×