Rishi Sunak sets up review to tackle 'anti-maths mindset'
bbc.co.uk
bbc.co.uk
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.
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's going to mean you have to turn the central heating off in your schools and stop mending the holes in the roofs). It's just a completely out of touch approach. This new initiative won't touch the sides against the damage childrens eduction will take due to the failure to pay teachers properly.
The state of state maths education in this country is even worse than he thinks.
Having a conversation with any of the 93.6% of the population educated in the state school system qualifies as contact with state maths education
Regarding his background, it's like saying the CEO of the company has no clue about the software that we build because he never fixes the bugs. The job of a Prime Minister of a CEO is not to be in the nitty gritty of the issues, that's the job of the people who work under him just like IC's and Eng Leaders, then they are supposed to bubble up the important issues and explain to him. Having said that, he is best suited as he brings strategic thinking (learned at Goldman, Stanford) to solve these dire problems.
As to what knowledge he brings to the table, the answer is nothing. He's just buddies with the IB establishment. That's why I would vote Starmer despite being right of center, him being positioned ahead of voter desires was unacceptable.
The first part of your sentence above is fine. The second part is not consistent with the record. There have been quite a number of initiatives and programmes to try and improve mathematics in Schools and Colleges over the past 40 years or so in England and Wales.
I think I might need to go digging and put a list up somewhere.
It's not a criticism to say that his background isn't in education, it's an explanation of why he's come up with some weird priority out of the blue and created a solution that no one thinks will work. This isn't about the Prime Minister being the CEO and therefore not needing to worry about the details. A strategic thinker might address the actual issues facing the country rather than blathering about how actors should be forced to learn maths. Should we have interupted Sunak's education to teach him about acting? I think it might have been a good idea, he might have learned to empathize with others a bit rather than coming up with dumb ideas about how every child in Britain needs to be a little Rishi Sunak.
That's clearly nonsense. In a well-run large organisation (which I definitely not saying the UK Government is!) leaders can legitimiately be provided with information that then informs their opinions; they can delegate topics to trusted subordinates to define policy; they can choose to 'sponsor' a topic to give it extra importance, without having done a personal deep-dive into the subject. This is just the reality of leading a large organsation.
Sure; but I didn't say anything to the contrary. I was arguing the opposite: that a leader doesn't need to have direct experience of an issue, to 'sponsor' a related initiative.
> The problem for Sunak is that if you look at his record he's got no junior ministerial experience, no experience on a select committee that's relevant, no record on an all party parliamentary group, not legislative record. He simply has never seriously engaged on this issue, and it's not a serious idea - think about someone with low acheivement in maths GCSE - that student is going to be an immense drain on sources to productively teach maths.
These are all great points, but these aren't the points you were making in your initial post - where you were arguing that he shouldn't be pushing an initiative related to maths education because "Rishi Sunak has literally never in his life had any contact at all with state maths education in this country".
I’m lucky enough to never have been homeless (and I’ve never worked in that area either) but if I was Prime Minister, it’s an area I’d focus on. But… as PM, I’d likely delegate the details to whichever Secretary of State was most logical, and be happy to act as a sponsor, or figurehead.
Does this mean whatever my government did in this would be worthless, and I’d just be being superficial? Not necessarily: the policies and delivery should be judged on their merit, independently of how they were developed or pushed.
This is my point. It doesn’t matter whether Sunak is historically deeply invested in the area - as PM, he’s just supporting something he believes (not incorrectly) is worthwhile. That’s absolutely okay.
The policy itself will have likely been worked in by a plethora of different folk: civil servants, special advisors, domain experts, ministers - and probably least of all Sunak himself.
So judge the content and delivery of the policy on its merits. It may be a terrible policy - but that’s independent of whether the PM is expert or deeply invested in the area.
> Nobody thought to ask me whether I support this policy
My concern is this - there are policy aims, like ending modern slavery or improving maths education (or even just improving the status of maths in the UK), and then there are actual policies. What Sunak is doing here is endorsing a policy in order to achieve a policy aim. But the policy he's endorsing is a policy that will be totally ineffective at achieving that aim.
You're right - ideally the policy would've been worked on by Spads, domain experts, etc. But it wasn't. It was a half-cocked idea that he came up with by himself. How do we know this? The policy is nonsense! No one seriously thinks it will achieve the policy aim, you can't actually endorse a policy that both insists on more maths education and endorse a policy to give maths teachers a massive pay cut.
I understand how this is meant to work, what i'm saying is it very clearly isn't working that way.
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're better off in the private sector doing anything else. The recruitment shortage is serious: https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-com...
> 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.
In other words, this is already impossible, and no amount of "mindset changing" (wishful thinking) is going to change otherwise. You're only hearing this now because the local elections are soon.
> Underpay and overwork teachers while using them as pawns in your transphobic culture war, so that they constantly strike and quit in their thousands
> Economically isolate the UK and cripple all its key public services while still somehow failing to cut most people's tax bill
"My economy is unhealthy because people aren't studying enough maths, I will have my army of teachers fix this problem".
My personal experience as a Brit is that the UK has a growing trend of anti-intellectualism and being innumerate is "cool" in certain circles.
The problem is that the majority of pupils in state schools, be they intelligent or not intelligent never stand a chance and are recieving a terrible formal education.
Might cost a bit.
State school in the UK costs the governement £7,100 a year per pupil vs £13,700 a year for private schools (averages). The government is getting poor value for money, but it would cost ~50bn a year to send every secondary state school pupil to private schools.
It is cheaper to simply pander to your base, make the next generation of their offspring dumber and blame the foreigners or the rich people or boats or whatever gets people angry. It actually increases the size of your political base, with the only downside that it dumps your future party with a massive social welfare bill in the distant future. By then they will be burying you at a state funeral, and your decendants will be living offshore somewhere nice talking about how great the country was back in your day.
My personal view is that there has to be a wider discussion on what 16 to 18 education is actually for in the UK, or at least England and Wales (Scotland has a different system, not sure about the Province).
To what extent do we have specialised often vocational courses for students? Do GCSE exams at age 16 still actually have a function?
Then you can have a discussion about the role of quantitative and logical thought in whatever system you decide to have.
PS: I'd keep mathematicians at least 50 miles away from any committee working on this. Nice people, but a tiny minority of the communities of practice who use mathematics to make decisions.
I ask because "The Two Cultures" was 1959: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Two_Cultures
Even where people recognise the value of maths, some of the responses I've seen to this use rhetoric-disguised-as-maths such as this: https://nitter.net/Samfr/status/1647717775777972224
It's just sexism. From teachers to exams to parents to pop culture, we've decided that women are worse at maths which is obviously both untrue and incredibly damaging. Maybe we should be tackling that.
Coming through an isolated, rural school like this then hitting the real world where the roles are reversed (women are more frequently discriminated against, paid worse) - was a bit of a shock. Note that I didn't suffer at school or anything, it was just sort of accepted that if you were a boy and you wanted to achieve academically you were going against the grain and you were largely on your own.
It is definitely true that as a country the self-deprecating "haha I'm rubbish at maths" attitude is pretty common, I don't whether that is indicative of actual ability or if it's just something people say.
We met when she had her last year in high school, and she was unsure what to do for college or otherwise. She ended up taking a gap year to figure things out. I encouraged her to explore the options, and through a friend found she really wanted to do construction engineering.
To do that, she had to take a year to get some extra math and physics classes.
The start was rough, she had a fear of math and was lacking in basics like algebra. But she was determined to try. Meanwhile I'd been in college for a couple of years and gotten the basic math classes there for my CS degree. I enjoyed math, so tried to help her.
I quickly realized however I had to go back to basics and build some foundations. Back to basics with fractions, basic equation solving etc. After a few weeks of hard work from the both of us, and nearly giving up, things started to fall into place. She started to realized she could understand math, and with that it became a lot more fun.
After a couple of months, it turned out she was actually quite good at math! She picked up new concepts without much struggle, and my help was less and less needed. At the end of the year she passed the exams with high marks, and all I had done to help prepare was just to sit with her and check her answers as she went through previous exams.
The trend at the moment is to announce 'reviews' that capture headlines while doing absolutely nothing about the actual problems. When this doesn't work, get back to fighting the culture wars.
For example, we've had multiple reviews, and actual announcements on the legal side, which replicate already existing powers. It's a joke.
It's cliche to say that the current administration is the worst we've ever seen ... but the last decade has demonstrated that cliche as fact in the UK's case.
"Guys, be more like me and be better at Math"
In fact Sunak is 99% all about posturing. We don't know what real things he has accomplished, as he was not voted into the PM role, but "positioned"
I had left the UK by then so I wasn't paying much attention to what went on, but when I did pay more attention when Brexit was rearing its head Cameron seemed like such a wanky toff it's hard to understand how his govt had not only got back in but were in a better position.
(Abbot is the most maligned person in UK politics; I believe someone did a survey of all hate mail (or email?) sent to the House of Commons, and found that a whole third of it was for her alone. I would simply not trust media-informed views of her, unfortunately)
Huh that is very easy to understand. There were two main reasons:
1. Labour had left the government essentially bankrupt, literally leaving the coalition a note that said "there's no money anywhere" iirc. The new government had come in and discovered the finances of the state had been utterly ruined. The numbers were stark and voters had accepted the argument that budget cutbacks were necessary to try and right the ship.
Labour had sort of accepted that this situation was true, but failed to take it seriously. Miliband supposedly had a minor meltdown after he tried to give a long speech without notes, and then realized only afterwards that he'd forgotten the entire section about the deficit. That was the number one issue in British politics at the time!
2. The EU had been building as a bigger and bigger problem over time. Voters were increasingly upset that their concerns on major policy areas like immigration were being systematically ignored by all the major parties, except for the eurosceptic wing of the Tories. Neither Labour nor the mainline Tories nor the Lib Dems wanted to tackle this problem. UKIP came along and started hoovering up votes from both left and right by promising a referendum on the EU. Cameron saw what was happening and decided he could end UKIP, win the election and also crush the eurosceptics by promising an EU referendum he was convinced he could win. That caused a whole lot of voters to abandon UKIP and vote Tory in the correct belief that Cameron would honor his promise. The rest is history.
I didn't know there was a building EU resentment (beyond the stupid stuff I'd heard growing up in the UK). I was living in Europe at the time. It all seems so bizarre.
Resentment against the EU had been building for years due partly to the totally incorrect initial claims made about immigration levels, and then the lack of interest/ability in controlling it. Even voters who weren't that affected by it saw that there were now real issues that affected local people which had effectively been removed from democracy and felt that was wrong. So there was a broad coalition being built by Farage, both the people who cared primarily about immigration levels and wage suppression of the working classes, and also those who cared about the constitutional issue it was exposing.
That's an odd framing of events considering Brown came in midway through 2007. Just before the 2008 GFC.
You make it sound like he went Brown went on a spending spree on a whim ... that isn't what happened. Any increased spending that took place when he became PM was easily within the scope of the UK economy. And considering National Debt was well managed until then (during a time when Brown was Chancellor), your recollection of what happened is wrong.
https://www.economicshelp.org/blog/334/uk-economy/uk-nationa...
And that is exactly the point being made. Brown was in charge when the economy entered a crisis and yet was too left wing to slam the brakes on government spending in response. Voters reacted accordingly.
Do you not remember bailing out the banks?
Emergency stimuli to keep the economy going from recession to depression?
Decreasing tax revenue as the economy entered recession?
And yet, you say Brown was too left wing to slam on the brakes on government spending? ... we would be finished as a nation if you were in charge.
It's just me and you. I'm sure no one else is reading this. So I'll just say. I'm quite confident you have no idea what you're talking about. Either you were too young at the time, no idea how the economy works (especially during a crisis) or ... let's leave it at that.
It doesn't matter why Brown spent so much money. What matters is that after he did so nobody in the Labour hierarchy adjusted to the new reality that they'd spent all the money, and they'd need to implement austerity via large budget cuts to try and reduce the suddenly massive deficit. The Conservatives did realize that, did make that argument, and the voters agreed with them. Which is the point I've been making all along.
BTW it's very rich that in a thread where I'm having to remind people about the issues in an election that only happened 13 years ago, you're claiming I'm too young to remember what happened at the time! The economy, Labour's claims to be competent at it "we have ended boom and bust" etc followed by their Labour's inability to seem serious about the deficit remained an issue for years. Don't you recall Miliband's doomed notes-free speech and his subsequent political exile? That was in 2014. Even years after losing to the coalition, they still didn't want to talk about cutting public sector spending and voters reacted accordingly:
https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2014/sep/24/ed-miliband...
There's an analysis by Labour supporters here:
https://labourlist.org/2010/05/why-labour-lost/
"People stopped trusting the party and they didn’t believe what it said about foreign wars, the state of the economy, reform of Parliament and public spending"
I'm not interested in the politics of why the voters voted they way they did. And your assertions on that are like picking a few leaves off a tree and saying that they are the reason the tree grows.
Your contention was that "Brown was too left wing to slam on the spending brakes".
My contention is that the chart I posted would have looked largely the same whichever party was in power. The only difference would have been the degree and speed of action. And it was this that Conservatives got wrong and which I think that Brown would have done better with. He wasn't a good PM, but he knew what mattered on the economy.
And you can run a clear line from the decisions that were made by the Conservatives at the time to where we are today. The mistakes made (David Cameron with Brexit, Austerity, and now political corruption and malaise) have effectively ruined the potential of Britain for decades to come.
I'm not here to defend Brown, but I do understand the position he was in. Anything else is political garbage.
>> I never understood why Miliband didn't win the 2015 election.
And so this thread is an attempt to explain that, by reference to Labour's legacy of not being willing to reduce public spending.
>> My contention is that the chart I posted would have looked largely the same whichever party was in power.
It might have done, but Brown didn't argue that. In the leadup to 2010 he argued that he would simply not increase it further, in contrast to the "savage cuts" planned by the Tories.
Brown just wasn't charismatic and he made some critical political timing errors. You can have one but you can't have both and he deserved to lose the election.
With the economy, however, he played a blinder and it's under-appreciated. The subsequent clowns have proven that. Brown's mistake was his desire to be PM.
Like you say, a review is a hollow thing.
The engineer, while appreciated, is not admired in Britain.
France has an extremely small, but great math community via the ENS/Sorbonne/X schools, but it hardly reflects on a larger trend -- general education. The topic isn't the culturing of a select, few elites, but the education of the larger population.
source: https://data.oecd.org/pisa/mathematics-performance-pisa.htm
Software Engineering and "working in IT" does have a different perception and is considered "cooler", even though the vast majority of our IT jobs are awful.
Big focus on money here.
Being an engineer is also:
- rewarding in its own right (you *build* things)
- an achievement to be proud of
- a way to have a long lasting net contribution to society with - usually - little moral downside
I think that is a fairly recent change, it certainly wasn't the case when I started my career in the eighties.
"In Britain" is a bit general; but in the circles of senior politicians and civil servants in Westminster, it's likely accurate.
It seems that this is a vestige of the past when the university was established and the only way to include engineering as a subject of study was to classify it as a subdivision of mathematics.
Although the university is not currently based in the UK, there was a time when it did not permit Catholics to enroll as students either...
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.
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's a big difference between doing matrix transformations of imaginary numbers and working out that you're being fleeced by Tesco
Unfortunatly people don't have the skills to judge the total cost, or the value, so either listen to one of two extremes of "just buy on finance" vs "never buy on finance"
But one problem is that most of this goes well beyond maths and really becomes more like law.
The worst example perhaps is pensions. The difficult part isn't "how much do I need to invest to get a decent pension?". Its everything else - how much can you contribute? When? How does this change if you have a change in circumstances? What are inheritance rights? Can I move my pension with me if I change job? What protected rights do I have and which of those have value to me? What is the tax position now and when you retire? This is much less about maths and much more about being able to navigate an insanely complicated set of rules built up over about 3 decades of government changing them more or less every year then adding in special case exceptions or saving clauses.
Learning maths was fine for me, up to university level.
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's not one-size fits all. Aptitudes do vary and education should lean into that.