Rishi Sunak is resurfacing today after the Christmas break and amidst the NHS meltdown to talk about maths. The Prime Minister’s new year speech contains an announcement that has provoked a visceral personal reaction in many of the mildly innumerate inhabitants of the Westminster village. It’s the sort of response that will underline to the PM and his team why Britain needs to take maths more seriously than it does. His solution to this country viewing maths as something to bunk off as soon as possible is to make it compulsory to 18, though he is not expected to make all students sit Maths A level.
The overriding reaction in Westminster is ‘why maths?’
The reasoning behind more maths for longer – ‘double maths’, as Labour is evocatively calling it – is that a similar approach worked for literacy, and therefore a focus on numeracy will help pupils’ skills long before they’re in the 16-18 education bracket anyway.
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