Maths education is failing UK students - FT中文網
登錄×
電子郵件/用戶名
密碼
記住我
請輸入郵箱和密碼進行綁定操作:
請輸入手機號碼,透過簡訊驗證(目前僅支援中國大陸地區的手機號):
請您閱讀我們的用戶註冊協議私隱權保護政策,點擊下方按鈕即視爲您接受。
FT商學院

Maths education is failing UK students

To combat worrying GCSE trends, we must make the discipline relevant to young people
00:00

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 the UK’s 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. Eagle-eyed 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.

版權聲明:本文版權歸FT中文網所有,未經允許任何單位或個人不得轉載,複製或以任何其他方式使用本文全部或部分,侵權必究。

落後的電力系統對綠色能源發電造成拖累

由於電網和電池儲能技術滯後,風能和太陽能發電商的停產率不斷上升。

歐洲要加強防務,錢從哪來?

各國政府正在討論如何促進對歐洲軍工產業的投資。

川普無意中重振加拿大自由黨

川普的挑釁激怒了加拿大人,削弱了與他結盟的加拿大反對黨的聲望。

美烏礦產協議的條款是什麼?

烏克蘭從川普政府獲得了一些讓步,但沒有獲得戰後安全保障。

Lex專欄:輝達透過季度壓力測試

對晶片製造商輝達來說,每個季度都是一個新的挑戰。

從華爾街到利雅得:普丁的「交易撮合者」爲美俄談判鋪平了道路

前高盛銀行家基里爾•德米特里耶夫是克里姆林宮與海灣國家的中間人。
設置字型大小×
最小
較小
默認
較大
最大
分享×