Rishi Sunak’s recent pledge to make Maths compulsory through to 18 led to a number of raised voices and red flags. The headline responses focussed on the challenge of providing staffing, the perceived blow to more creative subjects and the outcry from those whose education only came alive after they were able to drop the subject at 16. There is no doubt that Maths carries a unique emotional weight, it marks and it polarises. With that in mind, perhaps what concerned me most about the PM’s pledge, was that it was “personal”. 

We love Maths at GB and we have plenty of students and a number of teachers who revel in algorithms, algebra and prime factors. In their hands, numbers simply seem to dance, and arithmetic is just another language. For many though, just the memory of quadratic equations, square roots and rote learned tables can raise a cold sweat, reminding them of a lifelong phobia. And that is why Rishi’s well-meaning and passionate promises received such a mixed reception. To make Maths compulsory through to 18 in its current form would be a vain and one eyed crusade. 

But there was plenty, in the small print, to suggest that this pledge might lead to a complete and overdue review of the way Maths is taught and the content it carries. Because for every maths teacher lost in a reverie of calculus there are far more who are frustrated that they have no time to teach students the vital real-world applications of their subject, or to give students the time and space they require to take on challenges that may not have black and white answers, problems that cannot easily be marked or assessed. How many students currently leave school with no knowledge of pensions, mortgages and tax and how many of our very strongest mathematicians will crumple in real life when the challenges in front of them do not have linear solutions?

This is why every student in the senior school at Great Ballard runs their own business. They make profits but also losses, they take up loans and learn about interest, they run stalls, they manage cash flow and they shape their first ever business plans. And this year our oldest students will take a training course in personal and professional finance designed to prepare them better for the real world beyond school and not just for the tests they must take long the way. 

Our 4H educational approach has always kept its focus on the real world and on thinking forwards, on subjects that are relevant and practical and which prepare our students for life and not just exams. So let us just hope that the PM has a similarly ambitious and inclusive vision in mind for Maths and not one shaped in Victorian classrooms and in the dusty halls of his own very “personal” and scholarly journey.

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