Sam Sims and Bobby Seagull gave evidence alongside Alex Stevenson, Deputy Director of the Learning and Work Institute, while Lynne McClure, also Chair of the Academy for the Mathematical Sciences' Education Workstream, gave evidence with Conrad Wolfram, Founder of Wolfram Research Europe Ltd and Charlie Stripp, Chief Executive Officer of the Mathematics Education Innovation.
A range of issues were discussed, including teacher recruitment and retention, maths anxiety and the importance of recognising the value of everyday numeracy.
Emphasising the value of everyday maths
Mr Sims stressed the importance of making numeracy appealing and ensuring that people could see how improving their everyday maths could help in their lives.
He said: “Understanding how [people] feel to start with, they’re feeling negative often about maths, so leading with maths is often a bad idea and we make this mistake again and again and again.
“It's incredible how many maths course posters you see advertised with equations in the background – it’s the equations, it’s that kind of school-based maths, that people have developed an aversion to.
“We need to talk about value, always lead with value: this is how it can help you, this is how it can help you feel more in control of your finances, get into work, build a sustainable career, support your children.”
Turning failures into successes
Mr Sims added that people who had experienced failure with maths in the past needed to see it was possible to do better with practice.
He continued: “We need to change the cycle where people have experienced failure, they don’t believe they can improve and therefore they’ve shut down to maths, where we need to make people feel and experience success quickly.
“We have something called the National Numeracy Challenge. It meets people where they are, they can do it online, they can get started in 10 minutes, it’s bite-sized, they experience success quickly, if they experience failure it stops. All of these things we’ve learnt and put into practice.
“Making it relatable, contextualising all maths that we do, never having abstract maths is something that’s really, really important.”
The important difference between exams and numeracy
National Numeracy Ambassador Bobby Seagull, also a maths teacher and TV presenter, highlighted the difference between the maths learnt in schools and the maths we need in everyday life.
He said: “We’ve got this exam at 16 and in theory, if you get GCSE [maths] you’re numerate, but the problem is that maths is a skill. Imagine you passed your driving test at 17 and then you’ve not driven a car for 50 years…you’ve probably forgotten the skills.
“I think there’s a difference between exams, so that children can progress to the next stage of their academic tree, and actually having the numeracy skills so you can function and be confident and competent in using maths and numeracy in day-to-day life.”
The benefits of the Multiply programme
The Multiply programme comes to an end this month and Mr Sims today summarised some of its success.
He said: “We’ve seen some really great activity come out of Multiply. One thing it’s enabled National Numeracy to do in many respects, is to train people to become Numeracy Champions across the country.
“We’ve now trained over 2,000 Numeracy Champions and they don’t teach maths, they support adults to be able to build their confidence, take their first step, signpost where they can get help and understand that there’s a psychological confidence barrier that needs to be broken down.
“It’s enabled things like that in all sorts of different ways to happen over the country which I think should really be recognised as great steps forward.”
Priorities for maths education
Having a wealth of experience in maths education, Lynne McClure cited the following when asked about three priorities she would have regarding maths education:
“I would set up a criterium based numeracy qualification that everybody has to do, so that we raise the bar for everybody.
“I would make sure that we have a policy for AI and technology in schools, so that we are not wasting money, but we have a proper structure to do that, and also I would set up a qualifications and curriculum authority, much as QCA used to be, so there is a reservoir of knowledge which is continued from time to time and allows curriculum to be designed by people who really understand and know what they’re talking about.”
Watch the recording of the Committee sessions on Parliament TV.
