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We need more maths graduates to go into teaching

4 min read

I was pleased to see the Prime Minister raise the issue of maths teachers at PMQs last week.

But, perhaps inevitably, I found his riposte somewhat wrong-headed. This new Labour government has directed many charges at previous Conservative governments, some not altogether unfairly, but any claim that we didn’t care for maths is absurd.

It was the Conservatives that wanted every school pupil to study maths in some form to 18 – a clear and important signal of how important the subject is to our everyday lives and the success of the nation. We agreed funding for a new National Academy of Mathematical Sciences to represent the sector and find new ways of integrating maths and mathematical thinking into government and industry. And we were progressing a supercomputer in Edinburgh that would draw on and fuel the British maths expertise, ensuring we remain among the top rank of nations for computing power and all the benefits that brings, from supporting industry to national security.

In power, Labour has axed all of the above, undermining critical national capabilities. When pressing the government in the chamber on why they cancelled the National Academy of Mathematical Sciences, the Minister failed to provide me with an actual answer.

However, I can agree with the Prime Minister’s broad point that we need more maths teachers in our schools.

New research commissioned by the Campaign for Mathematical Sciences and published this week shows the scale of the problem. The report, by York University’s Professor Paul Wakeling, finds that 1100 maths graduates went into secondary school teaching in the four years for which we have the most recent statistics. Yet to keep up with recruitment targets we need at least twice that number every year.

Around one in seven maths classes is currently being taught by someone with no maths education beyond A Level. And on current trends the shortfall of specialist maths teachers is going to get worse.

Thankfully we have record numbers of school pupils sitting A Level mathematics. But many are doing so with an eye on taking an entirely different subject at university such as medicine or computer science. The numbers taking maths further and enrolling as undergraduates are static at best and falling as a proportion of graduates overall.

This matters. For while the maths A Level pupil who goes on to enrol on a computer science course can work as a computer scientist, if they choose maths the options are vast. A maths graduate can work as a computer scientist, or a climate scientist, or in AI, epidemiology, or national security. Or even politics, like me. Or they can become a teacher.

But many of the institutions most likely to produce teachers are cutting or closing their maths provision. At post-1992 universities 17 per cent of maths graduates go into teaching. At Russell Group universities that figure is 2 per cent.

In the last year alone we’ve seen Oxford Brookes, Huddersfield and Birkbeck, University of London shutter their maths department. Others are going through redundancy rounds and laying off mathematicians.

At the same time the maths departments at universities like Manchester, Durham and Edinburgh are thriving.

As maths courses are concentrated in certain places and at certain institutions so the pipeline of maths teachers is squeezed.

As per Professor Wakeling’s report we need more maths graduates, or more Russell Group graduates to go into teaching. Or both.

There are those trying to tackle these issues. The Campaign for Mathematical Sciences launched the Maths Degrees for the Future programme offering grants of up to £500,000 to fund innovation and collaboration, to make maths more attractive and really promote the wonderful variety of careers it proffers. The first round of bids for that has just closed and I’m excited to discover what ideas have emerged and get developed when the successful projects are announced later in the spring.

But while Sir Keir Starmer identified the problem this week, I did not hear him offer policy or money to address it.

He talks about AI fuelling growth and lighting our brightest future. But that starts with maths and with maths teachers who know and love the subject.

Maths is about solutions. Now we need some to solve the conundrum of training enough specialist maths teachers.  

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