Maths until 18 and how not to build 21st Century Education

Whatever his hopes going into it, Rishi Sunak’s New Year speech appears to generated a collective ‘meh’ from commentators. Given how little substance there was to much of it, this doesn’t come as a huge surprise, but level of hostility to his proposal for Maths till 18 did feel a little excessive.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a pretty meaningless proposal, but that also makes it hard for me to get so wound up about compared to the various damaging policies already implemented by this Government, including in Education. However, the whole episode did reveal just how ‘subject’-based our view of teaching remains, as if we all pick a field of study at the start of school follow that through the rest of the education system and then spent the remaining decades of our working life working only in employment relevant to those subjects. Certainly the Government seems committed to this view, having announced this week that they will be spending £2.6m to provide careers training for children in years 1, 2 and 3 of primary school.

I don’t know if the economy ever really worked this way, I strongly doubt it, but it certainly bears no relationship to the modern world of work or its direction of travel. Outside of a few professions, people now experience a range of careers during their lifetime, some of which do not currently exist. I say this as someone who entered the education system before the creation of the World Wide Web and now spent most of my working day using it.

While no decent education system would send someone out into the world without an understanding of maths, languages and an understanding of the world around them, the most important thing is to ensure those entering the world of work have the ability to adapt to the changes. In the 21st Century, that means imbuing in people with the ability and willingness to continue learning beyond the education system, the capacity to evaluate information critically, the grit to persist when challenged, and creativity. On that last point, it’s now seventeen years since the late Ken Robinson gave TED’s most watched talk on exactly how our education system not only fails to enable creative thinking but stamps it out, if you haven’t watched it before, it’s well-worth a watch.

It’s certainly possible to teach all of these skills through subject-based learning, but that certainly hasn’t been the focus of education policy under the Conservatives, in fact Michael Gove’s reforms went 180 degrees in the opposite direction. Unfortunately, as with most areas of policy now, it appears that we’re left waiting for a change of Government in order to get back on the right track.