Numeracy for Life

Last week I gave evidence to the House of Lords Numeracy for Life Committee on behalf of Maths Horizons. The Committee is examining how numeracy can be strengthened across the population. It is an important conversation – and one that often generates strong claims about the state of maths education in England.

At the House of Lords

One of the key points I wanted to make to the Committee is that the starting point for this discussion should be that England’s maths education system has improved significantly over the past decade.

The question now is not, therefore, how to rescue a failing system, but how to move from a strong system to a world-leading one.

A decade of progress in maths and numeracy

Over the past 15 years, England has built a much stronger mathematical foundation in schools. Attainment has risen at both primary and secondary level. International performance has improved: in the OECD’s most recent PISA study, England ranked 11^th in the world for maths, up from 17^th in 2018 and 27^th in 2009. Participation in advanced maths has also grown dramatically. A-level maths is now the most popular A-level subject, with more than 100,000 students taking it each year – almost double the number in 2010.

The picture for adults is improving. The OECD’s latest PIAAC survey, published in 2023, shows that the proportion of adults in England with very weak numeracy has fallen since the previous survey in 2012. That equates to around 1 to 1.5 million fewer adults with the lowest levels of numeracy.

And policies such as the GCSE resit requirement have made a real difference. Around 50,000 more young people now achieve at least a grade 4 at GCSE maths by age 19 each year than before the policy was introduced, amounting to roughly half a million additional students gaining a maths qualification over the past decade.

These are very significant achievements. But they are, of course, not the end of the story.

From strong foundations to deeper mathematical thinking

The next phase of improvement should focus on a different challenge. Many pupils leave school able to carry out mathematical procedures successfully when the method is clear. But too often they struggle when the problem is unfamiliar, the method isn’t signposted, and they need to decide for themselves which maths to apply.

This matters because real-world problems rarely come with instructions about which maths they require. If we want young people to use maths confidently in work, in further study, and in everyday life, they need more experience of reasoning, problem-solving and applying maths in unfamiliar situations.

One response to this challenge is to argue that maths should simply become ‘more relevant’ or more focused on real-life contexts. But this risks misunderstanding how mathematical thinking develops.

Real-world problems are harder, not easier, than abstract ones. They require pupils to interpret information, decide which maths concepts are relevant, apply them, and then have the confidence to trial different approaches if and when the first one fails. Without secure foundations in the underlying maths, those steps quickly become overwhelming.

The task now is therefore not to replace maths with ‘real-world maths’, but to ensure that pupils develop secure knowledge then have regular opportunities to reason with it – tackling unfamiliar problems, explaining their thinking and applying what they know in new contexts.

When that happens, pupils do not just learn maths – they learn how to think mathematically. And that is ultimately what numeracy for life requires.

Dr Helen Drury, Co-Lead, Maths Horizons