It doesn't seem controversial to suggest that Britain's Maths education could do with improving. This could be the sort of thing that will help to make Britain a better country in 10-20 years time, if you imagine a possible future where Maths education noticeably improves.
Except what has been trailed so far is not 'better' maths education, just 'more' maths education.
If the announcement was extensive maths tutoring for all ages you might have a point.
But it isn't...
Casino says there's a whole report behind today's announcement. You'd expect there to be a number of policies for all age groups.
If it ends up being only extending compulsory Maths education to 18 then I rescind my more neutral take off this morning and revert to my criticism of yesterday evening.
Sunak's maths approach is not inherently bad, but it is irrelevant to the primary concerns of the electorate and sounds... odd. Not Truss' energy wibbling when asked about borrowing/inflation/mortgage costs weird, but still out of kilter with the general public discourse of the minute. And that's not exactly a subtle or hidden conversation people are having (economic, and, lately, A&E).
I disagree.
It is inherently bad because it is based on a damaging misunderstanding.
And if ever implemented (it won't be) it would be a disaster for that reason.
It would be nice, just for once, to have leaders who bothered to actually understand matters in education before coming up with policies.
Education really is a subject where everyone is an expert (or thinks they are). The problem is compounded by the fact that many of those pontificating on the subject, and implementing it across the state sector, have never actually been anywhere near a state school. A horrible thought is starting to cross my mind - is Sunak actually a worse PM than Johnson?
Agreed. This is yet more of the typical ideological out-of-touch crap that these tired, bent, tories are now left with. It reminds me so much of the same tired old dross of John Major's final months.
I'm a state school teacher. And have been both a classroom teacher and in senior management. I've also taught in the private sector.
So I know my onions.
There's so much to say about educational reform but Sunak's solution is not a solution. It's utter bollocks.
Still think he is benefitting from the chaos on the government side rather than anything particularly clever on his own. If that is right and Rishi continues to provide some stability he should fade a little.
I suspect it's more to do with a change in the zeitgeist. A year ago some were still enamoured of the fluffy buffoonery of Johnson. As the year progressed and the realisation dawned that this buffoonery had cost lives livelihoods and the country its well being it turned 180 degrees and looked for someone who looked safe serious and honest. Rishi could never really be the answer because he'll forever be Johnson's fag*
Just a thought? Could this sudden enthusiasm for maths lessons be an admission that ministers never did get their pretty little heads around R values and exponential growth?
Or graphs
Doppelganger Britain has a far lower economic drop due to Covid - and that's with a delayed EU vaccine rollout - and rapidly makes a full recovery to pre-Covid levels and its pre-existing growth rate thereafter?
It doesn't seem controversial to suggest that Britain's Maths education could do with improving. This could be the sort of thing that will help to make Britain a better country in 10-20 years time, if you imagine a possible future where Maths education noticeably improves.
Except what has been trailed so far is not 'better' maths education, just 'more' maths education.
If the announcement was extensive maths tutoring for all ages you might have a point.
But it isn't...
Casino days there's a whole report behind today's announcement. You'd expect there to be a number of policies for all age groups.
If it ends up being only extending compulsory Maths education to 18 then I rescind my more neutral take off this morning and revert to my criticism of yesterday evening.
If it's anything else then prepare to kiss goodbye to every other subject on the curriculum. The primary curriculum is already so overstuffed that some schools teach only English and Maths in years 5 and 6. There literally is no more room for further changes.
It would be far better to follow Foxy and see where actually useful points of it could be introduced via other subjects.
95% of the maths I was taught I never used after school, the other 20% I could do on a calculator.
So you can't add up?
You’re off on a tangent, a bad sine.
That's cos I only did maths to 16.
Very sensible. Here's one of our absent friends, quoting Isaac Asimov to make a wise point I had forgotten about. Everyone who studies maths has a point where it goes from pleasantly easy to impossibly hard. Once you cross that threshold, it doesn't really matter how much effort you put in, or how well you are taught. Maths suddenly just gets too difficult and too abstract.
I just found it rather dull, to be honest. I prefer things that aren't theoretical.
There is a reason why I did much better at physics and economics than maths, even though there's so much maths in them.
Maths belongs in physics but there's too much of it in economics these days.
Really? I found plenty of it when I was studying it 20 years ago.
But of course, I never went into banking...
There is a lot more now than 20 years ago, I think, although I suppose that when I said "these days" I meant 20 years ago (when I was studying it) comparing it to 50 years ago. As an economist in the markets the amount of maths is reasonable, consisting mainly of being able to do basic arithmetic. The complicated stuff (eg pricing derivatives) is mostly done by French engineering graduates rather than economists. In econ academia the use of maths is excessive, detracting from the subject's ability to impart economic intuition in my opinion. The subject has been colonised by mathematicians who know more maths than economists but not enough to work successfully in top mathematics departments. I say all of this as someone who isn't bad at maths, but who hoped that studying economics would mean learning about the economy.
The news report on the radiocameout with "8.5 million people can only do maths to primary school level" followed by "maths compulsory to 18".
It strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that someone who has not progressed their maths to exceed that of a primary school child by the age of 16 will benefit from an additional two years of mathematics.
I want to know what's going to be dropped to make the time available.
And how are they planning to pay the teachers required because it won't be cheap.
I'm afraid Sunak has just revealed to those who didn't realise it already that he's a totally out of touch amateur.
The news report on the radiocameout with "8.5 million people can only do maths to primary school level" followed by "maths compulsory to 18".
It strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that someone who has not progressed their maths to exceed that of a primary school child by the age of 16 will benefit from an additional two years of mathematics.
I think the idea is that those who don't hit that standard by age 16 have remedial education to meet that standard by 18, and achieve the foundation qualification.
The news report on the radiocameout with "8.5 million people can only do maths to primary school level" followed by "maths compulsory to 18".
It strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that someone who has not progressed their maths to exceed that of a primary school child by the age of 16 will benefit from an additional two years of mathematics.
I think the idea is that those who don't hit that standard by age 16 have remedial education to meet that standard by 18, and achieve the foundation qualification.
See my comment on the previous thread.
That's already being done. So if it is that policy - it's not a policy announcement.
In the desire to stick it to the Tories we've got a "fuck maths" attitude on here this morning.
I despair.
Yes, it's a bit weird. I thought it was a PB.com truism that Britain needed better Maths skills and there were too many innumerate people in media and the government who sneered at quantitative analysis.
If a community like PB with niche interests in probability, statistics and spreadsheets cannot back this policy, then who in the real world will?
I back it. And logically so should everyone else - it's raw emotion against the Tories driving opposition to this.
I did an analysis the other day of about 80 regular PB posters and a very clear majority of those posting at the moment are of a centre-left/left persuasion whilst centre-right posters (which narrowly outweight both combined) have gone back to lurking. The inverse of how it was here in 2008-2009.
It's a morale thing, like seeing 9 Lib Dem boards up in Hyacinth Avenue, interpolating, and thinking everyone is going to vote Lib Dem - but it's not representative.
As a matter of interest, where do you classify me on the centre-left <-> centre-right split?
In the desire to stick it to the Tories we've got a "fuck maths" attitude on here this morning.
I despair.
Yes, it's a bit weird. I thought it was a PB.com truism that Britain needed better Maths skills and there were too many innumerate people in media and the government who sneered at quantitative analysis.
I think the two of you are confusing 'better maths skills' and 'yet more bloody maths teaching.'
If there were serious proposals to improve maths it could start with sorting out the train crash that is the primary school maths curriculum. Introduced by *checks notes* Nick Gibb.
The news report on the radiocameout with "8.5 million people can only do maths to primary school level" followed by "maths compulsory to 18".
It strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that someone who has not progressed their maths to exceed that of a primary school child by the age of 16 will benefit from an additional two years of mathematics.
I think the idea is that those who don't hit that standard by age 16 have remedial education to meet that standard by 18, and achieve the foundation qualification.
See my comment on the previous thread.
What about the students who
i) Don't wish to do A-level maths ii) Are mathematically competent at 16.
What happens with them under this new system ?
Maybe A-levels are for the chop and we'll move to a broader IBish system, but that hasn't been announced.
It doesn't seem controversial to suggest that Britain's Maths education could do with improving. This could be the sort of thing that will help to make Britain a better country in 10-20 years time, if you imagine a possible future where Maths education noticeably improves.
Except what has been trailed so far is not 'better' maths education, just 'more' maths education.
If the announcement was extensive maths tutoring for all ages you might have a point.
But it isn't...
Casino days there's a whole report behind today's announcement. You'd expect there to be a number of policies for all age groups.
If it ends up being only extending compulsory Maths education to 18 then I rescind my more neutral take off this morning and revert to my criticism of yesterday evening.
If it's anything else then prepare to kiss goodbye to every other subject on the curriculum. The primary curriculum is already so overstuffed that some schools teach only English and Maths in years 5 and 6. There literally is no more room for further changes.
It would be far better to follow Foxy and see where actually useful points of it could be introduced via other subjects.
Have you read the report? Maybe it proposes a radical overhaul of Maths teaching at primary level to teach more of our via other subjects?
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
It's more of the same tired ideologically driven tory crap.
95% of the maths I was taught I never used after school, the other 20% I could do on a calculator.
So you can't add up?
You’re off on a tangent, a bad sine.
That's cos I only did maths to 16.
Very sensible. Here's one of our absent friends, quoting Isaac Asimov to make a wise point I had forgotten about. Everyone who studies maths has a point where it goes from pleasantly easy to impossibly hard. Once you cross that threshold, it doesn't really matter how much effort you put in, or how well you are taught. Maths suddenly just gets too difficult and too abstract.
I just found it rather dull, to be honest. I prefer things that aren't theoretical.
There is a reason why I did much better at physics and economics than maths, even though there's so much maths in them.
Curiously, I was the opposire. I was comfortable with abstract maths (point-set topology, my PhD subject, is about as abstract as you can get) but found that practical applications added a complication that I wasn't any good at. Your preference is more useful to society - I'm sadly convinced my PhD did nobody any good at all, except possibly me.
I always found maths without practical applications to be pointless - but that's probably just me. I see the beauty not in the maths, but the applications. From coding in BBC Basic to rotate a 3D cube (inspired by the game Elite), to working out stresses in portal frame structures. Or trying to figure out the best way of manipulating numbers in assembler given the limited instructions available. For me, maths is is a tool.
A friend of ours is like you: she loves the (what I call) esoterica of maths, but doesn't particularly enjoy the fact that the practical applications mess up the beauty - the 'pure' maths gets sullied by real-world applications.
I think there's room for both - and maths that used to be seen as abstract can end up having massive real-world applications later - like fast Fourier transforms.
Don't really see how a policy to teach more Maths sometime after 2024 helps prevent someone's granny dying in pain on a trolley in A&E tomorrow. Whatever the merits, annoucing it today just comes across as out of touch.
Just a thought? Could this sudden enthusiasm for maths lessons be an admission that ministers never did get their pretty little heads around R values and exponential growth?
Or graphs
Doppelganger Britain has a far lower economic drop due to Covid - and that's with a delayed EU vaccine rollout - and rapidly makes a full recovery to pre-Covid levels and its pre-existing growth rate thereafter?
Smells like bullshit to me.
I'd imagine this is because doppelganger Britain is based on GDP data from countries that measure GDP slightly differently from us in the public sector. If you think that some of the decline in GDP relative to the doppelganger is still Covid related even now and reflects this measurement issue then that might mean the amount attributed to Brexit is over stated. However, I'm not sure if this is a convincing explanation - eg kids are all back at school now, so measurement differences in the education sector won't explain it. It might be interesting to look at just private sector activity. As a general point this kind of counterfactual exercise is useful, although of course it is not without its problems. I'd love to see some similarly rigorous analysis from the other side of the debate rather than just sniping.
It doesn't seem controversial to suggest that Britain's Maths education could do with improving. This could be the sort of thing that will help to make Britain a better country in 10-20 years time, if you imagine a possible future where Maths education noticeably improves.
Except what has been trailed so far is not 'better' maths education, just 'more' maths education.
If the announcement was extensive maths tutoring for all ages you might have a point.
But it isn't...
Casino days there's a whole report behind today's announcement. You'd expect there to be a number of policies for all age groups.
If it ends up being only extending compulsory Maths education to 18 then I rescind my more neutral take off this morning and revert to my criticism of yesterday evening.
If it's anything else then prepare to kiss goodbye to every other subject on the curriculum. The primary curriculum is already so overstuffed that some schools teach only English and Maths in years 5 and 6. There literally is no more room for further changes.
It would be far better to follow Foxy and see where actually useful points of it could be introduced via other subjects.
Have you read the report? Maybe it proposes a radical overhaul of Maths teaching at primary level to teach more of our via other subjects?
In which case why is the pre-announcement leaking about post-16?
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
It's more of the same tired ideologically driven tory crap.
They need booting out of office ASAP.
To meet the needs of today's workplace English, Maths, IT and a foreign language should be studied to 18 in my view, even if not at A level standard by most students
A DfE-commissioned review of post-16 maths in 2017 reckoned it would take 10 years to enable compulsory maths for 16-18 year olds, that it would take considerable effort and new funding and require a lot more maths teachers: https://twitter.com/RichardA/status/1610560872732049411/photo/1
Instead, they should be asking why after a series of major curriculum and exam reforms dating back ten years, we are still not teaching maths sufficiently in twelve years that an extra two years are needed on top.
Five minutes or so listening to the average politician and you will be thinking the country has a numeracy problem. I don't know if Sunak is proposing a viable approach to improving numeracy, but I do agree it is an area that needs work.
It doesn't seem controversial to suggest that Britain's Maths education could do with improving. This could be the sort of thing that will help to make Britain a better country in 10-20 years time, if you imagine a possible future where Maths education noticeably improves.
Except what has been trailed so far is not 'better' maths education, just 'more' maths education.
If the announcement was extensive maths tutoring for all ages you might have a point.
But it isn't...
Casino days there's a whole report behind today's announcement. You'd expect there to be a number of policies for all age groups.
If it ends up being only extending compulsory Maths education to 18 then I rescind my more neutral take off this morning and revert to my criticism of yesterday evening.
If it's anything else then prepare to kiss goodbye to every other subject on the curriculum. The primary curriculum is already so overstuffed that some schools teach only English and Maths in years 5 and 6. There literally is no more room for further changes.
It would be far better to follow Foxy and see where actually useful points of it could be introduced via other subjects.
Have you read the report? Maybe it proposes a radical overhaul of Maths teaching at primary level to teach more of our via other subjects?
In which case why is the pre-announcement leaking about post-16?
Because an announcement about tweaking the primary school curriculum is going to garner a lot less attention than "forcing Maths dunces to learn more Maths at age 16-18".
Thanks, how about a copy of the Tory Manifesto? Ah, that used to be in the fiction department too, but recently we have moved it to the comedy section.
In the desire to stick it to the Tories we've got a "fuck maths" attitude on here this morning.
I despair.
Personally I'm all in favour of well-resourced maths teaching from primary up to school-leaving age, with the emphasis being on the sort of maths (statistics, for instance) that is useful in almost any occupation. I also accept the Sunak's statement is likely to feature a variety of themes, and the sole focus on maths is probably just a reflection of a perhaps ill-judged press release.
But as Hodges - hardly a left-wing critic - observes, it's an odd priority to highlight right now after a period of almost total silence on policy, and not obvious that it's really thought through.
Perhaps the speech will surprise on the upside by covering a variety of issues in more detail. We'll soon know.
It doesn't seem controversial to suggest that Britain's Maths education could do with improving. This could be the sort of thing that will help to make Britain a better country in 10-20 years time, if you imagine a possible future where Maths education noticeably improves.
Except what has been trailed so far is not 'better' maths education, just 'more' maths education.
If the announcement was extensive maths tutoring for all ages you might have a point.
But it isn't...
Casino days there's a whole report behind today's announcement. You'd expect there to be a number of policies for all age groups.
If it ends up being only extending compulsory Maths education to 18 then I rescind my more neutral take off this morning and revert to my criticism of yesterday evening.
If it's anything else then prepare to kiss goodbye to every other subject on the curriculum. The primary curriculum is already so overstuffed that some schools teach only English and Maths in years 5 and 6. There literally is no more room for further changes.
It would be far better to follow Foxy and see where actually useful points of it could be introduced via other subjects.
Have you read the report? Maybe it proposes a radical overhaul of Maths teaching at primary level to teach more of our via other subjects?
In which case why is the pre-announcement leaking about post-16?
Because an announcement about tweaking the primary school curriculum is going to garner a lot less attention than "forcing Maths dunces to learn more Maths at age 16-18".
'Tweaking?'
It doesn't need tweaking. It needs nuking from orbit. Just to be safe.
I doubt very much if there will be any significant change there anyway. That would require Gibb to admit he'd fucked up on an epochal scale and he doesn't do that.
In the desire to stick it to the Tories we've got a "fuck maths" attitude on here this morning.
I despair.
Sadly the requirements of the secondary maths curriculum will be beyond so many of our students there would be no point in forcing them to do 2 more years of it. Surely if they want to raise achievement at least to the end of primary school level, we should start concentrating on primary stuff in years 7 and 8 before even attempting secondary till year 9 onwards.
They put a load of soldiers in a large building marked on every map. They put a load of ammunition next to them. They move them about in broad daylight.
And whose fault is it when the Ukrainians blow them up?
Although I suppose the story may have the positive side effect (from the Putinista point of view) of making soldiers nervous about using mobile phones to tell people just how big a disaster Putin's penile compensation scheme is.
And, of course, it may have some truth in it, improbable though this would be for a Russian press release.
Mobiks get their phones confiscated and the Russian government makes MegaFon, MTS, etc. cancel the contracts. Because they are as thick as fuck and usually the product of fetal alcohol syndrome they go out and buy/steal new phones all the time. The Ukrainians probably have an operation to sell cheap Chinaphones with compromised baseband processors going in Donbas.
It almost certainly doesn't require any of that. In all likelihood the mobile networks are backdoored or hacked and Ukraine, or an ally, can hoover up all the signalling data in occupied Ukraine. So they know where all phones are, and even switching them off will merely give a bloody big clue that something important is nearby. Cyberwar is yet another area where Russia appears to be failing and on the back foot.
From coding in BBC Basic to rotate a 3D cube (inspired by the game Elite)
Oh, the hours we wasted...
We only had one copy of the disk, so every time someone did a hyperspace jump they had to fetch it from another player.
Disk? Luxury! My friend got it on release in 1984. We used to pretend we were spacemen as we waited (what seemed like) half an hour for it to load from tape...
95% of the maths I was taught I never used after school, the other 20% I could do on a calculator.
So you can't add up?
You’re off on a tangent, a bad sine.
That's cos I only did maths to 16.
Very sensible. Here's one of our absent friends, quoting Isaac Asimov to make a wise point I had forgotten about. Everyone who studies maths has a point where it goes from pleasantly easy to impossibly hard. Once you cross that threshold, it doesn't really matter how much effort you put in, or how well you are taught. Maths suddenly just gets too difficult and too abstract.
I just found it rather dull, to be honest. I prefer things that aren't theoretical.
There is a reason why I did much better at physics and economics than maths, even though there's so much maths in them.
Maths belongs in physics but there's too much of it in economics these days.
Really? I found plenty of it when I was studying it 20 years ago.
But of course, I never went into banking...
There is a lot more now than 20 years ago, I think, although I suppose that when I said "these days" I meant 20 years ago (when I was studying it) comparing it to 50 years ago. As an economist in the markets the amount of maths is reasonable, consisting mainly of being able to do basic arithmetic. The complicated stuff (eg pricing derivatives) is mostly done by French engineering graduates rather than economists. In econ academia the use of maths is excessive, detracting from the subject's ability to impart economic intuition in my opinion. The subject has been colonised by mathematicians who know more maths than economists but not enough to work successfully in top mathematics departments. I say all of this as someone who isn't bad at maths, but who hoped that studying economics would mean learning about the economy.
With a physics degree and some postgrad education in health economics, I must say that I see some similarities between the maths in economics and the spherical cow in a vacuum in physics - it all looks very nice on paper but has limited applicability to the real world.
From coding in BBC Basic to rotate a 3D cube (inspired by the game Elite)
Oh, the hours we wasted...
We only had one copy of the disk, so every time someone did a hyperspace jump they had to fetch it from another player.
Disk? Luxury! My friend got it on release in 1984. We used to pretend we were spacemen as we waited (what seemed like) half an hour for it to load from tape...
Ouch
Our crappy state school had 6 machines, each with a 40 track single sided disk drive.
They put a load of soldiers in a large building marked on every map. They put a load of ammunition next to them. They move them about in broad daylight.
And whose fault is it when the Ukrainians blow them up?
Although I suppose the story may have the positive side effect (from the Putinista point of view) of making soldiers nervous about using mobile phones to tell people just how big a disaster Putin's penile compensation scheme is.
And, of course, it may have some truth in it, improbable though this would be for a Russian press release.
Mobiks get their phones confiscated and the Russian government makes MegaFon, MTS, etc. cancel the contracts. Because they are as thick as fuck and usually the product of fetal alcohol syndrome they go out and buy/steal new phones all the time. The Ukrainians probably have an operation to sell cheap Chinaphones with compromised baseband processors going in Donbas.
It almost certainly doesn't require any of that. In all likelihood the mobile networks are backdoored or hacked and Ukraine, or an ally, can hoover up all the signalling data in occupied Ukraine. So they know where all phones are, and even switching them off will merely give a bloody big clue that something important is nearby. Cyberwar is yet another area where Russia appears to be failing and on the back foot.
I reckon this located-by-mobile-phone is, if true, far from the whole story. There will be lots of signals and visual intelligence feeding into knowledge on the target. Saying "You idiots used mobile phones!" is a good cover for "Our intel teams on the ground, along with spy and comms satellites, saw you all congregating there."
Or it could be that one piece of evidence (say, on-ground teams) was confirmed with satellite imagery and mobile phone data.
They put a load of soldiers in a large building marked on every map. They put a load of ammunition next to them. They move them about in broad daylight.
And whose fault is it when the Ukrainians blow them up?
Although I suppose the story may have the positive side effect (from the Putinista point of view) of making soldiers nervous about using mobile phones to tell people just how big a disaster Putin's penile compensation scheme is.
And, of course, it may have some truth in it, improbable though this would be for a Russian press release.
Mobiks get their phones confiscated and the Russian government makes MegaFon, MTS, etc. cancel the contracts. Because they are as thick as fuck and usually the product of fetal alcohol syndrome they go out and buy/steal new phones all the time. The Ukrainians probably have an operation to sell cheap Chinaphones with compromised baseband processors going in Donbas.
It almost certainly doesn't require any of that. In all likelihood the mobile networks are backdoored or hacked and Ukraine, or an ally, can hoover up all the signalling data in occupied Ukraine. So they know where all phones are, and even switching them off will merely give a bloody big clue that something important is nearby. Cyberwar is yet another area where Russia appears to be failing and on the back foot.
Yes. It would be interesting to see a map of "distance to nearest mobile phone".
I've heard of a few workplaces that have everyone hand in mobile phones on entry for security reasons, and you'd imagine those gaps would be very noticeable on such a map.
Casino is having a crack at being a political Cnut.
Hope that's not a typo.
😀 Alas no. Be careful old chap. A positive attitude is one thing, sticking yourself on the front line advocating for this government is quite another. You do not control what they do and should not be the butt of the anger they thoroughly deserve. It’s a toxic recipe for your mental health.
I back it. And logically so should everyone else - it's raw emotion against the Tories driving opposition to this.
No
It's a stupid idea.
When I started high school there were around 300 in my year.
By year 6, there were 6 of us still left studying maths.
I see zero utility in making everyone else study it as well.
It's a stupid idea for you because you're angry about Brexit.
That is the be all and end all of your position on everything.
A very close friend who had suffered a personal tragedy decided to move to the South of France. She found herself an apartment and was required to pay a year in advance. She discovered yesterday that she couldn't stay. She is obliged to return after 90 days which means she cant move because she can't afford to keep an apartment in both countries.
The news report on the radiocameout with "8.5 million people can only do maths to primary school level" followed by "maths compulsory to 18".
It strikes me as exceedingly unlikely that someone who has not progressed their maths to exceed that of a primary school child by the age of 16 will benefit from an additional two years of mathematics.
I think the idea is that those who don't hit that standard by age 16 have remedial education to meet that standard by 18, and achieve the foundation qualification.
See my comment on the previous thread.
That's already being done. So if it is that policy - it's not a policy announcement.
The thing is, with the best will in the world delivery will turn to dust when the standards are not met.
When was the post 16 Key Skills requirement implemented in further education colleges? 25 years ago? And when measurement were failed and the requirement not met through direct teaching, and hence financial remuneration held back from the educational establishment, what happened? Maths, English and IT were "embedded" and the criteria met by extrapolation from subject assignments. A positive practical proposal dissolved into a tick box exercise to obtain the cash from central government.
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
It's more of the same tired ideologically driven tory crap.
They need booting out of office ASAP.
To meet the needs of today's workplace English, Maths, IT and a foreign language should be studied to 18 in my view, even if not at A level standard by most students
Cram all that in, and inevitably you end up diluting A Levels, which in my view is the worst possible thing you could do.
Also English - do you mean Lit? Can't see the point of an MCP* like me reading more Shakespeare. If language, then what more is to be learnt after getting an A* at GCSE?
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
(Snip)
Whilst I have some sympathy with the above, we do have a massive problem with functional illiteracy and innumeracy in this country. Anyone who is functionally illiterate and/or innumerate is at a big disadvantage in life, and has been let down by the schools system, themselves and their parents.
If studying up to 18 means things like getting core skills into those left behind, then I'm all for it.
Instead, they should be asking why after a series of major curriculum and exam reforms dating back ten years, we are still not teaching maths sufficiently in twelve years that an extra two years are needed on top.
Five minutes or so listening to the average politician and you will be thinking the country has a numeracy problem. I don't know if Sunak is proposing a viable approach to improving numeracy, but I do agree it is an area that needs work.
I think Sunak (and Truss for that matter) are unusual in being front line politicians who understand and love numbers. That is pretty rare in our politics. The problem is that they see only numbers, and there is more to life than those.
One of the defects of NHS management is that it too is just interested in numbers, hence the poor experience of many of our clients. The number of GP consultations is back above the 2019 level, 2/3 being face to face and more than 40% the same day, so looks great on paper. The bewilderment then comes from the poor quality of the whole experience. Things like continuity of care are highly valued in patient satisfaction surveys, yet are ignored by management.
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
It's more of the same tired ideologically driven tory crap.
They need booting out of office ASAP.
To meet the needs of today's workplace English, Maths, IT and a foreign language should be studied to 18 in my view, even if not at A level standard by most students
I agree to some extent with English and Foreign Language, but as far as IT is concerned, the use of excel, word and power point is hardly A level standard IT, and I am sure the knowledge of Calculus, coordinate geometry and algebraic equations in relation to graphical analysis is not required in the boardroom or even the shop floor.
95% of the maths I was taught I never used after school, the other 20% I could do on a calculator.
So you can't add up?
You’re off on a tangent, a bad sine.
That's cos I only did maths to 16.
Very sensible. Here's one of our absent friends, quoting Isaac Asimov to make a wise point I had forgotten about. Everyone who studies maths has a point where it goes from pleasantly easy to impossibly hard. Once you cross that threshold, it doesn't really matter how much effort you put in, or how well you are taught. Maths suddenly just gets too difficult and too abstract.
I just found it rather dull, to be honest. I prefer things that aren't theoretical.
There is a reason why I did much better at physics and economics than maths, even though there's so much maths in them.
Maths belongs in physics but there's too much of it in economics these days.
Really? I found plenty of it when I was studying it 20 years ago.
But of course, I never went into banking...
There is a lot more now than 20 years ago, I think, although I suppose that when I said "these days" I meant 20 years ago (when I was studying it) comparing it to 50 years ago. As an economist in the markets the amount of maths is reasonable, consisting mainly of being able to do basic arithmetic. The complicated stuff (eg pricing derivatives) is mostly done by French engineering graduates rather than economists. In econ academia the use of maths is excessive, detracting from the subject's ability to impart economic intuition in my opinion. The subject has been colonised by mathematicians who know more maths than economists but not enough to work successfully in top mathematics departments. I say all of this as someone who isn't bad at maths, but who hoped that studying economics would mean learning about the economy.
We have discussed this before. Friends of mine who are senior economists and arrived there by way of various institutions (MIT, Imperial) inform me that as you say the maths in economics study now is "formidable".
Does it make them better or worse economists? Not 100% sure you'd have to discuss with them (perhaps when you are all back at Davos one year).
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
(Snip)
Whilst I have some sympathy with the above, we do have a massive problem with functional illiteracy and innumeracy in this country. Anyone who is functionally illiterate and/or innumerate is at a big disadvantage in life, and has been let down by the schools system, themselves and their parents.
If studying up to 18 means things like getting core skills into those left behind, then I'm all for it.
And there is definitely a "fuck Maths" attitude out there. It seems to be perfectly socially acceptable to admit being innumerate and it gets laughed off.
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
(Snip)
Whilst I have some sympathy with the above, we do have a massive problem with functional illiteracy and innumeracy in this country. Anyone who is functionally illiterate and/or innumerate is at a big disadvantage in life, and has been let down by the schools system, themselves and their parents.
If studying up to 18 means things like getting core skills into those left behind, then I'm all for it.
Yet all the evidence is that better early years education is more important. Perhaps funding SureStart instead of closing a third of the centers down might help......
I reckon this located-by-mobile-phone is, if true, far from the whole story. There will be lots of signals and visual intelligence feeding into knowledge on the target. Saying "You idiots used mobile phones!" is a good cover for "Our intel teams on the ground, along with spy and comms satellites, saw you all congregating there."
Or it could be that one piece of evidence (say, on-ground teams) was confirmed with satellite imagery and mobile phone data.
There is an entire side to the war in Ukraine that is essentially invisible and unreported. I believe that the intelligence, electronic warfare, and cyberwarfare is making a huge difference. You do occassionally read or hear something that makes you think that means X is/was happening, but the military and intelligence people aren't talking, and it goes over the head of much of the press.
As to the mobile phones stuff we already know that the NSA has boasted in the past of intercepting all calls in unnamed nations. That kind of network full-take is right up their street. I think it is very likely happening in occupied Ukraine right now, and probably as a security measure in the rest of Ukraine too.
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
(Snip)
Whilst I have some sympathy with the above, we do have a massive problem with functional illiteracy and innumeracy in this country. Anyone who is functionally illiterate and/or innumerate is at a big disadvantage in life, and has been let down by the schools system, themselves and their parents.
If studying up to 18 means things like getting core skills into those left behind, then I'm all for it.
And there is definitely a "fuck Maths" attitude out there. It seems to be perfectly socially acceptable to admit being innumerate and it gets laughed off.
Is it inadequate mathematical ability which is the problem or is it more a failure of logic?
I don't think Labour sneering at the maths policy is a good look either. It makes them look anti-education and anti-success. I think the maths policy is solving a problem that's just not as urgent as other ones and it also requires a lot more joined up thinking than just throw maths teachers at it. We have an education system that isn't giving kids the necessary skills for work, numeracy is a part of that, extending maths education to 18 may be the solution, I'm not sure, but it certainly isn't a silver bullet and it does nothing for 18 year olds who can barely read and write properly, should education in English language be extended to 18 as well?
What about for people who get A* English language and English lit/maths and choose not to take it further, do you lumber them with the A-Level or make them do the 16-18 remedial maths they can do in their sleep?
Sometimes I wonder whether we need to look again at automatic progression of school years and the hard school finishing age we have.
Imagine a maths teacher borderline to stay in the job and considering their options, who will now be asked to teach a load of 16-18 year olds who don't want to be there but are forced into it, many of which will have no belief they can do maths, instead of teaching motivated students who have chosen the course.
What happens next.......
Pay will need to be going up 30% or so to get enough maths teachers in for this.
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
(Snip)
Whilst I have some sympathy with the above, we do have a massive problem with functional illiteracy and innumeracy in this country. Anyone who is functionally illiterate and/or innumerate is at a big disadvantage in life, and has been let down by the schools system, themselves and their parents.
If studying up to 18 means things like getting core skills into those left behind, then I'm all for it.
You don't need to be forced to pursue maths to age 18 to become functional numerate. I would argue that a reasonably able year 9 could be at that stage already. Most of the population left primary school in the 50s and 60s at the functional numerate stage. It depends what functionally numerate is defined as. Is it just tables, fractions, decimals, percentages, measuring and estimation? What else is needed?
I don't think Labour sneering at the maths policy is a good look either. It makes them look anti-education and anti-success. I think the maths policy is solving a problem that's just not as urgent as other ones and it also requires a lot more joined up thinking than just throw maths teachers at it. We have an education system that isn't giving kids the necessary skills for work, numeracy is a part of that, extending maths education to 18 may be the solution, I'm not sure, but it certainly isn't a silver bullet and it does nothing for 18 year olds who can barely read and write properly, should education in English language be extended to 18 as well?
What about for people who get A* English language and English lit/maths and choose not to take it further, do you lumber them with the A-Level or make them do the 16-18 remedial maths they can do in their sleep?
Sometimes I wonder whether we need to look again at automatic progression of school years and the hard school finishing age we have.
Hmm. If you're getting top grades (whatever they're called these days, "9"?) in English, English lit and Maths and aren't taking them further, what are they doing at A Level?
It depends on how many hours a week this new maths teaching involves, but the Sunak plan is likely to need 5000 to 10000 extra maths teachers.
The government currently aims to recruit 2000 mathematicians into teacher training each year, and got 1800 last year.
This is why an awful lot of maths lessons aren't actually taught by actual maths teachers.
So in other words the problem isn't that kids need more maths, its that they need maths. So we need to make teaching an attractive profession to both get into and stay in - something the Tories are doing in reverse as with everything else.
Then again, HY and that beinn guy - and possibly Big_G - will point out that I live north of the wall which is devolved which proves there is no crisis in England so THERE. Which is 1+1=11 territory...
Big G has spent most of the last 48 hours bemoaning crises in the NHS on Labour's watch, but I haven't seen him say that means there is no crisis in England.
Good morning
My family's experience of the NHS in Wales saw the death of my son in laws sisters partner with sepsis yesterday in Glan Clwyd hospital (in special measures for months) following a cancer operation and my granddaughter was put at risk due to the idiotic administration whereby a doctor faxes a prescription (after waiting 24 hours on the phone to speak to a doctor on suspected scarlet fever/ strep) to Asda but Asda had run out of the penicillin and would not let my son take the fax to another chemist
The NHS in Wales is just as bad as in England and I have not suggested at anytime that Wales is bad England is good but that all the politicians across parties need to understand the NHS is not a religion and needs cross party agreement to radically change the organisation, integrate social care, install state of art IT, and ensure GP practices open 7 days a week
As far as Sunak, Barclay and Hunt are concerned they are holding a hard-line on pay rises but also they are losing the argument especially with the nurses and they will pay a political price for this if they do not agree a fair settlement in the heath sector
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
It's more of the same tired ideologically driven tory crap.
They need booting out of office ASAP.
To meet the needs of today's workplace English, Maths, IT and a foreign language should be studied to 18 in my view, even if not at A level standard by most students
I agree to some extent with English and Foreign Language, but as far as IT is concerned, the use of excel, word and power point is hardly A level standard IT, and I am sure the knowledge of Calculus, coordinate geometry and algebraic equations in relation to graphical analysis is not required in the boardroom or even the shop floor.
I have only once in my entire life made use of Pythagoras' Theorem, when a work colleague wanted to put a shower cubicle in a small WC room, and wanted to know if the door, hinged in the opposite corner, would clip the shower or not.
95% of the maths I was taught I never used after school, the other 20% I could do on a calculator.
So you can't add up?
You’re off on a tangent, a bad sine.
That's cos I only did maths to 16.
Very sensible. Here's one of our absent friends, quoting Isaac Asimov to make a wise point I had forgotten about. Everyone who studies maths has a point where it goes from pleasantly easy to impossibly hard. Once you cross that threshold, it doesn't really matter how much effort you put in, or how well you are taught. Maths suddenly just gets too difficult and too abstract.
I just found it rather dull, to be honest. I prefer things that aren't theoretical.
There is a reason why I did much better at physics and economics than maths, even though there's so much maths in them.
Maths belongs in physics but there's too much of it in economics these days.
Really? I found plenty of it when I was studying it 20 years ago.
But of course, I never went into banking...
There is a lot more now than 20 years ago, I think, although I suppose that when I said "these days" I meant 20 years ago (when I was studying it) comparing it to 50 years ago. As an economist in the markets the amount of maths is reasonable, consisting mainly of being able to do basic arithmetic. The complicated stuff (eg pricing derivatives) is mostly done by French engineering graduates rather than economists. In econ academia the use of maths is excessive, detracting from the subject's ability to impart economic intuition in my opinion. The subject has been colonised by mathematicians who know more maths than economists but not enough to work successfully in top mathematics departments. I say all of this as someone who isn't bad at maths, but who hoped that studying economics would mean learning about the economy.
We have discussed this before. Friends of mine who are senior economists and arrived there by way of various institutions (MIT, Imperial) inform me that as you say the maths in economics study now is "formidable".
Does it make them better or worse economists? Not 100% sure you'd have to discuss with them (perhaps when you are all back at Davos one year).
Ha ha just for the record I have never been to Davos.
Anyway, a far more interesting application of practical mathematics this morning is how on earth the Republicans are going to solve the dilemma in the House?
There are any number of scenarios but one thing seems fairly sure: McCarthy is seriously weakened by this.
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
(Snip)
Whilst I have some sympathy with the above, we do have a massive problem with functional illiteracy and innumeracy in this country. Anyone who is functionally illiterate and/or innumerate is at a big disadvantage in life, and has been let down by the schools system, themselves and their parents.
If studying up to 18 means things like getting core skills into those left behind, then I'm all for it.
Yet all the evidence is that better early years education is more important. Perhaps funding SureStart instead of closing a third of the centers down might help......
Well, yes. As a counter, it would be interesting to see if functional innumeracy and illiteracy altered for those kids 'helped' by SureStart. And to widen that as well; things like crime.
The scheme's been going for 25 years, so if we take primary school age kids, then there should be well over a decade of data for it.
I went to a SureStart baby club when the little 'un was a baby. It was useful. But the NCT classes we attended (as sensible middle-class folk) were much more useful. Perhaps widening access to NCT-style schemes for first-time parents may be a big advantage?
I don't think Labour sneering at the maths policy is a good look either. It makes them look anti-education and anti-success. I think the maths policy is solving a problem that's just not as urgent as other ones and it also requires a lot more joined up thinking than just throw maths teachers at it. We have an education system that isn't giving kids the necessary skills for work, numeracy is a part of that, extending maths education to 18 may be the solution, I'm not sure, but it certainly isn't a silver bullet and it does nothing for 18 year olds who can barely read and write properly, should education in English language be extended to 18 as well?
What about for people who get A* English language and English lit/maths and choose not to take it further, do you lumber them with the A-Level or make them do the 16-18 remedial maths they can do in their sleep?
Sometimes I wonder whether we need to look again at automatic progression of school years and the hard school finishing age we have.
Hmm. If you're getting top grades (whatever they're called these days, "9"?) in English, English lit and Maths and aren't taking them further, what are they doing at A Level?
Yes. It would be interesting to see a map of "distance to nearest mobile phone".
I've heard of a few workplaces that have everyone hand in mobile phones on entry for security reasons, and you'd imagine those gaps would be very noticeable on such a map.
The data for a warzone would be fascinating.
Of course, if you had access to the data you could select every phone that is switched off at certain times, or near certain masts, or travels on certain routes, or travels with other phones, or calls back to Russia. There are lots of ways of looking at such data to identify people, places, relationships etc.
Switching off your phone or banning phones is not a panacea if your adversary has all the network data. Good.
I don't think Labour sneering at the maths policy is a good look either. It makes them look anti-education and anti-success. I think the maths policy is solving a problem that's just not as urgent as other ones and it also requires a lot more joined up thinking than just throw maths teachers at it. We have an education system that isn't giving kids the necessary skills for work, numeracy is a part of that, extending maths education to 18 may be the solution, I'm not sure, but it certainly isn't a silver bullet and it does nothing for 18 year olds who can barely read and write properly, should education in English language be extended to 18 as well?
What about for people who get A* English language and English lit/maths and choose not to take it further, do you lumber them with the A-Level or make them do the 16-18 remedial maths they can do in their sleep?
Sometimes I wonder whether we need to look again at automatic progression of school years and the hard school finishing age we have.
Hmm. If you're getting top grades (whatever they're called these days, "9"?) in English, English lit and Maths and aren't taking them further, what are they doing at A Level?
I got 9A*s, I didn't do 9 A-levels.
Which doesn't answer the question. As best as I can remember, everyone at my school did either Maths (if they were doing sciences) or English (if they weren't).
In the desire to stick it to the Tories we've got a "fuck maths" attitude on here this morning.
I despair.
Yes, it's a bit weird. I thought it was a PB.com truism that Britain needed better Maths skills and there were too many innumerate people in media and the government who sneered at quantitative analysis.
Well quite. How many arts graduates were on TV during the pandemic, tasked with explaining simple mathematics to a general audience - and failing utterly to do so?
It’s a bit of a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t for Sunak it seems.
People have been complaining he’s an empty suit/crisis manager/ treasury wonk who is only interested in controlling inflation and needs to be doing more.
The day a part of a policy is announced he’s attacked for doing things that aren’t priorities.
As far as I have understood it this morning they aren’t intending on making every child do further maths but ensuring an ongoing teaching of maths - I’m presuming basic maths that will be important in people’s lives and careers to ensure that there isn’t this huge deficit in basic maths ability in children and young adults.
Of course it’s not going to solve the strikes, fix the NHS, end war in Ukraine but being an old fashioned sort I thought governments were supposed to be multi-functional and had different departments to focus on making the country run or run better rather than just being tunnel visioned on a couple of high profile matters.
So if it is a plan to make every kid into a rocket scientist then obviously it’s stupid but if it’s about a tweak to try and improve basic maths to ensure all UK adults of the future can live a bit better than that’s cool. Of course we could just tell Sunak to only focus on the big things and leave everything else to be sorted in the future.
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
(Snip)
Whilst I have some sympathy with the above, we do have a massive problem with functional illiteracy and innumeracy in this country. Anyone who is functionally illiterate and/or innumerate is at a big disadvantage in life, and has been let down by the schools system, themselves and their parents.
If studying up to 18 means things like getting core skills into those left behind, then I'm all for it.
And there is definitely a "fuck Maths" attitude out there. It seems to be perfectly socially acceptable to admit being innumerate and it gets laughed off.
Oh dear, I risk as an educationalist getting drawn into this which I'd really rather avoid. Partly because I don't enjoy discussing education with people who are not actually in it.
Generally speaking education does not equip pupils for the world. I constantly read, especially from the reactionary Right, moaning about mobile phones in schools but THIS IS THE MODERN WORLD!!!! Not teaching with technology is as antediluvian as making pupils write with quills. Or write with pens. Or even write at all. I mean, I'm an English teacher but why do we still make pupils write exams with pens? Whoever uses a pen in real life? Seriously: it's GONE. We use keypads and phones. We even sign things electronically now or with face recognition or iris scanning.
As for school curriculum IT, it's an absolute joke.
Okay, so I'm being provocative but really, truly, education does NOT fit people for actual life. Especially, I might add, the commercial world.
Making all pupils do maths until 18 is a pathetic response to a real, deep-seated, problem.
Oh ... and if you've never watched this then you REALLY should:
I don't think Labour sneering at the maths policy is a good look either. It makes them look anti-education and anti-success. I think the maths policy is solving a problem that's just not as urgent as other ones and it also requires a lot more joined up thinking than just throw maths teachers at it. We have an education system that isn't giving kids the necessary skills for work, numeracy is a part of that, extending maths education to 18 may be the solution, I'm not sure, but it certainly isn't a silver bullet and it does nothing for 18 year olds who can barely read and write properly, should education in English language be extended to 18 as well?
What about for people who get A* English language and English lit/maths and choose not to take it further, do you lumber them with the A-Level or make them do the 16-18 remedial maths they can do in their sleep?
Sometimes I wonder whether we need to look again at automatic progression of school years and the hard school finishing age we have.
Hmm. If you're getting top grades (whatever they're called these days, "9"?) in English, English lit and Maths and aren't taking them further, what are they doing at A Level?
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
(Snip)
Whilst I have some sympathy with the above, we do have a massive problem with functional illiteracy and innumeracy in this country. Anyone who is functionally illiterate and/or innumerate is at a big disadvantage in life, and has been let down by the schools system, themselves and their parents.
If studying up to 18 means things like getting core skills into those left behind, then I'm all for it.
You don't need to be forced to pursue maths to age 18 to become functional numerate. I would argue that a reasonably able year 9 could be at that stage already. Most of the population left primary school in the 50s and 60s at the functional numerate stage. It depends what functionally numerate is defined as. Is it just tables, fractions, decimals, percentages, measuring and estimation? What else is needed?
The number of adults who are functionally illiterate and/or innumerate has remained stubbornly static for decades, at around 15-20%.
We do not have a 'fuck Maths' attitude. We have a balanced one, which accepts the fact that people have different skill sets and brain wiring. I happen to be good at English but I wouldn't be so fucking stupid, downright wicked, as to impose that on everyone else until it was drilled into them. I wouldn't want a brilliant mathematician to have to work their way through Chaucer until they're 18. Or someone with the gift of languages. Post-16 is an opportunity to begin specialising. We're not for the most part an IB country, we have Advanced levels which are actually a bloody good set of qualifications.
(Snip)
Whilst I have some sympathy with the above, we do have a massive problem with functional illiteracy and innumeracy in this country. Anyone who is functionally illiterate and/or innumerate is at a big disadvantage in life, and has been let down by the schools system, themselves and their parents.
If studying up to 18 means things like getting core skills into those left behind, then I'm all for it.
And there is definitely a "fuck Maths" attitude out there. It seems to be perfectly socially acceptable to admit being innumerate and it gets laughed off.
Oh dear, I risk as an educationalist getting drawn into this which I'd really rather avoid. Partly because I don't enjoy discussing education with people who are not actually in it.
Generally speaking education does not equip pupils for the world. I constantly read, especially from the reactionary Right, moaning about mobile phones in schools but THIS IS THE MODERN WORLD!!!! Not teaching with technology is as antediluvian as making pupils write with quills. Or write with pens. Or even write at all. I mean, I'm an English teacher but why do we still make pupils write exams with pens. Whoever uses a pen in real life? Seriously: it's GONE. We use keypads and phones. We even sign things electronically now or with face recognition or iris scanning.
As for school curriculum IT, it's an absolute joke.
Okay, so I'm being provocative but really, truly, education does NOT fit people for actual life. Especially, I might add, the commercial world.
Making all pupils do maths until 18 is a pathetic response to a real, deep-seated, problem.
Oh ... and if you've never watched this then you REALLY should:
If you are an accountant, a banker, a data analyst, work in finance and resources or tech or in business management at any level you will almost certainly use Maths to some degree and that is most of the commercial world
Another good day for energy usage. 14C outside and widely across the UK, near-record temperatures continuing across Eastern Europe and 19.7gw of power coming from UK wind turbines vs 3.1gw from gas.
Let’s see the detail of today’s policy announcement - I really hate it when the ‘news’ is soundbites of what *will* be announced, rather than what *has* been announced - but I doubt it’s further maths for all. Further maths (at least in 1996 when I did it) was all imaginary numbers, equation solving and lots of calculus - not something used afterwards by anyone not doing a pure maths degree.
Ironically on topic, while clearing out a load of my stuff in my parents’ house over Christmas, I found my old Ti-82 school calculator - still works too!
It’s a bit of a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t for Sunak it seems.
People have been complaining he’s an empty suit/crisis manager/ treasury wonk who is only interested in controlling inflation and needs to be doing more.
The day a part of a policy is announced he’s attacked for doing things that aren’t priorities.
As far as I have understood it this morning they aren’t intending on making every child do further maths but ensuring an ongoing teaching of maths - I’m presuming basic maths that will be important in people’s lives and careers to ensure that there isn’t this huge deficit in basic maths ability in children and young adults.
Of course it’s not going to solve the strikes, fix the NHS, end war in Ukraine but being an old fashioned sort I thought governments were supposed to be multi-functional and had different departments to focus on making the country run or run better rather than just being tunnel visioned on a couple of high profile matters.
So if it is a plan to make every kid into a rocket scientist then obviously it’s stupid but if it’s about a tweak to try and improve basic maths to ensure all UK adults of the future can live a bit better than that’s cool. Of course we could just tell Sunak to only focus on the big things and leave everything else to be sorted in the future.
But again, should we not be asking ourselves why twelve years of teaching maths is insufficient, and another two will magically solve it?
What are we doing wrong that twelve years - about one-seventh of the average person's lifetime - isn't enough time?
I don't think Labour sneering at the maths policy is a good look either. It makes them look anti-education and anti-success. I think the maths policy is solving a problem that's just not as urgent as other ones and it also requires a lot more joined up thinking than just throw maths teachers at it. We have an education system that isn't giving kids the necessary skills for work, numeracy is a part of that, extending maths education to 18 may be the solution, I'm not sure, but it certainly isn't a silver bullet and it does nothing for 18 year olds who can barely read and write properly, should education in English language be extended to 18 as well?
What about for people who get A* English language and English lit/maths and choose not to take it further, do you lumber them with the A-Level or make them do the 16-18 remedial maths they can do in their sleep?
Sometimes I wonder whether we need to look again at automatic progression of school years and the hard school finishing age we have.
Hmm. If you're getting top grades (whatever they're called these days, "9"?) in English, English lit and Maths and aren't taking them further, what are they doing at A Level?
There's plenty to learn out there outside Maths and English.
OK, the creative side (art, design, music) I can see as a specialism (though I think my school discouraged even the creative people from doing an all-creative A level curriculum). Everything else there naturally goes with either English or Maths, I would think. Certainly doing physics and/or chemistry without maths seems unusual.
Let’s see the detail of today’s policy announcement - I really hate it when the ‘news’ is soundbites of what *will* be announced, rather than what *has* been announced - but I doubt it’s further maths for all. Further maths (at least in 1996 when I did it) was all imaginary numbers, equation solving and lots of calculus - not something used afterwards by anyone not doing a pure maths degree.
Ironically on topic, while clearing out a load of my stuff in my parents’ house over Christmas, I found my old Ti-82 school calculator - still works too!
I doubt anyone expects it to be Further maths for all, there are nowhere near enough teachers qualified to teach it. Lots of schools don't even offer it at all.
I'm also going to mention my deep-seated fundamental belief, certainty, that not only are there multiple forms of intelligence but there are also multiple learning differences.
Probably not a popular belief on here, especially amongst the reactionary Right, but it's undoubtedly true.
Generally speaking those who believe sitting compliant children behind individual desks and lecturing them with chalk and talk is the right way to educate are dismissive of such things. Ironically, private schools are stuffed full of pupils who could most benefit from teachers with a better comprehension of education.
It’s a bit of a case of damned if you do and damned if you don’t for Sunak it seems.
People have been complaining he’s an empty suit/crisis manager/ treasury wonk who is only interested in controlling inflation and needs to be doing more.
The day a part of a policy is announced he’s attacked for doing things that aren’t priorities.
As far as I have understood it this morning they aren’t intending on making every child do further maths but ensuring an ongoing teaching of maths - I’m presuming basic maths that will be important in people’s lives and careers to ensure that there isn’t this huge deficit in basic maths ability in children and young adults.
Of course it’s not going to solve the strikes, fix the NHS, end war in Ukraine but being an old fashioned sort I thought governments were supposed to be multi-functional and had different departments to focus on making the country run or run better rather than just being tunnel visioned on a couple of high profile matters.
So if it is a plan to make every kid into a rocket scientist then obviously it’s stupid but if it’s about a tweak to try and improve basic maths to ensure all UK adults of the future can live a bit better than that’s cool. Of course we could just tell Sunak to only focus on the big things and leave everything else to be sorted in the future.
But again, should we not be asking ourselves why twelve years of teaching maths is insufficient, and another two will magically solve it?
What are we doing wrong that twelve years - about one-seventh of the average person's lifetime - isn't enough time?
Yes, this is the discussion that ministers should be having, not bolting on another two years.
Comments
It's a stupid idea.
When I started high school there were around 300 in my year.
By year 6, there were 6 of us still left studying maths.
I see zero utility in making everyone else study it as well.
If it ends up being only extending compulsory Maths education to 18 then I rescind my more neutral take off this morning and revert to my criticism of yesterday evening.
I'm a state school teacher. And have been both a classroom teacher and in senior management. I've also taught in the private sector.
So I know my onions.
There's so much to say about educational reform but Sunak's solution is not a solution. It's utter bollocks.
*Ask an Old Etonian.
Smells like bullshit to me.
It would be far better to follow Foxy and see where actually useful points of it could be introduced via other subjects.
This is student politics.
See my comment on the previous thread.
That is the be all and end all of your position on everything.
If there were serious proposals to improve maths it could start with sorting out the train crash that is the primary school maths curriculum. Introduced by *checks notes* Nick Gibb.
"Do you sell copies of the railway timetable?"
"Yes sir. You'll find it in the fiction section."
i) Don't wish to do A-level maths
ii) Are mathematically competent at 16.
What happens with them under this new system ?
Maybe A-levels are for the chop and we'll move to a broader IBish system, but that hasn't been announced.
It's more of the same tired ideologically driven tory crap.
They need booting out of office ASAP.
A friend of ours is like you: she loves the (what I call) esoterica of maths, but doesn't particularly enjoy the fact that the practical applications mess up the beauty - the 'pure' maths gets sullied by real-world applications.
I think there's room for both - and maths that used to be seen as abstract can end up having massive real-world applications later - like fast Fourier transforms.
As a general point this kind of counterfactual exercise is useful, although of course it is not without its problems. I'd love to see some similarly rigorous analysis from the other side of the debate rather than just sniping.
We only had one copy of the disk, so every time someone did a hyperspace jump they had to fetch it from another player.
https://twitter.com/RedfieldWilton/status/1610330196321730566?s=20&t=f2uqpQf3i5JO9q2PMimvKw
But as Hodges - hardly a left-wing critic - observes, it's an odd priority to highlight right now after a period of almost total silence on policy, and not obvious that it's really thought through.
Perhaps the speech will surprise on the upside by covering a variety of issues in more detail. We'll soon know.
It doesn't need tweaking. It needs nuking from orbit. Just to be safe.
I doubt very much if there will be any significant change there anyway. That would require Gibb to admit he'd fucked up on an epochal scale and he doesn't do that.
So it isn't going to happen then.
This is never going to happen either.
Our crappy state school had 6 machines, each with a 40 track single sided disk drive.
You could buy floppies from the headteacher.
Luxury
Or it could be that one piece of evidence (say, on-ground teams) was confirmed with satellite imagery and mobile phone data.
I've heard of a few workplaces that have everyone hand in mobile phones on entry for security reasons, and you'd imagine those gaps would be very noticeable on such a map.
The data for a warzone would be fascinating.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-64158179#comments
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11596549/ALL-pupils-study-maths-age-18-declares-Rishi-Sunak.html
Brexit is a f*cking curse.
When was the post 16 Key Skills requirement implemented in further education colleges? 25 years ago? And when measurement were failed and the requirement not met through direct teaching, and hence financial remuneration held back from the educational establishment, what happened? Maths, English and IT were "embedded" and the criteria met by extrapolation from subject assignments. A positive practical proposal dissolved into a tick box exercise to obtain the cash from central government.
Also English - do you mean Lit? Can't see the point of an MCP* like me reading more Shakespeare. If language, then what more is to be learnt after getting an A* at GCSE?
*Maths, Chemistry, Physics
Perhaps what we really need are more lessons in common sense for out of touch politicians.
If studying up to 18 means things like getting core skills into those left behind, then I'm all for it.
One of the defects of NHS management is that it too is just interested in numbers, hence the poor experience of many of our clients. The number of GP consultations is back above the 2019 level, 2/3 being face to face and more than 40% the same day, so looks great on paper. The bewilderment then comes from the poor quality of the whole experience. Things like continuity of care are highly valued in patient satisfaction surveys, yet are ignored by management.
Does it make them better or worse economists? Not 100% sure you'd have to discuss with them (perhaps when you are all back at Davos one year).
As to the mobile phones stuff we already know that the NSA has boasted in the past of intercepting all calls in unnamed nations. That kind of network full-take is right up their street. I think it is very likely happening in occupied Ukraine right now, and probably as a security measure in the rest of Ukraine too.
What about for people who get A* English language and English lit/maths and choose not to take it further, do you lumber them with the A-Level or make them do the 16-18 remedial maths they can do in their sleep?
Sometimes I wonder whether we need to look again at automatic progression of school years and the hard school finishing age we have.
Imagine a maths teacher borderline to stay in the job and considering their options, who will now be asked to teach a load of 16-18 year olds who don't want to be there but are forced into it, many of which will have no belief they can do maths, instead of teaching motivated students who have chosen the course.
What happens next.......
Pay will need to be going up 30% or so to get enough maths teachers in for this.
My family's experience of the NHS in Wales saw the death of my son in laws sisters partner with sepsis yesterday in Glan Clwyd hospital (in special measures for months) following a cancer operation and my granddaughter was put at risk due to the idiotic administration whereby a doctor faxes a prescription (after waiting 24 hours on the phone to speak to a doctor on suspected scarlet fever/ strep) to Asda but Asda had run out of the penicillin and would not let my son take the fax to another chemist
The NHS in Wales is just as bad as in England and I have not suggested at anytime that Wales is bad England is good but that all the politicians across parties need to understand the NHS is not a religion and needs cross party agreement to radically change the organisation, integrate social care, install state of art IT, and ensure GP practices open 7 days a week
As far as Sunak, Barclay and Hunt are concerned they are holding a hard-line on pay rises but also they are losing the argument especially with the nurses and they will pay a political price for this if they do not agree a fair settlement in the heath sector
There are any number of scenarios but one thing seems fairly sure: McCarthy is seriously weakened by this.
The scheme's been going for 25 years, so if we take primary school age kids, then there should be well over a decade of data for it.
I went to a SureStart baby club when the little 'un was a baby. It was useful. But the NCT classes we attended (as sensible middle-class folk) were much more useful. Perhaps widening access to NCT-style schemes for first-time parents may be a big advantage?
Switching off your phone or banning phones is not a panacea if your adversary has all the network data. Good.
SKS - It doesn't add up
People have been complaining he’s an empty suit/crisis manager/ treasury wonk who is only interested in controlling inflation and needs to be doing more.
The day a part of a policy is announced he’s attacked for doing things that aren’t priorities.
As far as I have understood it this morning they aren’t intending on making every child do further maths but ensuring an ongoing teaching of maths - I’m presuming basic maths that will be important in people’s lives and careers to ensure that there isn’t this huge deficit in basic maths ability in children and young adults.
Of course it’s not going to solve the strikes, fix the NHS, end war in Ukraine but being an old fashioned sort I thought governments were supposed to be multi-functional and had different departments to focus on making the country run or run better rather than just being tunnel visioned on a couple of high profile matters.
So if it is a plan to make every kid into a rocket scientist then obviously it’s stupid but if it’s about a tweak to try and improve basic maths to ensure all UK adults of the future can live a bit better than that’s cool. Of course we could just tell Sunak to only focus on the big things and leave everything else to be sorted in the future.
Generally speaking education does not equip pupils for the world. I constantly read, especially from the reactionary Right, moaning about mobile phones in schools but THIS IS THE MODERN WORLD!!!! Not teaching with technology is as antediluvian as making pupils write with quills. Or write with pens. Or even write at all. I mean, I'm an English teacher but why do we still make pupils write exams with pens? Whoever uses a pen in real life? Seriously: it's GONE. We use keypads and phones. We even sign things electronically now or with face recognition or iris scanning.
As for school curriculum IT, it's an absolute joke.
Okay, so I'm being provocative but really, truly, education does NOT fit people for actual life. Especially, I might add, the commercial world.
Making all pupils do maths until 18 is a pathetic response to a real, deep-seated, problem.
Oh ... and if you've never watched this then you REALLY should:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
https://mobile.twitter.com/BBCNews/status/1610409558555463683
There's plenty to learn out there outside Maths and English.
e.g. look at the following from 2010:
https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/functionally-illiterate-and-innumerate
And the following, more recently, shows how much innumeracy may cost the economy:
"Poor numeracy skills have a direct impact on productivity at work, and costs the UK economy £20.2 billion each year."
https://www.fenews.co.uk/skills/20-of-adults-in-the-uk-are-innumerate-but-it-doesn-t-have-to-be-this-way/
Or the following:
https://www.ft.com/content/52b91b92-1780-4c84-ae11-4017a315ada7
Ironically on topic, while clearing out a load of my stuff in my parents’ house over Christmas, I found my old Ti-82 school calculator - still works too!
What are we doing wrong that twelve years - about one-seventh of the average person's lifetime - isn't enough time?
Probably not a popular belief on here, especially amongst the reactionary Right, but it's undoubtedly true.
Generally speaking those who believe sitting compliant children behind individual desks and lecturing them with chalk and talk is the right way to educate are dismissive of such things. Ironically, private schools are stuffed full of pupils who could most benefit from teachers with a better comprehension of education.
Do watch that Ken Robinson TED talk though. It's the best thing I've ever seen on education.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY