No New Funding, Just More Maths
By Adi Bloom
Happy new year. Twenty-three years in, it’s probably safe to say that the 21st century has not, on the whole, been the era of the arts graduate. Being able to quote pithily apposite lines from literature is not a skill greatly prized in the technological age. (Not unless, that is, your skills also include the ability to falsely attribute them to Oscar Wilde across the internet.)
This year, however, promises to be different. We’re now one week into 2023, and already it looks as though arts graduates’ skills have taken on new currency. Education coverage this week has been suffused with irony and wordplay – both the traditional preserve of the person trying to persuade you that an English degree does prepare you for real life, honest.
All of which is ironic in itself, because the conversation in education this week wasn’t actually about the arts at all. It was about Maths.
In his first major speech of the year, on Wednesday, Rishi Sunak laid out his vision for 2023. His brave new world (that’s a literature reference, twice over) would be shaped by five pledges, which involved reducing NHS waiting lists and halving inflation – but nothing at all when it came to education.
Or almost nothing. He did have one idea: he would like all pupils to study Maths up to the age of 18. Releasing children into the world without the skills to analyse data and statistics was, he said, letting them down. Or, to put it another way: it’s more important than ever that pupils should learn to count, if only to be able to tell you how many education secretaries there were in 2022.
The plan itself was somewhat short on details: Sunak does not appear to envisage making Maths A level compulsory for all students. Instead, he simply referred vaguely to “the right plan”, and left it at that.
“This is personal for me. Every opportunity I’ve had in life began with the education I was so fortunate to receive,” said Sunak, the Winchester College alumnus.
“And it’s the single most important reason why I came into politics: to give every child the highest possible standard of education.”
As any literature student can tell you, the definition of irony is the use of language to say one thing while in fact implying its direct opposite. And, while Sunak’s suggestion offered very little whatsoever by way of actual policy, it did in fact provide an excellent lesson in irony.
A Winchester education currently costs just shy of £46,000 a year. In 2022-23, state primary schools receive £4,362 per pupil per year, and state secondaries receive £5,669 per pupil per year. Many state school headteachers are currently weighing up whether they can afford to keep paying their teachers and heat their classrooms at the same time.
So Rishi Sunak is telling us that he will give every single child in England the equivalent of his Winchester education, in a speech in which he fails to commit any significant funding to education. Jane Austen would have had a field day.
“The education system doesn’t need more policy gimmicks or random targets”, Geoff Barton – General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, former English teacher and the man in education most likely to be the subject of a big-screen biopic (Liam Neeson is hotly tipped for the role) – said in a Tes report on Sunak’s speech.
Instead, Barton said, the sector needs “serious and sustained investment in schools and colleges after a decade of chronic underfunding, and a strategy to address teacher shortages”.
Those very teacher shortages, in fact, were somewhat salient. Commentators were quick to point out the fundamental flaw in the government’s plan: it makes no sense at all to extend Maths provision while doing nothing to tackle the chronic shortage of Maths teachers in the country. Specifically, the number of entrants to initial teacher training programmes in Maths in 2022-23 fell 10 per cent below (the already reduced) government targets.
And, in another moment to gladden the hearts of arts graduates, this detail was inevitably pointed out via the medium of maths-related wordplay. Sunak’s sums didn’t add up. He needed to show us his workings out. His plans are nothing but – A* to this student – 3.14 in the sky.
All this discussion about compulsory Maths, however, is little more than a distraction from the leitmotif (that’s one for the music graduates) in education right now: teacher strikes.
The government is to introduce new laws allowing it to impose “minimum safety levels” during strike action. This will mean that fire, ambulance and rail services have to keep functioning at a basic level, despite their workers striking for a wage they can live on.
However, the government has said that it has no plans to impose these levels on education – instead, it hopes that the sector will come up with a “voluntary agreement” about minimum safety levels instead.
The NEU and NASUWT teaching unions, as well as the NAHT school leaders’ union, are currently balloting members over strike action over pay. The Association of School and College Leaders has carried out a consultative ballot of its members, to find out whether they want a formal ballot on strike action.
Geoff Barton called this threat of imposing minimum-service agreements “anti-union sabre-rattling”. (It may help if you imagine the line delivered by Liam Neeson in the film version, while the leitmotif plays softly in the background.)
Barton, you will recall, also accused the government of using policy gimmicks to cover up for a shortage of real investment in education. And so, as the credits roll and the screen fades to black (the film industry, too, is sustained by arts graduates), we have news that the government has launched a £2.6 million careers-education scheme for primary schools.
Primary teachers in deprived areas of the country will receive training to deliver a new careers programme for primary schools. The programme will focus on 2,200 primaries, across the government’s 55 “education investment areas”.
Perhaps it is in fact all part of a cunning plan, in which primary pupils will be directed towards careers as Maths teachers. That’s joined-up thinking for you: by 2040, we may even have enough Maths teachers to educate all pupils to the age of 18.
It is a tale, told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. As Oscar Wilde once said.
Click here to read Adi Bloom’s This Week In Education column every week.
