We need to raise the bar on maths, David Cameron tells the Post

Feb 4 2009 Agenda by David Cameron, leader of the Conservative Party

been a governor of a successful academy. She will be bringing together experts from all disciplines – and talking to parents, teachers and pupils – to find ways of making Britain the very best in the world in mathematics.

Her taskforce will look into how curriculae have changed and how they can be improved so they are as rigorous as possible. We don’t have to argue about whether the Government has devalued exams. We know it has because studies have shown that the same performance which would have secured just a D grade in A-Level maths in 1997 now secures you a B.

We also know the top independent schools are abandoning GCSEs for new tougher international exams such as the international GCSE, while state schools are forced to stick to the standard GCSE. This is absurd and has got to change. Every school in Britain should be able to do the same high quality exams that now only private schools are allowed to do so we really stretch our children.

The taskforce will also look at how we can encourage our brightest to teach, and to keep them teaching. The Government simply isn’t passing the test on this.

It’s amazing to think that more than half of those qualified to teach maths in our schools don’t even have a degree in maths.

From my own experience as a student to my time visiting schools in this job, I have seen for myself what a difference a great teacher makes versus an ineffective one.

So we must give head teachers more control of their budgets so they can reward good teachers better and recruit specialist maths and science teachers, and give poorer schools extra funding so they can recruit the best teachers.

As things stand, our top universities have to do remedial maths courses for science undergraduates to get them up to scratch.

In the last eight years we’ve slipped from eighth to twenty-fourth in the international league tables for maths.

If we are going to be able to shift our battered, unbalanced economy towards the hi-tech industries that maths enables, we are going to have to do much, much better.

So how we can inspire young people to study maths?

This is where we need new arguments. If you think of any technological innovation of recent years – things that children can’t live without – I doubt we would have it without maths.

Websites like Facebook and MySpace couldn’t have happened without maths, as web designers use it every day to know how big to make the pages, what graphics need to be used and how to fit images on the page.

The ipod couldn’t have happened without maths, as the maths of error-correcting codes is vital to making sure it works.

Or what about video games? Our leading video game manufacturers are crying out for people with maths skills to create, develop and programme those ever-realistic games.

I look forward to hearing what Carol has to say on all these issues. It really is an absolute outrage that we are failing our children and our country like this.

Under a Conservative government, good enough will no longer be good enough.

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Word cloud of David Cameron's article, courtesy of www.wordle.net