The prime minister has fallen off the not-talking-about-maths wagon. Until last week, he hadn’t done a speech about maths since 3 January. I wrote at the time that I thought he was seeking solace in the familiarity of a favourite school subject. It’s a difficult time of year for most of us, all resolutions and pine needles, anyone might need comforting. Now it’s the spring with its scent of optimism and blossom. But not for Rishi: last Monday, he did a big speech about maths again.
To be clear, he wasn’t updating us on the maths policy he announced in January. Back then, he pointed out that in Britain, unlike most other major economies, children don’t have to learn any maths after the age of 16. Last week, he said it again. In January, he was saying how our children’s futures, and the UK’s economy, are held back by numeracy problems. Last week, he said it again.
He does know he’s the prime minister, does he? If he wants there to be lots more maths taught, he’s in a position to make that happen. It would take a change in the law and quite a lot of money for training and then paying more maths teachers – but it’s really totally doable. He could make that dream a reality.
But then, in three and a half months’ time, when the stress starts to get to him again, he couldn’t moan about how shit we all are at maths. If he solves the problem, he won’t be able, as he did last week, to once again smilingly cite it. To enjoy the ridiculousness of it. In this crazy, complicated world, to focus for consolation on that small, soluble wrong: why don’t we prioritise maths more highly? Maths is really important!
This time, notwithstanding the upbeat delivery style of the speech, it felt slightly more combative: “I won’t sit back and allow this cultural sense that it’s OK to be bad at maths to put our children at a disadvantage.” He’s not going to sit back and allow that, no matter how much no one asks him to. He’s desperate for someone to ask him to. His dream is Keir Starmer piping up with: “Maths doesn’t matter! Maths is boring!” Or a new attack ad: “Do you think numeracy is important? Rishi Sunak doesn’t.”
That would give him an excuse for another speech: “How dare they say that?! I do think numeracy is important. I love maths! We need to crush all the people who think maths isn’t important! Maths matters so much for our children and our economy! And to stop the boats! We need to be able to count the boats accurately so we know how many we haven’t stopped!”
We’re all aware of how polarised politics has become. Each side demonises the other. Suella Braverman dismisses the left as the “Guardian-reading, tofu-eating wokerati”, while Labour claims Sunak thinks paedos shouldn’t go to prison. Solving problems is difficult, expensive and controversial, so British politics has moved beyond it: you don’t need to solve a problem if you can blame it on someone else. Sunak, with his very modern political instincts, is trying to do that here.
On the face of it, the obvious people to blame are those running the country’s education policy but unfortunately, for the past 13 years, that’s the Conservative party, so he’s side-stepped that and is attempting to make it a “cultural” issue. You know, like the “culture wars”. Which are to do with the left. “Culture” is their fault – it’s the responsibility of luvvies and Gary Lineker and the BBC. Maybe they’ve all been too busy doing humanities degrees and watching subsidised ballet to remember that basic numeracy is actually quite important for those school-leavers who can’t just get a summer job working on a film their dad’s directing.
Sunak’s cultural argument rests on the notion that being bad at maths is more “socially acceptable” than being illiterate, when numeracy, he says, is “every bit as essential as reading”. He’s probably right that innumeracy is more casually laughed off than illiteracy, but that may be because numeracy is not actually “every bit as essential as reading” at all. It’s very, very important but not quite as important as being able to read and write. If you had to pick one skill for life, out of the two, you’d definitely pick literacy – at least then you can email an accountant. Sunak, in attempting to state the self-evident importance of something extremely important, has elected to do so by comparing it to something even more important. That’s like trying to make an elephant look big by standing it next to a blue whale.
Sadly for the prime minister, his initiative doesn’t look likely to provoke the conflict he’s hoping for. Nobody disagrees about the importance of maths. It is a genuine point of consensus. People just doubt that the improvements he says he wants will ever come because he mentioned the problem earlier in the year and nothing has happened since then except strikes and, as the shadow education secretary, Bridget Phillipson, put it, “existing teachers leaving in their droves”.
Geoff Barton, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, called it “an attempt to divert attention away from… the industrial dispute triggered by the erosion of teacher pay and conditions and resulting crisis in recruiting and retaining enough staff”. And, perhaps most tellingly, Sam Sims, chief executive of the charity National Numeracy, said: “Addressing poor numeracy needs to start much earlier than 16. We need a cradle to career vision for numeracy in the UK.” If someone like Sims isn’t going to confirm Sunak’s assertion of an anti-maths culture, then I don’t think there’s a fight to be had.
It must be nice for a ruling politician when a problem is entirely cultural, because then it can be addressed exclusively with words, argument and arguments. One senses, amid all the government’s troubles, a deep wish in Sunak for innumeracy to be such an issue. But it’s not. It should be no surprise to him of all people that, in the end, maths is just about money.
