Help seven year olds with maths - and save the public £2.4bn a year...

Sometimes I surprise even myself with my prescience. On Friday I posted a piece about helping your child enjoy maths - from a very young age. Today a new report warns that problems with numeracy can start young and have huge effects, both socially and economically.

The new report, from the Every Child A Chance Trust and accountants, KPMG, estimates that innumerate school children end up costing a huge £2.4bn each year. It says that around 33,000 children leave primary school each year with very poor numeracy skills, and that many of these children never catch up. An estimated seven million adults have mathematical skills at or below those of a nine-year-old.

The largest of all the costs involved in this is that of unemployment - unsurprisingly, many innumerate people simply can't find jobs. But there are also other costs - in special needs support, for example, as well as exclusion and truancy (children with poor numeracy skills are proportionally more likely to be excluded). There is also a suggestion (the report says it's "over and above those associated with social disadvantage in general") that numeracy difficulties are linked to increased health risks and an increased risk of involvement with the criminal justice system. It doesn't sound good.

So, what can be done?

Early intervention is one option, and that, of course, is what the Every Child A Chance Trust, and particularly its Every Child Counts initiative, is aimed at. The Trust says that individual tuition - begun early enough, at the age of seven -  can make a real difference, and has evidence to back this up. In fact, Sir Peter Williams, Chancellor of the University of Leicester and author of last year’s independent report into the teaching of mathematics in the early years and primary schools, says: “In our review last year we made clear to government the importance of getting maths teaching right in the primary school, and the impact on individuals and society if we don’t. It may be costly to provide early intervention to tackle children’s numeracy difficulties, but as this new report from the Every Child a Chance Trust makes very clear, such investment will pay for itself many times over in the future.”

The Trust and KMPG are also calling for businesses to get involved and contribute money to help children overcome their problems. The idea is that the money will be part of a new Every Child Counts campaign.

Maths is often, and wrongly in my view, overlooked, when it comes to school. There is such a huge emphasis on literacy that maths can fall by the wayside, and it can be very hard to catch up. In fact, research suggests that children are less likely to catch up if they are poor at maths than at literacy (their weakness becomes entrenched).  Children also pick up on signals from their parents - how many people mutter about "not being good" at maths in front of their kids? And how many tools do we have to get round shortcomings in maths (using calculators for everything, for example)? It's more difficult to hide an inability to read.

TV programmes like Numberjacks can help, at least with young children, as they make maths fun. And parents can do this too, enjoying simple things like counting, adding and subtracting. But I'm not suggesting that this is the whole story. Before you can help the children, you often have to help their parents, and as I've written before, maths is taught differently these days. This means that parents often can't help their children with their learning. We need schools to take the lead on this, perhaps offering workshops (I know some do) and more help. Maths can be made more fun - from mathematical games (chess being one) to innovative ways of teaching (Mister Teacher's Darth Vader video is one extreme example!) We also need more talented maths graduates to think about teaching. This is something which is tremendously important and action really does need to be taken - for everyone's sake.

Read School Gate on:

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Why I love being a science teacher

Helping your young child enjoy maths...

Comments

[Glen Thomas]

"children are less likely to catch up if they are poor at maths than at literacy (their weakness becomes entrenched)"

If a child has got behind in maths and literacy due to poor education or home life, then I would expect their literacy to improve more than their maths skills.

Literacy, as an extension of language, is always going to be easier to pick up than maths unless the child has a specific disorder preventing quick reading. Children with low general intelligence can hold proper conversations verbally, and can use the same skills when dealing with written language.

But maths is of a different order and is a largely artificial character - it is often conceptually abstract. It is hard to learn and requires patience, repetition and a certain innate ability to progress far or fast.

In any case, the KPMG study is not new research, but a kludge of data from studies used in a way which wasn't forseen by the original researchers. Assumptions made by the writers are many and often unjustified. Worst, there is no level uncertainty stated in the final cost figure - might I suggest that it should be £20 billion plus or minus £20 billion (ie a meaningless figure)?

[mumoftwo]

I also agree that statistical risk and probability should be taught, I was 'rubbish' at maths and only did statistics later in life, and have found it very useful for assessing the value (or not) of the latest reseach on everything from which medicines to take, to what you should eat. When a scare story comes out, I can get some sense of the proportional response- should I dismiss it, panic, or something in between.

[Robin Richmond]

I am afraid that Kate Thomson has failed to exercise the reality check so well expressed in Professor Spiegelhalter's four rules of risk - Stuff happens and What am I not being told?

So many organisations do not achieve their potential, since they are unable to compare like with like.

[Jeremy]

I teach in a secondary school and we recieve many year seven students with virtually no knowledge of maths, we started a maths club for those struggling and had to dive back as far as primary school year three to help our students.

[DAVID VINTER]

I started school at 3and a half in wartime, and we instantly started on addition and subtraction. Unless you know the basics calculators are a delusion. At council primary school we always did 40 minutes on mental arithmetic, and don't forget all our learning was in imperial measures. We had fearful stuff like four yards, two feet of cloth at six shillings and nine pence a yard.
But before I took the 11+ we did fractions, decimals, long division, square roots,weights using tons, cwts, stones, pounds , and ounces.Simple and compound interest.All basic tables to 12x12, and squares to 20x20. I still know
17x17 is 289! Sorry but there is no easy route, to the basics, but when you start to introduce speed and money, there is fun to be had!

[Wendy V]

Isn't it the norm in England to have numeracy hour (or rather 45 minutes) every day? At my son's school this certainly seems to be the case (he's seven, at a local state primary).

[kate Thompson]

I'm afraid it's wrong to equate mathematical ability with reading. Reading is essential to cope with modern life; numeracy is not. And this has always been so. I wrote poetry on my maths O level paper; it didn't stop me getting a first class degree in history at Oxford, or from now being in the top one per cent in terms of my current earnings.
As far as tables and basic arithmetic are concerned, the only way many children can learn is through endless repetition and rote. If your child has problems, take them away from primary school and teach them at home using these old fashioned methods. You will encounter only arrogance and dogma from today's primary school teachers.

[Hol]

Sam - your sister was told her daughter could get answers wrong so long as she "got the concept?" Yet clearly if you're getting lots of answers wrong (as opposed to the odd miscalculation or forgetting to carry a number etc.) then you haven't grasped the concept... that's a fairly worrying indictment on standards!

As for the idea that struggling with literacy means that to excel at Maths you must be cheating, the mind boggles. One of the most common talent divides around is those who excel at English/similar subjects but may be less adept with Maths/Science based stuff and vice versa. It's really not rare to struggle with one more than the other since they require such different types of thinking!!

[Sam]

One of my sons teachers openly admitted to the whole class (of 8 year olds) that she was rubbish at maths. My sister was told that it didn't matter too much if her daughter got the answers right or not as long as she "got the concept". My daughters class teacher accused her of cheating when she showed him a correctly completed worksheet of subtraction sums that she had done at home after being shown how to do it once. His (the teachers) disbelief in my daughters mathematical ability was based on the fact that she is struggling to read!

I'm tutoring both my kids at home using work set by my brother in laws mum who taught primary school maths in the 1950s 60s and 70s. Multiplication tables by rote, abacuses and long division rule!

Schools just don't spend enough time on the basics of either literacy or numeracy and haven't done for a long time. We are now seeing twentysomethings who cannot perform basic arithmetic without recourse to a calculator. Is it any wonder we have an economic crisis on our hands. The sums haven't added up for a long time but no-one understood the concept!

[jonquil]

i notice the assumption that people, as students & as adults, don't do well in maths because they don't want to--ignoring that some (such as myself) don't do well in maths because we can't. numbers don't stick with me. i have spent hours figuring out the simplest aglebriac equation only to have the knowledge dissapear within 3 hours. it's just one of 3 learning 'difficulties' i have. the main difficulty in schools is that i need to learn a different way,& maybe something will stick--or not--& i have yet to find any teacher,course, or book which can help me learn maths (which is certainly a necessity in this world). don't blame all students for not learning maths when all schools insist on teaching the same method.

[Andy]

People don't just mutter about not being good at maths, they are actively proud of it; because our culture tells us that being good at maths is equivalent to being a socially inept geek.

[MarkS]

I used to absolutely love maths at school. Learning up to 12x tables by rote, long divisions, multiplication - all in imperial measures which meant multiples of 12, 20, 14, 8 etc.

We spent about 45 minutes every morning on it at primary school in a very disciplined sort of way.

Part of the problem today is due to the change to the metric system which, at a stroke, probably reduced by 50% the arithmetic content of the curriculum. Then there is the 'no one must fail' culture in schools that ensures there is no emphasis on competition, excellence or performance.

For those who cannot fluently and confidently perform arithmetic by the time the move to secondary school, much of the battle for them is lost. They will move at a slower pace throughout the following five years.

That, of course, was one of the main reasons why children headed off in different directions at the age of 11 in the past. The most agile mentally would be taken off to extend their skills to provide the country with doctors, engineers, scientists, etc.

Those who needed a different educational stimulus were rewarded with a more applied and practical curriculum. Until the politics of envy started to destroy the best on offer to ordinaty people. Forty years and that nonsense is still going strong. Maybe the realisation that the country can no longer hold its own on the world stage may force a rethink?