They call him the Count… because he can’t…

My degree, for what it’s worth, is in Mathematics (with Statistics), and I am, by most people’s standards, highly numerate. This allows me to look at Rishi Sunak’s announcement that the Government is going to raise standards of maths skills with a soupçon of scepticism.

I’ve always been of the view that, at the level confronted by most people, maths skills are as much about confidence as they are about technique. I encounter people who will throw their hands up and declare how bad they are at it and yet, if given the time and space to work through a calculation, will come up with the right answer.

There is a sense that, with the advent of calculators and, these days, calculators in smart phones, that the ability to add up, multiply, divide and subtract is obsolete, although I’d argue that, without a basic grasp of numbers, the risk of missing a typing error is higher than I’m comfortable with. My confidence in my numeracy skills means that, if I make a data entry error, I’m likely to spot it before it becomes critical.

But Rishi’s announcement does have a feel of John Major’s national cones hotline about it, but without the same potential viability. We already have a chronic shortage of mathematics teachers and a recruitment and retention crisis due to uncompetitive salary scales, and the announcement glosses over these issues without offering any sense of what might be done to remedy them. Indeed, it suggests that whilst young Sunak understands how government should work, the reality of how things actually are escapes him.

In fairness to him, he has no real experience of actual service delivery, so perhaps I should be as troubled by the fact that his Secretary of State for Education doesn’t appear to have pointed out the flaws in his announcement, nor any member of the Cabinet. But then, there’s not much sense of practical awareness  amongst most of them either.

The irony is that, in isolation, the idea of boosting maths skills is a thoroughly good thing but making an announcement to deliver an outcome when the resources required to deliver it simply don’t exist merely reminds us that Conservative government doesn’t add up. Perhaps the subtraction of hundreds of Conservative councillors next month might suggest a solution in 2024…