Who needs maths?

Why does the Prime Minister want us to learn maths until we’re 18? By Liz Hodgkinson, who’s good with money and bad with figures

It doesn’t add up

If I were still at school, my worst nightmare would be to have to take maths in the sixth form.

Sixty years after leaving, I still shudder at the very thought. I had no ability at the subject and wasn’t even allowed to take it at O level.

So to compel somebody like me to undergo two more years of hated maths lessons would have meant absolute torture; not just for me but for the poor teacher as well.

Yet if Rishi Sunak has his way, he will make maths compulsory in all schools up to the age of 18. His reasoning is that in Germany, Asia and France, youngsters have to study maths to that age.

He has even stated that, by allowing pupils to drop maths at 16, we are being held back as a country.

What’s so special about maths? As an adult, I have not once needed to apply Pythagoras’s theorem to anything or to solve a quadratic equation. At primary school, I learned all the arithmetic I needed to get me through life.

I could cope reasonably well with adding, subtracting, multiplying and dividing, but when it came to square roots, logarithms, algebra and geometry at secondary school, I was lost.

And have remained lost ever since. The only way I ever got any marks was thanks to a mathematically gifted friend letting me copy her homework. But my ineptitude was revealed when it came to end-ofyear exams: I often scored a big fat zero.

My lack of facility at maths beyond the most basic level hasn’t handicapped me in any way.

I was once called an idiot savant when it comes to figures

I would have needed to master the higher reaches if I was going to be an engineer or an accountant.

But there was no way that those careers were ever going to beckon. I needed to choose a vocation where such expertise was not required, and there were plenty of non-mathematical options. I became a journalist.

We all need to have some competency at maths, or at least arithmetic, to make sure we aren’t being diddled, overcharged or confused by percentages when applying for mortgages.

But even I can tell the difference between one per cent and five per cent, and I certainly know what ten-per-cent inflation means. For anything else, such as working out my tax return – which is beyond me emotionally, if not academically – I employ the services of a chartered accountant; somebody who actually enjoys grappling with numbers.

Why should we compel our kids to study maths beyond GCSE just because some other countries do?

It is this kind of sloppy thinking that has persuaded some schools to introduce Mandarin onto the syllabus, simply because it is the language of a fastgrowing economy. Most of us are not going to need to speak or write it.

So why not stick to European modern languages and Latin, which help us to understand our own language better? Offering Mandarin is just a fad.

There is very little correlation between being good at maths at school and being financially successful or astute in adult life.

I have known many gifted mathematicians who have been useless when it comes to investing capital or spending large sums on buying a house.

There is such a big gap between theory and practice. I have several friends who are brilliant at working

Irrational numbers: why bother? out figures on paper but whose investments have always managed to lose them money.

I’ve almost always managed to get figures wrong but have been quite a successful investor. I was once called an idiot savant when it comes to figures and there is something in that. I let intuition and an instinct for self-preservation guide me where actual knowledge is lacking, and have never been in debt or overdrawn at the bank.

What sort of maths would Rishi Sunak force on unwilling sixth-formers? Would it be abstruse stuff like differential calculus, or more practical applications such as how to read a profit-and-loss sheet? I doubt he has much idea, either.

By all means, let those who love maths continue, but please don’t force us maths dunces into two more years of pointless misery after the age of 16, just because some other countries do.