15 ms·

Rishi Sunak sets up review to tackle 'anti-maths mindset'

39 points by iamben 3y ago

gerikson 3y ago
My reading of British popular culture is that having an elite disdain for maths and engineering is not disqualifying. The engineer, while appreciated, is not admired in Britain.
- hikingsimulator 3y ago
  It reads very much the same in France. The average pay for a Business School graduate is 5-15% higher than that of an engineer.
  - Barrin92 3y ago
    While that might be the case France has an excellent math culture at the research level. There's a lot of French folks in the Deep Learning community. LeCun, François Chollet among others, and France has won 13 Fields medals, way ahead of anyone but the US (at 15). France probably has the strongest math community in Europe.
    - hikingsimulator 3y ago
      I'm not as charitable as you are. Chollet left for the USA, LeCun for Canada. France has an extremely small, but great math community via the ENS/Sorbonne/X schools, but it hardly reflects on a larger trend -- general education. The topic isn't the culturing of a select, few elites, but the education of the larger population.
    - defrost 3y ago
      I'm pretty sure on an apples to apples per capita basis France has many more Fields medeals per 100K population than the USofA.
    - lgeorget 3y ago
      "At research level" is the keyword here. We've both the second highest number of Fields medalists and a frankly low score at the 2018 PISA evaluation (especially in comparison to other European countries). The maths education in secondary and higher eduction is somewhat elitist, in the sense that it's not suited for all kinds of students. source: https://data.oecd.org/pisa/mathematics-performance-pisa.htm https://data.oecd.org/pisa/mathematics-performance-pisa.htm
- danpalmer 3y ago
  Engineering is not glamorous here at all, which I think is a shame because it's a productive, generative, job, with good qualifications needed, and it has a good earning potential. It's much less sought after than working in "marketing", yet probably on average a better job in many ways. Software Engineering and "working in IT" does have a different perception and is considered "cooler", even though the vast majority of our IT jobs are awful.
  - ur-whale 3y ago
    > Engineering is not glamorous here at all, which I think is a shame because it's a productive, generative, job, with good qualifications needed, and it has a good earning potential. Big focus on money here. Being an engineer is also: - rewarding in its own right (you *build* things) - an achievement to be proud of - a way to have a long lasting net contribution to society with - usually - little moral downside I'd put these ahead of any financial reward.
    - techterrier 3y ago
      crypto enters the chat
  - tonyedgecombe 3y ago
    >Software Engineering and "working in IT" does have a different perception and is considered "cooler", even though the vast majority of our IT jobs are awful. I think that is a fairly recent change, it certainly wasn't the case when I started my career in the eighties.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
  > The engineer, while appreciated, is not admired in Britain. "In Britain" is a bit general; but in the circles of senior politicians and civil servants in Westminster, it's likely accurate.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  British elite culture privileges spivs, gamblers, bullies, and opportunists. Intelligent competent professionals capable of critical thinking make the people in power nervous.
- conzar 3y ago
  In addition to my engineering degree, I also received a token degree in mathematics from the university where I studied. It seems that this is a vestige of the past when the university was established and the only way to include engineering as a subject of study was to classify it as a subdivision of mathematics. Although the university is not currently based in the UK, there was a time when it did not permit Catholics to enroll as students either...
- tomatocracy 3y ago
  It's not even about engineering. Culturally people who would be embarrassed to say "oh, I can't really read properly" have no issue with saying "I can't work out percentages".
pjc50 3y ago
> "The prime minister needs to show his working: he cannot deliver this reheated, empty pledge without more maths teachers," shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson said. Correct. Important context for this is the ongoing balloting for strike action over teachers pay. Anyone who can do maths can read their own payslip and know when they're better off in the private sector doing anything else. The recruitment shortage is serious: https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-committee/news/194283/education-committee-launches-new-inquiry-into-teacher-recruitment-training-and-retention/ https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-com... > A 2022 report by the National Foundation for Educational Research shows that the teacher supply challenge is marked particularly by a lack of physics, chemistry and maths teachers. For physics, only 17% of the target to recruit 2,610 trainees was achieved, with only 444 new entrants. The Committee was recently told that at this current level of supply, it would be impossible to carry out the Prime Minister’s proposal of requiring pupils to study maths until 18. In other words, this is already impossible, and no amount of "mindset changing" (wishful thinking) is going to change otherwise. You're only hearing this now because the local elections are soon.
- bjackman 3y ago
  lol > Underpay and overwork teachers while using them as pawns in your transphobic culture war, so that they constantly strike and quit in their thousands > Economically isolate the UK and cripple all its key public services while still somehow failing to cut most people's tax bill "My economy is unhealthy because people aren't studying enough maths, I will have my army of teachers fix this problem".
  - sd9 3y ago
    I don't understand; surely teacher supply is a relevant factor? More/better/less strained teachers encourage people to want to study maths, and help them do so.
    - colinhowe 3y ago
      I think it's relevant, but it's not the only thing. My personal experience as a Brit is that the UK has a growing trend of anti-intellectualism and being innumerate is "cool" in certain circles.
Lolaccount 3y ago
Just another hollow promise from a prime minster and administration that are staring electoral defeat in a years time. The trend at the moment is to announce 'reviews' that capture headlines while doing absolutely nothing about the actual problems. When this doesn't work, get back to fighting the culture wars. For example, we've had multiple reviews, and actual announcements on the legal side, which replicate already existing powers. It's a joke. It's cliche to say that the current administration is the worst we've ever seen ... but the last decade has demonstrated that cliche as fact in the UK's case.
- TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
  The UK has had government-by-press-release for decades now. But with this administration empty spin, emotive dog whistling and grandstanding, and relentless reality denial have completely replaced substance.
- oldfashioned1 3y ago
  Sounds like humble-bragging by Sunak. "Guys, be more like me and be better at Math" In fact Sunak is 99% all about posturing. We don't know what real things he has accomplished, as he was not voted into the PM role, but "positioned"
  - bilvar 3y ago
    Nobody in Britain ever gets voted for the PM role.
    - oldfashioned1 3y ago
      Not for at least 6 months. They get positioned now
- dmje 3y ago
  This. The last decade has been absolutely devastating to the UK. We were actually getting somewhere before that - good investment in infrastructure, in education, long term thinking about all the things that require long term thinking. And then the Daily Mail oldies kick in with Brexit b/s, Truss, Sunak. And now we're a dysfunctional and mostly irrelevant backwater. Sad times.
danpalmer 3y ago
It's not mentioned in the article but I think there's a big gender split as well. This is only anecdotal, but my sister was told all the way through school that she wasn't good at maths, despite being in a Grammar School (requires an exam to get in). She ended up doing well in her exams despite years of criticism, and is now a teacher, teaching maths among other things. Again, anecdotally, I more commonly see women laugh off terrible maths skills as "oh ha ha yes I'm not good with numbers". It's just sexism. From teachers to exams to parents to pop culture, we've decided that women are worse at maths which is obviously both untrue and incredibly damaging. Maybe we should be tackling that.
- rocketbop 3y ago
  I’ve read quite a few times that more girls take higher level maths as well as sciences at second level than boys, but this reverses when it comes to third level. My anecdotal school experience was that higher maths as well as chemistry and biology had more girls than boys while physics had slightly more boys.
- pipes 3y ago
  My brother and his wife are both maths teachers. They say the opposite is now true. Girls receive most of the encouragement.
  - 2b3a51 3y ago
    Which is occurring because of an initiative from around a decade ago. Initiatives and programmes for school improvement &c have a habit of persisting like zombies.
- smcl 3y ago
  This doesn't match with my experience in a Scottish state school, albeit way back in 1997-2003. In the top class in maths we always had more girls than boys throughout my time there. If anything boys were often treated as a nuisance for the first four years of secondary school - many leave aged 16 to work in farming or in oil - and you're only taken seriously if you stick around for the final two years. Coming through an isolated, rural school like this then hitting the real world where the roles are reversed (women are more frequently discriminated against, paid worse) - was a bit of a shock. Note that I didn't suffer at school or anything, it was just sort of accepted that if you were a boy and you wanted to achieve academically you were going against the grain and you were largely on your own. It is definitely true that as a country the self-deprecating "haha I'm rubbish at maths" attitude is pretty common, I don't whether that is indicative of actual ability or if it's just something people say.
SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
This is silly. Learning maths was fine for me, up to university level. However I would not make the mistake that this would work for everyone, people do have different strengths. I would not have coped with e.g. Art or Music to that level, and there is no point in forcing maths on people who have those strengths. It's not one-size fits all. Aptitudes do vary and education should lean into that.
- Lastodon 3y ago
  In my opinion good maths education is important for everyone, regardless of predilections. It's often a child's first introduction to objective logic.
  - SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
    Up to what level though? IMHO, the stated plan "to ensure all school pupils in England study some maths until the age of 18" is a pointless distraction that does not solve any real urgent problem. Which are many.
xiaodai 3y ago
Why work hard on math when they can be taken by foriegners from China, India, and Russia? They have stronger STEM skills and they are KEEN to come to the UK even if they get paid below their worth? So locals can't compete so don't bother.
- blitzar 3y ago
  > "Of course foreigners steal your job, but maybe, if someone without contacts, money, or speaking the language steals your job, you're shit." ~ Louis C. K.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
SilverBirch 3y ago
It's important to understand the context behind this, Rishi Sunak went to one of the top private schools in the country, he went on to study PPE, went to Goldman and then was parachuted in to a safe tory seat, he then took on various positions at the treasury before becoming Chancellor and then PM. All this is to say- Rishi Sunak has literally never in his life had any contact at all with state maths education in this country. This is just one of those weird idiosyncrasies of a guy who has a really strong opinion that maths is important having done absolutely nothing to study the issue. So what we end up with is a policy where Rishi Sunak plans to make maths education better... whilst massively cutting school budgets. Teachers unions are all voting to strike because he tried to negotiate a pay deal with them that involved them getting a pay rise that had to be funded out of existing school budgets (ie, you can have a pay rise, but it's going to mean you have to turn the central heating off in your schools and stop mending the holes in the roofs). It's just a completely out of touch approach. This new initiative won't touch the sides against the damage childrens eduction will take due to the failure to pay teachers properly.
- blitzar 3y ago
  > has literally never in his life had any contact at all with state maths education in this country The state of state maths education in this country is even worse than he thinks. Having a conversation with any of the 93.6% of the population educated in the state school system qualifies as contact with state maths education
  - suyash 3y ago
    He doesn't need to, he has 'Secretary of State for Education' in the UK working for him who is responsible for understanding the problem and brining it to the PM.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- suyash 3y ago
  Well, it's more important to see that actions Rishi Sunak is taking than what his background is. This is an important problem (STEM - Mathematics Education) that he is tackling which no one else before him bothered to. Regarding his background, it's like saying the CEO of the company has no clue about the software that we build because he never fixes the bugs. The job of a Prime Minister of a CEO is not to be in the nitty gritty of the issues, that's the job of the people who work under him just like IC's and Eng Leaders, then they are supposed to bubble up the important issues and explain to him. Having said that, he is best suited as he brings strategic thinking (learned at Goldman, Stanford) to solve these dire problems.
testemailfordg2 3y ago
Probably aiming for the soviet model, to have more people with STEM capabilities inhouse...Rather than depending on external immigration..
ta1243 3y ago
The vast majority of people do not need to be buried under calculus, it's almost as stupid as teaching kids to write with joined up handwriting, it's of no relevance to the real world and it turns people off. However we have a population that have no idea about how things like interest rates work, how loans, mortgages, savings etc work, what pensions do, how to determine if that 2-for-1 deal is better than that separate 50% off deal, the total cost of ownership for a 3 month phone bundled contract vs buying the phone upfront (or with a loan), etc. None of that is taught in maths. It could be taught in numeracy or finance or some other lesson, it should be taught, but there's a big difference between doing matrix transformations of imaginary numbers and working out that you're being fleeced by Tesco
- kerrsclyde 3y ago
  My son (15 in Yr 11) was extolled the virtues of buying cars & phones on finance during by a teacher in a school assembly recently.
  - ta1243 3y ago
    Buying things with finance often makes sense when the cost of the interest is less than the opportunity cost of using the money elsewhere Unfortunatly people don't have the skills to judge the total cost, or the value, so either listen to one of two extremes of "just buy on finance" vs "never buy on finance"
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- tomatocracy 3y ago
  I was certainly taught simple and compound interest and APR/AER for GCSE maths which is about as far as is needed. But one problem is that most of this goes well beyond maths and really becomes more like law. The worst example perhaps is pensions. The difficult part isn't "how much do I need to invest to get a decent pension?". Its everything else - how much can you contribute? When? How does this change if you have a change in circumstances? What are inheritance rights? Can I move my pension with me if I change job? What protected rights do I have and which of those have value to me? What is the tax position now and when you retire? This is much less about maths and much more about being able to navigate an insanely complicated set of rules built up over about 3 decades of government changing them more or less every year then adding in special case exceptions or saving clauses.

39 points by iamben 3y ago

My reading of British popular culture is that having an elite disdain for maths and engineering is not disqualifying. The engineer, while appreciated, is not admired in Britain.

hikingsimulator 3y ago
It reads very much the same in France. The average pay for a Business School graduate is 5-15% higher than that of an engineer.
- Barrin92 3y ago
  While that might be the case France has an excellent math culture at the research level. There's a lot of French folks in the Deep Learning community. LeCun, François Chollet among others, and France has won 13 Fields medals, way ahead of anyone but the US (at 15). France probably has the strongest math community in Europe.
  - hikingsimulator 3y ago
    I'm not as charitable as you are. Chollet left for the USA, LeCun for Canada. France has an extremely small, but great math community via the ENS/Sorbonne/X schools, but it hardly reflects on a larger trend -- general education. The topic isn't the culturing of a select, few elites, but the education of the larger population.
  - defrost 3y ago
    I'm pretty sure on an apples to apples per capita basis France has many more Fields medeals per 100K population than the USofA.
  - lgeorget 3y ago
    "At research level" is the keyword here. We've both the second highest number of Fields medalists and a frankly low score at the 2018 PISA evaluation (especially in comparison to other European countries). The maths education in secondary and higher eduction is somewhat elitist, in the sense that it's not suited for all kinds of students. source: https://data.oecd.org/pisa/mathematics-performance-pisa.htm https://data.oecd.org/pisa/mathematics-performance-pisa.htm
danpalmer 3y ago
Engineering is not glamorous here at all, which I think is a shame because it's a productive, generative, job, with good qualifications needed, and it has a good earning potential. It's much less sought after than working in "marketing", yet probably on average a better job in many ways. Software Engineering and "working in IT" does have a different perception and is considered "cooler", even though the vast majority of our IT jobs are awful.
- ur-whale 3y ago
  > Engineering is not glamorous here at all, which I think is a shame because it's a productive, generative, job, with good qualifications needed, and it has a good earning potential. Big focus on money here. Being an engineer is also: - rewarding in its own right (you *build* things) - an achievement to be proud of - a way to have a long lasting net contribution to society with - usually - little moral downside I'd put these ahead of any financial reward.
  - techterrier 3y ago
    crypto enters the chat
- tonyedgecombe 3y ago
  >Software Engineering and "working in IT" does have a different perception and is considered "cooler", even though the vast majority of our IT jobs are awful. I think that is a fairly recent change, it certainly wasn't the case when I started my career in the eighties.
SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
> The engineer, while appreciated, is not admired in Britain. "In Britain" is a bit general; but in the circles of senior politicians and civil servants in Westminster, it's likely accurate.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
British elite culture privileges spivs, gamblers, bullies, and opportunists. Intelligent competent professionals capable of critical thinking make the people in power nervous.
conzar 3y ago
In addition to my engineering degree, I also received a token degree in mathematics from the university where I studied. It seems that this is a vestige of the past when the university was established and the only way to include engineering as a subject of study was to classify it as a subdivision of mathematics. Although the university is not currently based in the UK, there was a time when it did not permit Catholics to enroll as students either...
tomatocracy 3y ago
It's not even about engineering. Culturally people who would be embarrassed to say "oh, I can't really read properly" have no issue with saying "I can't work out percentages".

pjc50 3y ago

> "The prime minister needs to show his working: he cannot deliver this reheated, empty pledge without more maths teachers," shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson said. Correct. Important context for this is the ongoing balloting for strike action over teachers pay. Anyone who can do maths can read their own payslip and know when they're better off in the private sector doing anything else. The recruitment shortage is serious: https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-committee/news/194283/education-committee-launches-new-inquiry-into-teacher-recruitment-training-and-retention/ https://committees.parliament.uk/committee/203/education-com... > A 2022 report by the National Foundation for Educational Research shows that the teacher supply challenge is marked particularly by a lack of physics, chemistry and maths teachers. For physics, only 17% of the target to recruit 2,610 trainees was achieved, with only 444 new entrants. The Committee was recently told that at this current level of supply, it would be impossible to carry out the Prime Minister’s proposal of requiring pupils to study maths until 18. In other words, this is already impossible, and no amount of "mindset changing" (wishful thinking) is going to change otherwise. You're only hearing this now because the local elections are soon.

bjackman 3y ago
lol > Underpay and overwork teachers while using them as pawns in your transphobic culture war, so that they constantly strike and quit in their thousands > Economically isolate the UK and cripple all its key public services while still somehow failing to cut most people's tax bill "My economy is unhealthy because people aren't studying enough maths, I will have my army of teachers fix this problem".
- sd9 3y ago
  I don't understand; surely teacher supply is a relevant factor? More/better/less strained teachers encourage people to want to study maths, and help them do so.
  - colinhowe 3y ago
    I think it's relevant, but it's not the only thing. My personal experience as a Brit is that the UK has a growing trend of anti-intellectualism and being innumerate is "cool" in certain circles.

Lolaccount 3y ago

Just another hollow promise from a prime minster and administration that are staring electoral defeat in a years time. The trend at the moment is to announce 'reviews' that capture headlines while doing absolutely nothing about the actual problems. When this doesn't work, get back to fighting the culture wars. For example, we've had multiple reviews, and actual announcements on the legal side, which replicate already existing powers. It's a joke. It's cliche to say that the current administration is the worst we've ever seen ... but the last decade has demonstrated that cliche as fact in the UK's case.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
The UK has had government-by-press-release for decades now. But with this administration empty spin, emotive dog whistling and grandstanding, and relentless reality denial have completely replaced substance.
oldfashioned1 3y ago
Sounds like humble-bragging by Sunak. "Guys, be more like me and be better at Math" In fact Sunak is 99% all about posturing. We don't know what real things he has accomplished, as he was not voted into the PM role, but "positioned"
- bilvar 3y ago
  Nobody in Britain ever gets voted for the PM role.
  - oldfashioned1 3y ago
    Not for at least 6 months. They get positioned now
dmje 3y ago
This. The last decade has been absolutely devastating to the UK. We were actually getting somewhere before that - good investment in infrastructure, in education, long term thinking about all the things that require long term thinking. And then the Daily Mail oldies kick in with Brexit b/s, Truss, Sunak. And now we're a dysfunctional and mostly irrelevant backwater. Sad times.

danpalmer 3y ago

It's not mentioned in the article but I think there's a big gender split as well. This is only anecdotal, but my sister was told all the way through school that she wasn't good at maths, despite being in a Grammar School (requires an exam to get in). She ended up doing well in her exams despite years of criticism, and is now a teacher, teaching maths among other things. Again, anecdotally, I more commonly see women laugh off terrible maths skills as "oh ha ha yes I'm not good with numbers". It's just sexism. From teachers to exams to parents to pop culture, we've decided that women are worse at maths which is obviously both untrue and incredibly damaging. Maybe we should be tackling that.

rocketbop 3y ago
I’ve read quite a few times that more girls take higher level maths as well as sciences at second level than boys, but this reverses when it comes to third level. My anecdotal school experience was that higher maths as well as chemistry and biology had more girls than boys while physics had slightly more boys.
pipes 3y ago
My brother and his wife are both maths teachers. They say the opposite is now true. Girls receive most of the encouragement.
- 2b3a51 3y ago
  Which is occurring because of an initiative from around a decade ago. Initiatives and programmes for school improvement &c have a habit of persisting like zombies.
smcl 3y ago
This doesn't match with my experience in a Scottish state school, albeit way back in 1997-2003. In the top class in maths we always had more girls than boys throughout my time there. If anything boys were often treated as a nuisance for the first four years of secondary school - many leave aged 16 to work in farming or in oil - and you're only taken seriously if you stick around for the final two years. Coming through an isolated, rural school like this then hitting the real world where the roles are reversed (women are more frequently discriminated against, paid worse) - was a bit of a shock. Note that I didn't suffer at school or anything, it was just sort of accepted that if you were a boy and you wanted to achieve academically you were going against the grain and you were largely on your own. It is definitely true that as a country the self-deprecating "haha I'm rubbish at maths" attitude is pretty common, I don't whether that is indicative of actual ability or if it's just something people say.

SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago

This is silly. Learning maths was fine for me, up to university level. However I would not make the mistake that this would work for everyone, people do have different strengths. I would not have coped with e.g. Art or Music to that level, and there is no point in forcing maths on people who have those strengths. It's not one-size fits all. Aptitudes do vary and education should lean into that.

Lastodon 3y ago
In my opinion good maths education is important for everyone, regardless of predilections. It's often a child's first introduction to objective logic.
- SideburnsOfDoom 3y ago
  Up to what level though? IMHO, the stated plan "to ensure all school pupils in England study some maths until the age of 18" is a pointless distraction that does not solve any real urgent problem. Which are many.

xiaodai 3y ago

Why work hard on math when they can be taken by foriegners from China, India, and Russia? They have stronger STEM skills and they are KEEN to come to the UK even if they get paid below their worth? So locals can't compete so don't bother.

blitzar 3y ago
> "Of course foreigners steal your job, but maybe, if someone without contacts, money, or speaking the language steals your job, you're shit." ~ Louis C. K.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

SilverBirch 3y ago

It's important to understand the context behind this, Rishi Sunak went to one of the top private schools in the country, he went on to study PPE, went to Goldman and then was parachuted in to a safe tory seat, he then took on various positions at the treasury before becoming Chancellor and then PM. All this is to say- Rishi Sunak has literally never in his life had any contact at all with state maths education in this country. This is just one of those weird idiosyncrasies of a guy who has a really strong opinion that maths is important having done absolutely nothing to study the issue. So what we end up with is a policy where Rishi Sunak plans to make maths education better... whilst massively cutting school budgets. Teachers unions are all voting to strike because he tried to negotiate a pay deal with them that involved them getting a pay rise that had to be funded out of existing school budgets (ie, you can have a pay rise, but it's going to mean you have to turn the central heating off in your schools and stop mending the holes in the roofs). It's just a completely out of touch approach. This new initiative won't touch the sides against the damage childrens eduction will take due to the failure to pay teachers properly.

blitzar 3y ago
> has literally never in his life had any contact at all with state maths education in this country The state of state maths education in this country is even worse than he thinks. Having a conversation with any of the 93.6% of the population educated in the state school system qualifies as contact with state maths education
- suyash 3y ago
  He doesn't need to, he has 'Secretary of State for Education' in the UK working for him who is responsible for understanding the problem and brining it to the PM.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
suyash 3y ago
Well, it's more important to see that actions Rishi Sunak is taking than what his background is. This is an important problem (STEM - Mathematics Education) that he is tackling which no one else before him bothered to. Regarding his background, it's like saying the CEO of the company has no clue about the software that we build because he never fixes the bugs. The job of a Prime Minister of a CEO is not to be in the nitty gritty of the issues, that's the job of the people who work under him just like IC's and Eng Leaders, then they are supposed to bubble up the important issues and explain to him. Having said that, he is best suited as he brings strategic thinking (learned at Goldman, Stanford) to solve these dire problems.

testemailfordg2 3y ago

Probably aiming for the soviet model, to have more people with STEM capabilities inhouse...Rather than depending on external immigration..

ta1243 3y ago

The vast majority of people do not need to be buried under calculus, it's almost as stupid as teaching kids to write with joined up handwriting, it's of no relevance to the real world and it turns people off. However we have a population that have no idea about how things like interest rates work, how loans, mortgages, savings etc work, what pensions do, how to determine if that 2-for-1 deal is better than that separate 50% off deal, the total cost of ownership for a 3 month phone bundled contract vs buying the phone upfront (or with a loan), etc. None of that is taught in maths. It could be taught in numeracy or finance or some other lesson, it should be taught, but there's a big difference between doing matrix transformations of imaginary numbers and working out that you're being fleeced by Tesco

kerrsclyde 3y ago
My son (15 in Yr 11) was extolled the virtues of buying cars & phones on finance during by a teacher in a school assembly recently.
- ta1243 3y ago
  Buying things with finance often makes sense when the cost of the interest is less than the opportunity cost of using the money elsewhere Unfortunatly people don't have the skills to judge the total cost, or the value, so either listen to one of two extremes of "just buy on finance" vs "never buy on finance"
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
tomatocracy 3y ago
I was certainly taught simple and compound interest and APR/AER for GCSE maths which is about as far as is needed. But one problem is that most of this goes well beyond maths and really becomes more like law. The worst example perhaps is pensions. The difficult part isn't "how much do I need to invest to get a decent pension?". Its everything else - how much can you contribute? When? How does this change if you have a change in circumstances? What are inheritance rights? Can I move my pension with me if I change job? What protected rights do I have and which of those have value to me? What is the tax position now and when you retire? This is much less about maths and much more about being able to navigate an insanely complicated set of rules built up over about 3 decades of government changing them more or less every year then adding in special case exceptions or saving clauses.