PRIME MINISTERS WHO CAN’T COUNT, DON’T COUNT

“… a politician who measures everything except that which makes life worthwhile” Guardian leader on Prime Minister Sunak 4 January 2023

Prime Minister Sunak has been quiet of late, reluctant to make any comment or display any form of leadership on the various crises that are piling up in his in-tray, which seems destined never to be an out-tray. He probably took one look at the chaos generated by the public statements of the ill-fated Truss-Kwarteng team and decided to keep his head below the parapet.

So it was with increasing disbelief and anger that I read his first considered public intervention for some time centred, not on the disintegrating health service, or the rail transport chaos, or the developing immigrant crisis, or the growing evidence of the serious economic damage caused by Brexit, or the poverty pandemic that is blighting so many lives: no, he wanted to tell us that his answer to all this is to ensure that every school child up to the age of 18 will study mathematics. He hastened to add that measures to provide this would not come until after the next election (how very convenient). This is par for the Tory public policy playbook, as designed by the Johnson/Truss school of Prime Ministerial governance: promise or pledge anything, but make no effort to fulfil these pledges and promises, or lay any sensible groundwork for implementation, much less provide the requisite financial resources. It’s all hot air, and designed to distract attention from the real multiple crises that are engulfing Westminster and Whitehall, and indeed the whole country.

Let’s have some data about maths teaching in our state schools, figures which Mr Sunak seems to have either overlooked or avoided. Although there were in 2021 almost 36,000 qualified maths teachers in this sector, an increase of 9% compared with 2012, the most recent annual report of the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER 2022) tells us that 45% of maths teaching in secondary schools is undertaken by teachers who have no specialised training in mathematics.  Moreover, the recruitment of specialist maths teachers has consistently fallen short in the past decade of the annual targets set by government for such recruitment. It is well understood that these key shortages are linked to a shortfall in teachers’ pay over the decade to 2021 of between 7 and 9%. These are figures we can all understand, and Sunak has absolutely nothing to say about how these shortages will be overcome, where all these missing teachers will come from, or what money will pay for them.

Perhaps no one told the Prime Minister that his own government had just recently cut back the quota for trainee maths teachers by almost 30 per cent, yet another of example of the lack of joined up thinking that has plagued policy-making under the ever-changing Tory administrations. Geoff Barton, general secretary of a principal headteachers union (Association of School and College Leaders ) says the plan is “unachievable” in the light of current teacher shortages. Perhaps Mr Sunak wished to avoid – or chose at least not to tell us – that Maths plus Further Maths is the most popular subject at A level taken by some 90,000 students. Hence the importance of getting enough well qualified teachers to teach them all, which is presumably what the Prime Minister wants. On the other hand, if maths teaching had to be extended to all A level students, we’d be looking at an additional 185,000 students to be taught. Have you any idea whether all these statistics add up, Prime Minister?

We might be reminded of the dictum sometimes attributed to a19^th century Tory Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, that there are ‘lies, damned lies and statistics’, with its implication that statistics may be misused and are inherently untrustworthy. We may see here a justification for the view that  the education of children and young adults should enable them to handle and understand the limitations of such slippery material, especially when presented by Prime Ministers or indeed by any set of politicians. But it is in large part the deliberate manipulation and misuse of statistics by politicians that creates the distrust that now permeates our political system. And in this instance Prime Minister Sunak is deliberately using a reasonable question (should education not provide all people with the ability to handle at least basic mathematical and statistical models and concepts?) to unreasonably avoid the question of how he intends, right now, to respond to the real and present crises in our economy and society.

For example:

• Why are there not enough nurses, doctors and other vital health staff in our national health service? We don’t need much of a maths education to know that a shortfall of at least 106,000 health service workers, (Nuffield Trust 2022) and 47,000 doctors (British Medical Association, 2022) is bad for our health. We can count how many essential staff are missing from our prized NHS, Mr Sunak; we can count, on our fingers, the ambulances queueing outside a great many of our A&E departments (we’d need three hands for some of them), and most of us personally know someone who has been caught up in the vast and growing backlog of elective treatment (7 million and counting)
• Where are the 40 new hospitals promised by the Tory government at the last election? Would a better maths education help us to understand how such figures can just vanish into thin air? We can at the least count to 40, Mr Sunak, and then realise that those promised hospitals are simply not there (however you choose to define them)
• You spoke recently, Mr Sunak, to a homeless man who was struggling to find employment and sufficient income for his needs, a laudable enough attempt to meet and understand your fellow citizen. But, do you really believe that this man is homeless and in difficulties because he failed to get a maths training by the age of 18? Might some deeper social and economic factors be involved here?
• When it comes to homelessness, over the past decade or so several Tory administrations have persistently failed to meet, or come even close to meeting, declared housebuilding targets. Is this because all those Ministers had not received any maths education when they were at school? Can they, and you, not count? Is this why the figures keep changing with every Tory administration? Or have the property magnates who dominate the house-building sector not yet given enough donations to your party? Presumably, you have no difficulty in adding these up.
• Many thousands of people are struggling in poverty, often despite also being in paid work. Right now, many such families are having to calculate whether to feed their children or the gas/electric meter. They can count their pennies, Mr Sunak, as recently advised to do by that well known authority on personal poverty, King Charles, but counting their pennies may not be enough. Is this because they did not do well enough in their maths lessons at school, and would such training have helped them in making such an impossible choice? This would be the case, according to the Sunak doctrine: but that doctrine does not explain why many people who work hard get so badly paid, or why our social benefits system is so deeply inadequate to established need, or why the better-off groups in our society are being so much better rewarded than the poorer groups (numerous respected sources, too many to reference). Or why the small percentage of our children who go to expensive private schools (around 7%) also go on to dominate the best paid occupations. Nothing to do with how much maths teaching they had, a lot to do with their social backgrounds and connections. Come to that, I can’t think of a single Prime Minister after 1945 who had anything approaching a maths degree, except possibly Liz Truss who studied Maths and Further Maths at A level – and look where that got the country.

Perhaps Sunak’s real argument should have been that as a society becoming ever more diversified and so badly in need of institutional reconstruction, we should be insisting that children and young adults need to have classes in politics, in sociology, in social policy, in moral philosophy, in cultural history. But no, all that is anathema to a ruling right wing coalition that will surely ignominiously collapse as they and their post-imperial delusions hit the unyielding buffers of economic and social reality, a deserved fate from which this group of ignorant and third-rate politicians will not be saved by all the maths training in the world. 

PS Don’t study maths if you want to become Prime Minister

Just for fun, I checked the educational qualifications of British Prime Ministers from 1945: this chart focusses largely on university degree studies as it was impractical to look at all post-16 qualifications.

Name	Party	Schooling	University	Degree
Clement Attlee	Lab	Private: Haileybury	Oxford	Modern History
Winston Churchill	Con	Private: Harrow	Sandhurst	Military studies/training
Anthony Eden	Con	Private: Eton	Oxford	Oriental Studies
Harold MacMillan	Con	Private: Eton	Oxford	Pt 1 Latin and Greek incomplete, war service
Alec Douglas-Home	Con	Private: Eton	Oxford	Modern History
Harold Wilson	Lab	State: Grammar	Oxford	Philosophy, Politics and                                                                                                         Economics (PPE)
Edward Heath	Con	State: Grammar	Oxford	PPE
Jim Callaghan	Lab	No post-16 education	University of Life	(Tax Inspector, union leader)
Margaret Thatcher	Con	State: Grammar	Oxford	Chemistry
John Major	Con	No post-16 education	University of Life	(Clerk, Business)
Tony Blair	Lab	Private: Fettes College	Oxford	Jurisprudence
Gordon Brown	Lab	State: High School	Edinburgh	History (+Ph.D)
David Cameron	Con	Private: Eton	Oxford	PPE
Theresa May	Con	State: Grammar / Comp	Oxford	Geography
Boris Johnson	Con	Private: Eton	Oxford	PPE
Liz Truss	Con	State: Comp	Oxford	PPE
Rishi Sunak	Con	Private: Winchester	Oxford	PPE