Bad Attitudes To Maths Makes Children Switch Off

Wendy Jones is a trustee of National Numeracy and a former BBC education correspondent.

The story that emerged last week of 17 million adults having such poor numeracy skills that they can`t understand deductions on wage slips, read bus timetables or pay household bills may have left anyone who teaches school maths thinking: that`s terrible, but what`s it got to do with me? It`s about adult skills, not about what goes on in my classroom.

The fact is that adults` and children`s experiences of maths and numeracy are all part of the same story. It`s a story of a peculiarly British sort: our attitude to maths.

National Numeracy, the new charity that highlighted this situation, emphasised the cost to the UK of having so many of its citizens so ill-prepared for life (a while back KPMG put an eye-watering £2.4 billion annual price tag on poor numeracy) - and the cost to the individual in terms of disadvantage. If you`ve got poor numeracy, you`re twice as likely to be unemployed, twice as likely to become a teenage parent, twice as likely to suffer depression.

At National Numeracy (where I`m a trustee), we`re knee-deep in statistics of this sort. We also know that while adult literacy has improved – thanks in large part to public attention and money being directed at the problem – numeracy has got worse.

We know too that many adults simply don`t like maths and don`t see the point of it. Many have no qualms about saying so. Being "no good at maths" carries little stigma. That tends not to be the case in other parts of the world.

Negative attitudes to maths set in early in the UK – some would say between the ages of seven and nine, when many children`s interest and attainment dip, in most cases never to return. They switch off and decide maths is something to be borne until the moment they can give it up – for ever. England, Wales and Northern Ireland have the lowest rate of young people continuing with maths beyond 16. (Scotland does a bit better, probably because of a wider curriculum.)

The process is then cyclical, with parents (and in some cases – dare I say? - teachers) passing on their own lack of enthusiasm and confidence to the next generation.

Take Paula, the mother interviewed on the Today programme last week. She admitted that, when it came to school maths, she `just didn`t get it`. In adult life, she never knew whether she was being short-changed in shops. But it was when she realised her children thought they were "rubbish at maths, just like Mum" that Paula made up her mind to start numeracy classes. With effort and good teaching, she then "did get it". When adults do decide to take steps to remedy poor numeracy, helping their children may be the motivation.

The relationship between parents and school maths is often troubled. I remember a parents` maths evening at my children`s infant school some years ago. There were fantastic displays of tactile maths equipment - this was well before the digital age – but very little explanation. We parents (the relatively small number of us that bothered to turn up) traipsed around looking by stages impressed and puzzled. Eventually the woman next to me whispered: "It`s all very well, but what about their times tables?"

My generation of primary school pupils didn`t have the imaginative resources that my children did, we did chant our tables before we had any understanding of what they meant and most of us still didn`t end up loving maths. It would seem there never was a golden age.

So why, by secondary school, does maths still become one of the most hated subjects? Is it the way it`s taught, the way teachers are trained, the failure to attract enough talented mathematicians who also have a gift for teaching, or just the old problem – our failure to take maths seriously? Well possibly all of those to some degree. At National Numeracy, we don`t believe any child – or adult – can be written off as being no good at maths.

In her book The Elephant in the Classroom, Jo Boaler talks about "learning without thought". One of the girls she interviewed said: "In maths you have to remember in other subjects you can think about it". If maths can be presented as a collaborative, stimulating, problem-solving activity relevant to real life, then maybe more children would avoid joining the ranks of the adult innumerate.

But as it is, for all the kids in the UK who are thrilled to be taking part in World Maths Day activities today, there are many more who aren`t and who regard maths as a waste of time. Changing young minds won`t happen overnight, but it has to be done.