Maths is the most popular A level. But is it fit for purpose?

A-level maths passed 100,000 entries this year - the first subject to do so.

In total, 107,427 students took maths - a significant 12.1 per cent of all A levels. What’s more, further maths also benefitted from this boost in popularity, with a 19.9 per cent increase in entries, from 15,080 in 2023 to 18,082 this year.

Maths also featured in 15 of the 20 most popular A-level subject combinations - almost always paired with other science, technology, engineering and mathematics (Stem) subjects.

A-level maths boost

It all suggests the “Stem push” from the government is paying off, something former maths teacher David Thomas, now CEO of Axiom Maths, says has come at just the right time.

“The world is becoming more mathematical,” he tells Tes. “The tech world is booming [and] young people are aware that [maths] is a way to have a positive impact on the world, and probably on their own economic circumstances, too.”

Indeed, research in 2016 found that from a cohort of 2,000 people, those who had taken maths A level earned an average of 11 per cent more by age 34 than peers who did not.

“It doesn’t matter what line of work you’re in,” explains report author Andrew Noyes, founding director of the Observatory for Mathematical Education at the University of Nottingham, “within any employment category, it’s still the case that if you do maths or don’t do maths, it makes a difference.”

Maths graduate opportunities

For those in schools, whether students are aware of this specific research, this perception is often central to the decision to take maths A level.

“A lot of them know how highly thought of maths is with employers and universities,” says Bethany Carless, director of maths at Vision 1590 Academy Trust and a maths teacher at Egglescliffe School and Sixth Form College in Stockton-on-Tees.

What’s more, she says the current curriculum does a good job: “The A-level curriculum sets students up well,” she says, adding that the range of elements studied - such as pure maths, statistics and mechanics - “really works”.

Tom Marjoram, maths standards lead at Inspiration Trust and a teacher at Sir Isaac Newton Sixth Form in Norwich, argues that it “prepares students for the important skills they need beyond A level to be successful in a whole range of different courses”.

Many note that reforms to maths A level in 2017 introduced a greater focus on teaching students how to understand and manipulate large data sets - a particularly practical skill for the world of work, something Jennie Golding, associate professor at University College London, says was a useful development as “we need students to be able to interpret data in robust ways”.

One subject for many masters

But this does not mean there aren’t any issues: “Very few people would say that it’s ideal,” Golding says, tactfully.

In fact, she notes that perhaps oddly, while maths A level is good at preparing students to learn “procedural approaches to quite difficult mathematical questions” for subjects such as physics and engineering, it is less good for maths undergraduate degrees.

“The type of mathematical thinking [required] is quite different from what you’ve learned to do at A level,” she says. “There’s a gap.”

Dan Abramson, CEO of uMaths (the University Maths Schools Network) and founding headteacher of King’s College London Mathematics School, agrees, explaining that an undergraduate maths degree “is much more a study of structure and forming compelling arguments that we call proofs” - something lacking at A level.

“[There is] less stuff in there that enables you to be an argument-forming mathematician”, he adds.

Linked to this, Abramson laments a lack of group work opportunities within maths at A level. “I don’t think we see enough collaboration in a mathematics classroom,” he says - which he adds is a problem because, “in general, mathematicians don’t work on their own...they thrash out ideas as a team”.

Carless acknowledges this issue, too: “We do struggle to find opportunities for group work at A level...time is not built into the curriculum for this.”

Golding says she thinks one cause for this is that maths exams do not easily lend themselves to questions that require group work: “[We are] constrained within the present assessment regime.”

She adds that this also means that aspects of the course, such as working with datasets, are “marginalised” because while “the curriculum says large parts of it should be delivered via digital means”, it is still assessed with pen and paper.

Ignoring the power of computers?

As well as these concerns with assessment and teaching methods, some notable mathematicians have argued that a fixation on doing calculations by hand is holding the subject back, too.

For example, Conrad Wolfram, European co-founder and CEO of the computational technology company Wolfram Research, argues that computation must be integrated into the maths syllabus because this is how most maths is done in the real world.

“In educational core curricula, we’re spending almost all our time doing hand calculations,” Wolfram said at an event earlier this year. “Yet computers do that billions and billions of times better than we do.”

Thomas at Axiom Maths agrees there are some areas, such as statistics, where it would make sense to integrate more technology into the curriculum because that is how it is done in the outside world.

“Statistics is just pure computation - you’re going to plug it into a statistics program, and that’s going to do it for you,” he admits.

However, in the main, he says he would be wary about moving away from learning core maths concepts: “I would be very worried about being quick to dismiss doing mathematics manually because that is how you learn it.”

Rise of artificial intelligence

Nicola Coe, director of maths at Inspiration Trust, agrees there are “skills we have to teach” in the traditional way instead of being lulled into complacency by computers.

For example, she says that when you ask a calculator to find the area under a curve that dips below the axis, it may tell you the area is zero.

“When actually, in real life, the area is not zero, because you’ve got part positive, part negative. Unless you’ve plotted the graph yourself, you could be led down the garden path. It’s not just a case of ‘the computer can do it’,” she explains.

But the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) is only going to make such issues more prominent, notes Kester Brewin, former maths teacher and associate director at the Institute for the Future of Work.

He says that “the latest generative AI tools”, for example, are “very different to calculator use”. If these tools come to be used more regularly, “there are going to be real questions about why students are being asked to do mathematics as the machine will solve these problems, with full algebraic/logical working”.

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“That is going to be tough, and will require some very sophisticated redesign of curricula,” adds Brewin.

And even then, this won’t solve the debate over whether maths is best done by hand or with computation, says Carless.

She describes a recent “puzzle” that she and her colleagues looked at on a staff training day. The head of department had “fed the problem into AI and got the solutions”, but “[we] as mathematicians had come up with different answers” by hand, she explains.

“[The AI] helped create something really quickly,” but it made the teachers realise “you still need the humans, to make sure it’s correct”.

‘Those who can and those who cannot’

While these debates are clearly important for the future of the subject, for some they ignore a bigger issue - that for many students simply passing GCSE maths to then even consider taking it at A level seems impossible.

For example, Noyes at the University of Nottingham notes the number of students who didn’t achieve a pass in the subject at GCSE this year increased to 40.4 per cent.

“Very clearly, there is a gap between those who can do maths and those who can’t,” he adds.

Closing this gap is one of the aims of Mathematical Futures, a new report from the Royal Society, which sets out recommendations for the government regarding maths education - timely, given the wider curriculum review that is currently underway that, it was announced this week, would have an explicit focus on ensuring all pupils have an “excellent foundation” in maths.

“If there is a core narrative for the current government, it is that the only salvation is economic growth,” Adrian Smith, president of the Royal Society, tells Tes.

“Economic growth fundamentally depends on skills. It depends on the jobs and industries of the future. All that comes back to the same story, that those will be data-dependent, computer-dependent,” he says.

While this focus is wider than just A level, Smith says it’s all connected: “It’s about a general quantitative literacy. Can people understand the numbers thrown at them? Can they use numbers successfully in their own lives?”

Maths GCSE failures

Improving maths for all is something the previous government sought to tackle, with former prime minister Rishi Sunak’s plan to make maths compulsory up to the age of 18.

The idea was widely dismissed, but Smith at the Royal Society says the then prime minister’s mistake was to “miscommunicate”: Sunak’s intention was not for all young people to take maths A level, Smith says.

Rather, it was likely to be an alternative qualification that gave people the necessary skills for life - something Martin Taylor, chair of the Royal Society’s advisory committee on mathematics education, says could have been done with the existing core maths offering.

“[Core maths] has two great components”, he tells Tes. Firstly, “it doesn’t start off thinking that everybody is motivated to think mathematics is great” and instead shows them how it is useful - and secondly, he says it includes skills such as “data and computing”, which are directly relevant to the real world.

But, currently, core maths sees low uptake: just 12,810 students sat it in in 2024 - 11.9 per cent of the number who opted for maths A level.

UCL’s Golding says until employers and universities give the qualification more prominence on applications, it is unlikely to grow. Abramson at uMaths agrees: “[Core maths] is not taken up in anywhere near the numbers it should be”, he says, adding that entry numbers “should be more like 200,000”.

Wanted: maths teachers

But if that were to happen, we’d need more maths teachers - something the rise in maths A level is also making clear.

The government did not meet its initial teacher training targets in 2020-21 or 2021-22, while in 2022-23 it strangely reduced its quota for maths trainees - before raising it again for 2023-24.

The impact is that, according to government data, 15.2 per cent of maths lessons in schools in 2023-24 were taught by teachers without a post-A-level qualification in maths, the lowest since 2015-16.

It’s a problem schools across the country are battling. Marcus Shepherd, education director at E-ACT, says that “maths teacher recruitment has been a persistent challenge, and the surge in demand for A-level maths has only increased the pressure”.

Meanwhile, Rupert Greeves, maths lead at Education South West, says recruiting good maths teachers “has become noticeably harder in the last couple of years” - and he expects it to become a “much bigger issue in the near future”.

Carless at Vision 1590 says maths teachers are in such “short supply” that they have recently recruited some who “don’t have a maths background”.

She notes these teachers might have studied geography or history at university and then done a maths conversion, but adds that “it becomes an issue, because if they’ve only got maths up to GCSE, are they confident enough?”

Retention payments, bursaries and scholarships

In response to this, a Department for Education spokesperson says that it offers retention payments, bursaries and scholarships “to encourage talented trainees to key subjects including maths”.

Meanwhile, while not referring specifically to maths A level, the spokesperson added that the subject, generally, is being scrutinised as part of the curriculum review to “ensure every young person has a strong foundation in maths”.

Given maths A level is booming, it may well be the case that the review feels that changes at this stage of the school journey are unnecessary.

But with questions over curriculum content, assessment methods, recruitment of teachers and wider questions about the learning gap being too big for many after GCSE, there are plenty of maths problems that still need solving.

Ellen Peirson-Hagger is senior writer at Tes

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