Recruiting and retaining enough maths teachers to deliver the government’s pledge to deliver the subject to 18 will be a “challenge”, with schools “struggling along” without specialists at the moment, MPs have been told.
In a session examining the government’s recently unveiled “maths to 18” plan, the cross-party Commons Education Select Committee was told that schools would “really need maths specialists”, and that meeting this demand would be “key” to delivering the policy.
Jack Worth, school workforce lead at the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), told members of the committee this morning that the core group of students that maths provision would be expanded to would have completed a level 2 qualification.
“So we’re talking about something level 3 where you really need math specialists to do it”, he said.
And he added that “enough schools are struggling along without specialists across all maths at the moment”.
Issues over the recruitment of maths teachers were raised by others giving evidence to the committee this morning.
Niamh Sweeney, deputy general secretary of the NEU teaching union, said that one of the “biggest challenges” that school leaders were facing at the moment was getting a qualified maths teacher” in front of any of their students”.
She added: “The majority of people teaching maths are geography teachers or science teachers or PE teachers [who are] not just teaching a couple of hours of maths alongside their timetable or core subject, but vast numbers of hours.”
Kevin Gilmartin, a post-16 specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders, said that one in eight classes was not staffed by a qualified maths specialist, and added that “high accountability” at GCSE level was already leading to school leaders having to make decisions about “what sorts of students will be exposed to - for want of a better word - the better maths teachers”.
Other aspects of how the “maths to 18” policy would be delivered were also discussed on the panel, with chair Robin Walker asking whether it would be “more useful” for the government to look at a qualification on the “core” or “functional” side of things.
But Mr Worth explained that even this would have its challenges, adding: “The challenge of something like core maths is that it is a level 3 qualification. Getting a PE teacher to do it is going to be extremely tricky; even though it’s more applied, it doesn’t mean it’s necessarily easy to teach.”
Possible solutions to the recruitment and retention crisis were debated by the committee, including the use of “golden handshakes” - bonuses or incentives for those who are arriving in the profession.
Martin Taylor, chair of the advisory committee on mathematical education at the Royal Society, said that these “can be part of” the answer to improving recruitment and retention, but added that there was “no silver bullet” for solving the issue.
Though Ms Sweeney warned that this approach risked “moving the problem elsewhere”.
She explained: “If you’ve got a good science maths graduate and you’re only getting a bursary for maths or physics, they won’t teach biology and then it just moves the problem.”
Figures released at the end of last year show that the government missed three-quarters of subject and phase targets for initial teacher training (ITT) recruitment.
It missed its target for secondary teacher trainee entrants by a wide margin of 41 per cent, with just 12,356 entrants.
