The chancellor's most recent budget made many commitments regarding maths: £600 for every additional student taking A level or core maths; £40 million towards Centres of Excellence in maths and £8.5 million towards research.

Further improving maths skills for both everyday life and work is to be encouraged. But from the college perspective, will these initiatives achieve this? 

Not all colleges deliver level 3 maths, particularly A level, and many colleges find it a struggle to find sufficient staff to teach maths to GCSE resit students. 

Maths A level is the most popular A level, with over 90,000 entries in summer 2018 – more than 20,000 entries ahead of the next most popular subject, which is English.

The risk of fewer maths students

This suggests that most students who wish to take maths at A level already do so. To offer, or indeed encourage, students who do not wish to do so to take level 3 maths may mean a drop in attendance, retention and overall achievement rates.

Maths AS entries in summer 2018 are half of what they were in 2017. Of course, this is at least in part attributable to the fact that students starting A-level maths in September 2017 were the first cohort studying the reformed linear A level and no longer sit AS at the end of their first year.

However, with many colleges now offering three A levels over two years as the most common A level study programme, it is more than possible that there will be fewer students taking a level 3 in maths. Those who might have taken maths as a fourth A-level option will no longer be doing so.

Thus, there is some irony in offering incentives to encourage providers to offer maths to more students while at the same time another policy means that fewer students will be taking it. And is £600 enough of an incentive? Basic 16-18 funding is £4,000, which when divided over three A levels suggests that £600 will not be enough. Few colleges intend to offer additional maths because it is not viable.

Providers facing the biggest challenge

One of the chancellor's budget pronouncements was for Further Education Centres of Excellence in maths. Encouragingly, these are now to be known as Centres for Excellence. There is a lot in that preposition change – a commitment to a focus on networking and dissemination across an area or region rather than just improving maths within a single centre.

This means that even if each college can’t apply to be a centre – the criteria requires providers to be "good" or "outstanding" – at least all colleges can benefit from the learning.

The requirement for a lead centre to have at least 250 students taking maths means that this policy will be focused on those providers who literally face the biggest challenge, large numbers of resit students. It also offers the opportunity for colleges to work together to put in a bid if they don’t make the criteria either in terms of numbers or grade.

'The mechanism is undoubtedly clumsy'

The basic maths premium pilot, somewhat controversially, focuses on improving maths resit outcomes based on areas where not enough children and teenagers (aged 5-16) have access to a high-quality school place.

As post-16 students often travel to a college based out of their home town, it does mean that some young people who should be eligible to receive an uplift won’t be. It is also based on the registered address of the post-16 institution. As many colleges have merged recently, this means that some students and colleges will lose out because the registered site is not in an achieving excellence area although other sites might be.

Those colleges who are eligible and opt in will be allocated one of three funding approaches. Group A will achieve £500 up front per student who has yet to achieve GCSE, group B will receive £250 up-front and £250 for each student who achieves by 2020 and group C will receive no money up front, but £500 for each student who achieves. Understandably, all the eligible colleges hope they are in group A so that they can guarantee and plan how they will spend the money. 

The mechanism is undoubtedly clumsy and, at first sight, rather divisive. But if it means that additional funding enabling smaller group sizes, more administrative support to chase attendance, more one-to-one support, additional online resources and possibly more teachers (if available by this time of the year for September) improves outcomes then it could have benefits in the longer term for the whole sector. One question remains, though: will the funding be sufficient?  If only 10 per cent of the nearly 200,000 students who require to continue studying maths are eligible, the money will be tight.

Of all the announcements, the Centres for Excellence, which will provide the financial resource to facilitate research and networking and dissemination, appear to offer the best opportunity to impact on the largest number of students within colleges.

It is possible that the networking could extend to English, too, impacting on even more students. That, combined with additional funding for all resit students in English and maths in the longer term, could really make a difference.

The only thing that could make it better is funding up-front for all now.

Catherine Sezen is senior policy manager at the Association of Colleges