Problems in Attracting Specialist Mathematics Teachers are Threatening the UK's Global Competitiveness - Lord Rees (March 9, 2006)

    Yesterday we reprinted a letter from the Jan Thomas, Executive officer of the Australian Mathematical Sciences Institute to The Australian noting the declining support for the teaching of maths at Australian universities.

On the same day Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society of London addressed a major UK conference on maths education -- the Advisory Committee on Mathematics Education conference.

The conference marks the second anniversary of Professor Adrian Smith's report Making Mathematics Count and brings together teachers and other leading figures in mathematics education in order to continue the report's momentum.

Professor Rees told the conference:

President Bush acknowledged the need to encourage more children in the United States to study science and mathematics in his State of the Union address in January, and he announced a drive to attract more scientists and mathematicians into teaching as part of a new initiative to improve his nation's competitiveness.

 

If the United States is worried about its competitiveness in these areas, particularly in the face of increasing numbers of highly trained scientists and engineers emerging from the expanding economies of countries like China and India, then we in the UK should be even more concerned.

We need to persuade more graduates who have studied mathematics beyond A-level to enter the teaching profession and continue to provide high quality lessons and courses.

The supply of highly qualified teachers of mathematics may become even more of a problem in the future when we consider the long-term drop in number of students who take mathematics after the age of 16.

It is encouraging that the number of entries for A-level mathematics in England, Scotland and Wales rose for the third successive year in 2005. However, the total of 58,830 entries last year was still 11.2 per cent lower than the total in 2001, and 21.5 per cent lower than in 1991.

 

While the number of home undergraduates embarking on mathematics courses has increased slightly over the last ten years or so, the decline in the popularity of the subject at A-level is still a cause for concern because mathematics underpins the teaching of so many other science and engineering disciplines at undergraduate level.

What is so damnable about the Australian federal government's lack of resourcing of the enabling sciences and the bullying of its academics is that while many of our OECD cohort have been coping with marginal economies, we had the resources to leap frog and move up in the pack. Instead a complacent and ideologically driven government has squandered a unique opportunity while its political opposition fibrillated and state governments shrugged -- not their problem.

No, it's not too late to turn matters around, but so far there is no indication that those with the means are inclined to do so.