Maths: Contribution to the UK

Claire Young Excerpts

Thursday 5th June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Claire Young (Thornbury and Yate) (LD)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairship, Mr Vickers. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (Ian Sollom) for securing this debate. Like him, I have a deep affection for maths. In fact, I would probably go further and say that I am a maths nerd. And, like him, I believe that it still influences my thinking now, including here in Parliament. I love maths for its own sake. I was inspired as a child by watching shows such as Johnny Ball’s “Think of a Number”, I was only too happy to get a scientific calculator for my 11th birthday—I am not sure many 11-year-olds would be—and I went on to study maths at university, so I could not pass up the opportunity to contribute to this debate.

Having said that I love maths for its own sake, though, I want to make the case that mathematics does not just contribute to our country in the headline-grabbing ways highlighted by my hon. Friend, such as AI innovation, although those are obviously very important. I believe that having a mathematically literate population can contribute to our society in myriad smaller ways, too, by ensuring that we can all think critically about what we are told, and make better decisions about our own lives.

There is a somewhat old-fashioned idea that, as long as people can work out their change when shopping, that is all the maths they need. It is true that basic numeracy is important, even in a world where we are more likely to wave our cards at a machine than to pay with cash, and where, contrary to teachers’ expectations in the 1980s, most of us do carry calculators around with us. From working out how long it is until the train or bus, or measuring whether that flat-pack furniture will fit in our living rooms before we buy it, to scaling up a cake recipe, there are plenty of ways in which basic arithmetic matters, but I think the importance of mathematics to every one of us goes way beyond that.

In a world where we are bombarded with information and misinformation daily, mathematics is vital to the critical thinking that stops us getting scammed and helps us to make truly informed decisions on matters such as healthcare and our personal finances. I will illustrate that with an example from a few years ago, when the BBC reported:

“Teenagers whose parents smoke are four times more likely to take it up themselves, experts have warned.”

There was an absolute bombardment of people saying that that was rubbish because their parents smoked and they did not, but let us look at the figures. What the article said was that

“4.9% of teenagers whose parents smoke have taken it up too. By contrast, only 1.2% of teenagers whose parents do not smoke begin to do so.”

It was absolutely right to say “four times more likely” but, even with parents who smoke, the vast majority—more than 95%—will not go on to smoke themselves. Those misunderstandings reoccur across many examples of scientific and medical stories in our mainstream press.

If we do not understand numbers, how can we make truly informed decisions about medical treatment? Do we really understand what a one-in-a-thousand risk of a side effect is? What does it mean if a contraceptive is 95% effective? What does it mean, in absolute numbers, for a treatment to carry a 10% increased risk of a type of cancer if the original risk was extremely low, and how does that compare with the risks of not having the treatment?

I think it became evident during the pandemic that people—including some at the highest levels of Government, apparently—did not understand the concept of exponential growth. We heard from Lord Vallance in the covid inquiry that the Prime Minister at the time had been “bamboozled” by graphs. He apparently wrote in his diary:

“Watching the PM get his head round stats is awful. He finds relative and absolute risk almost impossible to understand.”

Most of us will not have to lead the country through a pandemic, thank goodness, but we do need to make decisions about our own lives.

When it comes to school education, I can understand the sentiment of those who wanted to extend maths, but doing another two years of what has already not been working does not make any sense. I would rather see a focus on rebalancing the curriculum to 16, and ensuring that we have specialist maths teachers to deliver that and inspire our young people today.

I often speak on the subject of special educational needs, so before I finish, I will briefly say something about dyscalculia. Schools in England have a responsibility to identify and support students with special educational needs arising from specific learning difficulties, and that includes dyscalculia. But there is no requirement for teachers to learn about it; it is poorly understood and awareness is very low among both professionals and parents. Given that maths is so important to our lives and that dyscalculia is about having difficulty with understanding number-based information, I make a plea that it should be taken more seriously.