Maths: Contribution to the UK

Debate between Neil O'Brien and Chris Vince

Thursday 5th June 2025 Westminster Hall

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire (Ian Sollom) on securing this important debate. We have had some fantastic speeches, and any debate in which Johnny Ball gets a shout-out is a good debate in my view.

Our profession, politics, is awash with mathematical metaphors. Lyndon Johnson famously said that the first rule of democracy is that you have to be able to count. In Westminster, the Treasury is always insisting on making the numbers add up. Lots of junior Ministers who interact with the Treasury and try to get money out of it discover that they get the square root of naff all from those discussions. Occasionally, when I listen to hon. Members who are less concise—they are not in this debate—trouting on in the main Chamber, I am reminded of the space-filling Hilbert curve, which is repetitious and capable of filling an infinite amount of space if left unchecked.

One of my greatest beliefs is in the non-linear nature of innovation. As hon. Members have already alluded to, mathematics is a brilliant example of that. It was never obvious, when the obscure philosophers who became logicians were faffing around with strange upside down a’s and backwards e’s, that they would lay the foundations for the computation that defines our world today.

I read in Quanta magazine that in the ’60s we discovered something that seemed perfectly useless: Penrose tiling—infinitely non-repeating patterns, which are very pretty and obviously totally useless, right? No: they are now used in quantum encryption. We have found a use for that seemingly useless thing.

The same is true of one of the UK’s greatest industrial successes: Arm, which does obscure-seeming work on reduced instruction set computing. What use is that? Why would anyone need a really tiny thing that does not use much power? But we all have mobile phones, and the intellectual property from that bit of Britain’s industrial policy is now in everyone’s pocket, all over the world. Mathematics is hugely important. I completely agree with all hon. Members who have said that.

I have been goaded by the brilliant speech of the hon. Member for Harlow (Chris Vince), who said that I would talk about the last Government, and of course I will. It would be inappropriate not to add some numbers to a debate on maths, so what happened to mathematics under the last Government? Let us look at some international comparisons.

In the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study—TIMSS—between 2011 and 2023, England went from 10th in the world to sixth in the world for maths, and from ninth to fifth for science. That is remarkable progress that puts us top in the western world. We are not quite at the level of the Asian people who dominate the table, but we are the best in the west.

I cannot tell hon. Members how Scotland and Wales are doing on that metric because their Governments chose to withdraw from those competitions as they did not like the scrutiny. However, I can give a comparison by stating where those devolved Governments are in the results of the Programme for International Student Assessment. Between 2009 and 2022, England went from 21st to seventh in the world for maths in PISA results, and from 11th to ninth for science. Whereas Wales —where a lot of the reforms that we had in England were avoided for ideological reasons—went from 29th to 27th for maths, and slumped from 21st to 29th for science.

That is part of a wider picture. I encourage everyone to read the brilliant report “Major challenges for education in Wales” by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, which points out that the average deprived child in England is now doing as well or better than the average child in Wales. The gap is so big, and the deprivation progress has been so great in England, that the deprived child in England is now in a better position than the average child in Wales. That is an incredible situation.

Looking at the improvement in school attainment by IDACI—income deprivation affecting children index—decile, we see improvement across the income distribution under the last Government, but the biggest improvement in England was in the bottom half of the income distribution. That is true for maths throughout the educational life cycle. Today, 90,000 more children at key stage 2—the end of junior school—meet the expected standard in reading, writing and maths than in 2015-16.

That progress was driven by a number of measures, including our putting in 27,000 extra teachers over our time in government. Over the last Parliament, we increased real-terms per pupil funding by 11%. We brought in things such as maths schools and maths hubs, lots more low-stakes testing—my daughter is about to do the year 4 times tables test—and the key stage 2 tests. All those things, by the way, are still opposed by some people in the trade unions even though the evidence for the effectiveness of low-stakes testing, for example, is so strong. The National Education Union still opposes all forms of testing in primary school—a crazy position that we were right to reject in England.

There has been real progress as a result of those reforms. Although everything in England is far from perfect—there is loads of room for progress and lots of problems to fix—we can see what the alternative is. Where those reforms were not made for ideological reasons because the unions said no to academisation, school choice and school accountability, things got worse. The people who suffered from that ideology were not the rich and those who could afford to go private, but the poorest.

Some of the things being done now in schools are a mistake, such as hammering the budget for the advanced mathematics support programme. As has already been touched on in this debate, and as quite a lot of the people who care most about maths have pointed out, that is a big mistake. Jens Marklof, president of the London Mathematical Society, said that it will harm the chances of children from poorer areas. He said:

“There’s no AI without maths and if the government is really serious about its AI strategy they have to significantly scale up the support for maths education at all levels…The big success of AMSP was to enable kids who went to schools that didn’t offer further maths to give them this opportunity”.

Likewise, Adrian Smith, the Royal Society president, said it is

“spectacularly short-sighted to pull funding from programmes designed to support teachers and schools to deliver better maths provision.”

He also said:

“Our maths education is not up to scratch—too many young people are leaving school without the skills they need for life or the well-paid jobs that will drive economic growth”.

Dan Abramson, the chief executive of U-Maths, the umbrella organisation for university maths schools in England, and a professor of maths at King’s College London, said:

“For the UK to be at the forefront of AI and the data-driven modern economy, we need excellent mathematicians from all backgrounds, and we need more of them—that means more investment, not less”.

We set up the advanced mathematics support programme in 2018 to provide extra maths help to schools, and the Government have now cut it. I think that it is a mistake and I hope that they will look at it again. Unfortunately, that is part of a pattern. The Government have cut support not just for maths, but for physics, computing, Latin, cadets and behaviour hubs. A lot of the things that were doing a lot of good, including for maths, have been axed even though they are very small in the grand scheme of the Department for Education’s £100 billion budget. I hope that the Government will rethink those cuts.

The hon. Member for St Neots and Mid Cambridgeshire also wanted to talk about the higher education part of the piece. It is very striking that although 50% more people are now doing A-level maths—a great success—and the number of people doing double or triple science at GCSE has more or less doubled, which is great progress, that has not always translated into increases in the number of people doing maths at university. In fact, while there has been about a 20% increase in the total numbers entering HE courses at university since 2018-19, the number going into maths, while marginally up, is broadly flat.

Why is the improvement we are seeing in schools not leading to larger numbers doing maths at university? I am afraid that goes to the heart of the issues with our higher education system more broadly. I understand the logic of why tuition fees were brought in and I accept up to a point the idea of a market in higher education, but it seems to us that that market has gone too far. It is really a pseudo-market, because we rely entirely on young people aged 16 and 17 to drive the allocation of resources into our enormous higher education system.

The gradual move from teaching, or T, grants to a highly fees-based system gives Ministers far less control than they previously had. The Government’s decision last week to further reduce high-cost subject grants—T grants, as they used to be called—by a further 10% in real terms is a mistake in its own right because it hits the subjects such as engineering and science that we need for the future, and gives Ministers less control over what is going on in higher education.

The incentives set up by the pseudo-market in education have led to a great growth in courses that are cheap to provide but do not necessarily give great value to either the student or the taxpayer. We know from the leading work of the Institute for Fiscal Studies that, when we look at the combined perspective of the taxpayer and the student themselves, higher education is not worth it, at least from an economic point of view, for around 30% of those who go into it at the moment,.

Since the work that the IFS did, which is based on those who graduated during the mid-noughties, we have seen the graduate premium decline even further. The marginal students who we have been adding have even lower earnings, so those figures could easily be worse if we were to rerun that analysis now. That needs to be addressed.

There is absolutely sometimes a case for higher education to be simply beautiful—to do theology, art or whatever—and for it not to be of economic value, but we should be clear about when we choose to subsidise that. We should also be clear that things that are highly economically useful, such as mathematics and science, also have intrinsic value. They are also beautiful and there is an intrinsic value to studying them—that is not just the case for some of those things, particularly the creative arts, where we see the great concentration of those who end up with very low earnings and negative returns from an economic point of view.

We need to rethink. We need not just to patch up and mend the existing system, but to fundamentally rethink the incentives that it has set up. We should give ourselves the ability to make sure that we are investing in and driving up the growth of subjects such as mathematics, which are so critical to our future economy and security as a country. I will not go further into it than that, but the issues facing mathematics are, in a sense, part of the wider issues facing higher education. I hope that the Government will move from a patching up and mending attitude to a reformist and overhauling one.

The one thing I want discourage Ministers from doing is something that I am worried will come out of the Government’s curriculum and assessment review. Although I have lots of respect for Becky Francis, who is leading the review, one of the things that Ministers have been very keen to do is say that we need to have lots more time for arts subjects—for fun subjects such as music, drama and dance. That is fine in a sense, but Ministers have to be super clear about how they will find that time, and whether they are going to find it by funding some extra hours in the school day or something, because otherwise it inescapably means less time on other things. One of the good things that has happened, and one of the reasons standards have gone up, is that schools now spend about 13% more time teaching maths than they used to in 2010, so more time is going into this critical subject than was before. If we say that we want to have more time for something else, let us be honest about the trade-offs and what we are going to not do and let us also be honest about the consequences of that.

[Chris Vince]

This does not have to be a political point, but to answer the question that the hon. Gentleman just posed about where schools find the time: my argument is that maths does not need to be taught in a silo. Many subjects—even creative subjects such as art and music, and certainly design and technology—would include an aspect of maths. For many young people, being able to apply maths in those particular subjects would actually be really useful. Would the hon. Gentleman concede that point at least?

[Neil O'Brien]

I am happy to agree that we can bring maths into many other things, and that is also a fun way of teaching maths. In return, I put back to the hon. Gentleman that there are limits to that. If we want to have more time for something else, we have to say where it is coming from. The improvement in those international league table rankings that I mentioned has not come about as a result of some sort of magic. It has come about by us spending more time on that, putting more resources into it and making it a priority. Unfortunately, not everything can be a priority. If everything is a priority, then nothing is. The last Government chose to prioritise maths and STEM. I think it was the right decision. One can argue that we should go for a different course, but if we are going to do that, people should be explicit about it and honest about what they are actually going to do.

Let me not turn into the thing that I have already criticised—the space-filling Hilbert curve—and take up endless time in this debate. It has been a hugely important debate with brilliant speeches from lots of Members from across the House. I hope that the Ministers will act on some of the brilliant suggestions that have been made, and that we can further improve math education in this country.

Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill

Debate between Neil O'Brien and Chris Vince

Monday 17th March 2025 Commons Chamber

[Neil O’Brien (Harborough, Oadby and Wigston) (Con)]

I want to concentrate today on our new clause 36, which would ban phones from our schools. The new clause would also write into law some of the content of the very good private Member’s Bill drafted by the hon. Member for Whitehaven and Workington (Josh MacAlister), because this does not need to be a party political issue.

When I was on the Science and Technology Committee back in 2018, I got us to do a report on screen time, social media and children’s mental health. Back then, the evidence was already very concerning, but by now every alarm bell should be ringing. Over the last decade, there has been an explosion in mental health problems among young people all over the world, over the exact same period that smartphones and social media have become dominant in children’s lives. The growth in mental health problems is focused almost entirely on young people, not older people. Children now get smartphones at a very early age. As the Education Committee pointed out in a good report last year, one in five of the UK’s three and four-year-olds now has their own smartphone. By the end of primary school, four out of five kids have a smartphone.

There are many different ways in which smartphones and social media cause problems for children. They displace time in the real world with friends. US data, for example, shows that prior to 2012 children spent over two hours a day with friends, but that had halved by 2019. The proportion of children feeling lonely and isolated at school has exploded all over the developed world. But smartphones are not just a time sink; there is also the lack of sleep. Children are tired in school, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder has increased massively and concentration is impaired. This is a feature, not a bug. Apps are designed to be addictive and drip feed users dopamine.

At a recent school meeting that I organised in my constituency, I heard from local doctors about how excessive screen time is damaging eyesight and giving young kids the kind of back problems that one might expect from someone in late middle age. Eight out of 10 children are exposed to violent porn before the age of 18, many at a really young age. The average age at which kids see porn is now 13. The shift to a smartphone-based childhood is also leading children to be exposed to graphic violence, sextortion and self-harm encouragement, and is doing terrible things to girls’ self-image. According to the Office for National Statistics, one in five children aged 10 to 15 says they have been bullied online, and 72% of that is happening during school time.

As well as being bad in their own right, these negative effects come together to damage education. Although a ban of phones in schools cannot fix everything, it is a vital first step and can make a big difference in itself. I spoke to one headteacher who said that when they went from a policy of phones not being out to a full, “start of the day to end of the day” ban, with phones being handed in, the number of detentions they had to hand out fell by 40%, and teacher recruitment and retention improved, too.

[Chris Vince]

I thank the shadow Minister for giving way; he should take this as a constructive intervention. As a former teacher, I know some of the challenges of mobile phones—the Under-Secretary of State for Education, my hon. Friend the Member for Lewisham East (Janet Daby), will remember when hers went off during my speech in a debate on financial education. Will the shadow Minister also consider those groups who may require a mobile phone—I have perhaps given him a hint as to what I was going to mention—in particular young carers, who obviously need contact with family and those cared for?

[Neil O’Brien]

The hon. Member has brilliantly anticipated a point I was going to make, and if he looks at the text of the amendment he will see it is carefully drafted exactly to allow carve-outs for those who need them, for example as health devices, so I hope he is reassured on that point.

Attempts by the tech industry to lobby, to muddy the water, to run interference and to sow confusion are unconvincing. The problems hitting our children all over the world are not just a coincidence; there is more and more evidence for a causal link. For example, Sapien Labs asked questions about adults’ mental health and combined them into a mental health quotient score. They asked the same people when they first got a smartphone and the results were stark: the earlier someone gets a phone, the worse their mental health, particularly for girls. As with smoking, a powerful social gradient is also developing with smartphones and social media. That is going to widen gaps in school achievement unless something decisive is done.

Sadly, many people still do not know about the risks from smartphones but a growing number of parents do know and are worried about the problems with smartphones and social media, but we face a collective action problem: we worry that our kids will miss out if they are the only ones without them, and that is the problem that needs solving and Government need to be part of that. Across this country there has been an explosion of parent-powered campaign groups aiming to fight back including Smartphone Free Childhood, Safe Screens, Delay Smartphones and the new “Rage Against the Screen” campaign. Over the last year they have gained hundreds of thousands of members and together with the shadow Secretary of State and the Leader of the Opposition we met some of them this morning and I pay tribute to them for their work.