Let adult maths tuition work from home, says Sunak

Adults are being turned away from online maths courses because of the way devolved adult skills budgets are administered, former prime minister Rishi Sunak has claimed.

Giving evidence to the House of Lords numeracy for life committee today, Sunak said funding rules were creating “policy anomalies” that prevented online provision reaching learners who wanted the flexibility to study remotely.

His charity, The Richmond Project, said online providers had told it they were “turning away applicants in their thousands” because they could not access funding for learners in areas where adult skills funding is devolved.

Sunak said the charity had identified online training as the most cost-effective way of helping adults improve their maths skills later in life because it allows teaching to be standardised while giving learners the flexibility to study around work and family commitments.

But, he argued, funding arrangements in areas with devolved adult skills funds often require learners to study with providers based within their locality and in person.

He told the committee: “The local authority likely is going to say you have to do it [a maths course] at a provider that is in our area, it has to be delivered in person.

“So then you have this brilliant online provider that could do these nationally, very high-quality standardised curriculum, adults prefer to do this online because it’s flexible, but there are these funding and policy things that stop this from happening.”

Lizzie Gaisman, chief executive of The Richmond Project, said the organisation considered this “a crucial missed opportunity”.

The adult skills fund is worth £1.4 billion annually and pays for skills, employability and wellbeing courses for more than one million adults. About 68 per cent of the fund is devolved to 13 authorities, which implement their own funding rules.

‘Multiply programme was additive’

Sunak was also asked about Multiply, the £270 million adult numeracy programme introduced in 2022 while he was chancellor.

The programme offered free, flexible courses to adults aged 19 and older who did not already hold GCSE maths at grade 4/C or above before it was scrapped by the government in March last year.

An evaluation of the programme, published by the Department for Education in May, found it had engaged 210,000 learners – many new to adult education – and helped most to overcome “anxiety about numeracy”.

Researchers estimated 85 per cent of participation would not have happened without Multiply.

However, Multiply’s focus on unaccredited learning – considered important for offering a “low-pressure and unintimidating route into learning” – meant the evaluation was unable to assess the extent to which the programme improved numeracy skills.

Evaluators also found many employers were reluctant to release staff for Multiply training, “especially for non-accredited courses”, and struggled to see the direct business benefit.

Sunak told the committee he had not been “involved in the intimate detail” of delivering Multiply but was “encouraged” by the evaluation’s findings.

“It did seem to do a very good job of widening and broadening participation in adult numeracy programmes,” he said.

“In that sense it was hugely additive, and that’s something you want to make sure, that policy is additive rather than duplicative.”

But he admitted the programme needed a more coordinated national effort to raise awareness of the importance of adult numeracy.

“There should have been greater national visibility and awareness of the programme,” he said.

Sunak added that he would be open to a future iteration of Multiply in which learners gain an accredited qualification.

“There is this open question as to whether there should be some type of accreditation, and giving people something that they can walk away with, which also would mean the programme itself could be measured. There is a strong case for that.”