Steve McCormack concedes teachers haven’t always succeeded in demonstrating how maths skills will be relevant to students after they leave education. Yet numeracy skills are needed more than ever when dealing with fast developing technology at work.

Go on, admit it! You’ve taken a peek at Channel 4’s Educating Yorkshire on Thursday nights. And whatever you think about the kids, the teachers, the school, or the girls’ hairdos, you can’t deny it’s engaging, thought-provoking television.

For me, one particular thought crystallised after the recent episode in which the saintly maths teacher Mr Steer sweated blood and tears to get his — er, I think the word is challenging — year 11s through their GCSE with a Grade C.

The thought in question was prompted by the girl who, in tones every maths teacher in the land has heard a million times, said: “I don’t need maths, sir, cos I’m going to do hairdressing at college.”

We all know that 16-year-olds who waltz off to college under the impression that they have left numbers behind will soon experience a rude awakening, when their hairdressing tutor starts talking about angles of cut, or precision-mixing amounts required for tints and dyes.

We should admit we haven’t been smart enough in shaping maths lessons.”

The same scenario is played out, of course, on college building and catering courses, perhaps too when students studying graphic design and hospitality get their first assignments back.

You can’t leave maths behind the morning after the year 11 prom.

But, if we’re honest, we can see where those Yorkshire year 11 girls were coming from.

We should admit we haven’t been smart enough in shaping maths lessons, and the qualifications they lead to, so the relevance to the world of work is obvious.

Part of the problem is people argue it’s a rare workplace where the boss greets you in the morning with a request to solve a couple of quadratic equations.

Our task, as advocates for maths-education, is to demonstrate the ubiquitous demand for the application of the generic, transferable skills learned in maths lessons.

To be really convincing, we have to go further than point out that bricklayers and chefs need to be good at measuring and most people in administrative roles need to be able work out percentages.

This is not a straightforward task, because in our 21st century industrial landscape, the application of mathematical reasoning is usually far from explicit.

However, a book published a few years ago — called Improving Mathematics at Work: The need for techno-mathematical literacies — by academics at the Institute of Education in London addressed this challenge. Drawing on extensive workplace-based research, the team identified a crucial attribute — which they called techno-mathematical literacy — the best and most effective employees exhibit.

This attribute manifests itself, for example, in the ability to interpret graphs and charts accurately, identify the key variables in any system, and see how they relate to each other.

People with techno-mathematical literacy don’t slavishly gaze at their lap-top screens and report that “computer says no”.

They think about the software underneath the bonnet and try to understand what it shows and its limitations. All of these skills can best be nurtured among students with a solid maths education, who have developed mental disciplines such as precision, estimation, experimentation, and the ability to present logical arguments, with one step flowing from another.

Maths is the only subject that pulls all these skills together, and, for the sake of future generations, we’ll continue to bang on about it.

Steve McCormack, communications manager for the National Centre for Excellence in the Training of Mathematics

Former House of Commons Education Select Committee specialist Ben Nicholls is head of policy and communications at London’s Newham College. He writes exclusively for FE Week every month.

The recent resignation of Annaliese Briggs from her Pimlico Primary headship has proven perfect material for dinner party-ranters everywhere.

Her appointment, at the age of 27 and with no formal teaching experience or qualifications, was described as “staggering” by local councillors.

And even since her departure, after just six months, a storm has continued to thunder around the story. After all, we wouldn’t trust command of a warship to someone without active service, nor would we permit an untrained surgeon to stitch us up post-op — and yet here we are entrusting our children to an amateur? It’s tempting to jump on the bandwagon.

Education Secretary Michael Gove has been much-maligned for allowing Free Schools to employ unqualified teachers, and is now working to get ex-soldiers and others into classrooms.

Many have taken this as a slur on teachers’ skill and experience, and this latest chapter will do nothing to silence the naysayers. After all, what system allows an unknown, unqualified chit of a girl to take over a new school, only to abandon it two terms in?

And yet, as the tabloid fury bubbles, I remember that I too am a manager in education, around Miss Briggs’ age, and with no relevant qualification.

Granted, my job isn’t as student-facing as that of a primary headteacher, but as a member of a college senior team, I have a say in matters of teaching policy, recruitment, student experience, and many other areas where I am thoroughly untrained. Nor, in FE, am I alone.

Over the last few years, further and higher education have seen an increase in the number of senior leaders without direct teaching experience. Vice-chancellors like Bill Rammell and Sir David Bell have a vast knowledge of education — in their cases, as minister and permanent secretary respectively — without having operated as academics.

There are principals from accountancy, private sector, and estates management backgrounds and, evidently, they are doing fantastic jobs running complex educational organisations.

Education needs all manner of backgrounds, aptitudes and talents to become a truly diverse sector.”

This is certainly the case with the management team I serve on, where only half have a teaching qualification.

To a great extent, this is about horses and courses. A college the size of ours requires a range of skills and experiences for it to run effectively — it would be as wasteful for our HR director to be an outstanding teacher as it might for an A-level teacher to be an HR professional. This is clearly different in a primary school where the majority of staff are teaching.

But it’s also an issue for policy-makers. My biggest concern about the Pimlico saga is that Miss Briggs felt she had no choice but to leave. Where was the support, the mentoring, the advice? Whatever Miss Briggs’ accomplishments — and she must have plenty, for no governing body appoints simply to muster headlines — teaching experience wasn’t something she had, and the structure around her would surely have known this. The plus-side of the Academy and Free School programme is increased autonomy, but this is also its biggest flaw — with the removal of so many local authority functions (and funds), available support mechanisms are vastly reduced.

Solutions abound — improving Ofsted, developing leadership qualifications, growing proper career pathways for teachers, for three — but the lesson cannot be that only trained teachers can run schools and colleges.

Education needs all manner of backgrounds, aptitudes and talents to become a truly diverse sector. For Miss Briggs even to apply for the role shows a commendable desire to work in this exciting field and if we’re serious about encouraging other bright, young people, then demonising her is wrong.

Let’s work, instead, to make schools and colleges as vibrant and vital as possible — places where anyone, students and staff, can play a role of sorts — and to find the right people for the right jobs, rather than be guided by old-fashioned ideas of who fits where.

Ben Nicholls is head of policy and communications at London’s Newham College.

Parity should be maintained between how GCSEs and functional skills are valued by the government, says Stella Turner

With the increasing focus on English and maths, the Association of Employment and Learning Providers’ (AELP) members are concerned the positioning of functional skills for English and maths in relation to GCSE should be very clear and transparent.

In some areas, functional skills are now being described as the “interim qualification” or “stepping stone” towards the achievement of GCSEs, which the government sees as the “gold standard”.

In our view there should continue to be parity between the two types of qualifications, with a level two functional skill recognised as equivalent level to GCSE grade A* – C. Functional skills are now well accepted by employers as important components of apprenticeship frameworks and as valuable standalone qualifications.

Employers are beginning to recognise that as well as developing vital skills in English and maths, functional skills can help young people apply skills to different contexts, solve problems, use their initiative and work independently.

At the moment, many learners who have been demotivated by not achieving maths and English GCSEs at grade C or above at school, become more engaged through undertaking functional skills in these subjects.

There are also serious concerns within the sector, particularly among work based learning providers, about the capacity to deliver GCSEs.

This is because these qualifications relate the skills and knowledge to their working and personal life.

GCSEs are, quite rightly, designed for schools, to be delivered over a two year period.

This sometimes makes them unsuitable for use on shorter programmes, roll-on-roll-off provision and for use with disengaged learners.

By comparison, functional skills are flexible qualifications with multiple assessment opportunities, which means they can be delivered in a way that meets the needs of individual learners and their employers.

There are also serious concerns within the sector, particularly among work based learning providers, about the capacity to deliver GCSEs.

We need to build the capacity within all providers to deliver high quality English and maths.

The new support programme for teachers of maths that is being delivered through the National Centre for Excellence in Teaching of Mathematics (NCETM) and bursaries to support those intending to teach English and maths in FE are to be welcomed.

But it is questionable whether these initiatives alone will be able to make up the massive shortfall in maths and English specialists required to deliver the English and maths components of apprenticeships, study programmes and traineeships.

There also needs to be significant investment in improving the teaching and learning of these essential subjects pre-16, in both primary and secondary schools.

In its 2013 policy manifesto, AELP argues an element of outcome related funding should be introduced into schools.

This will encourage schools to focus on ensuring all young people leave the secondary phase of their compulsory education with a solid foundation in English and maths that will underpin progression to further academic or vocational study.

In addition to investment, there also needs to be stability in literacy and numeracy, or as it is now referred to, the English and maths qualifications landscape which has undergone significant transformation in recent years.

Functional skills, which are in their infancy compared to GCSEs, must be allowed to become embedded and their true value in delivering the skills that employers need recognised.

The credibility of functional skills with employers is growing and we need to ensure we continue to embed high quality maths and English functionality in the wider programmes such as traineeships and apprenticeships.

Stella Turner, head of qualifications and delivery at the Association of Employment and Learning Providers

The government, schools, trade unions, parents and carers all need to work together in a new drive to improve numeracy and literacy skills, says Barry Brooks.

t is a pity that, given all the words that have been written about English and maths skills since the publication of the OECD Report on Adult Skills, the very people being spoken about or represented in the various graphs and tables will not have been able to read the text or understand the statistics.

It is also somewhat ironic that at a time when the government has set out a coherent, holistic set of policies to address these recognised weaknesses, these ambitions have been overshadowed by the report’s findings.

For me, as I am sure for many of you, the recent debate in the House of Commons on adult literacy and numeracy was one of those déjà vu moments we so often experience with education and skills policies.

This time I relived almost identical sessions triggered in 1999 by “A Fresh Start”, Lord Moser’s Report on improving adult literacy and numeracy.

The main difference this time was that the debate was happening against a backdrop of cross-party consensus.

We have all known for some time that there is a continuous stream of young people leaving the compulsory school sector at age 16 without capability and competence in English and maths.

The percentage has remained at or around 40 per cent for over a decade.

Much of the progress has slowed down, not least because funding available to raise the quality and qualifications of teachers for these subjects has all but disappeared.”

We are also aware the vast majority of these young people have not sought to continue their GCSE studies when they enter the education and skills sector and have avoided resits wherever possible.

We also know from the National Institute of Continuing Adult Education’s (Niace) reviews on adult literacy and numeracy that much of the progress has slowed down, not least because funding available to raise the quality and qualifications of teachers for these subjects has all but disappeared.

The evidence was reinforced by the 2011 Skills for Life Survey, which confirmed that while progress had been made at levels one and two in literacy, numeracy progress continued to lag behind and those with the lowest levels of skills showed little or no improvement.

For me, though, the most telling evidence will emerge when the report on the Distanced Travelled or Skills Gain Pilot is published later this year.

The pilot was designed to explore whether a shift away from focusing and funding performance, as measured by qualification success, could be replaced by a more scientific approach to measuring, recording and reporting on progress — hence skills gained and progress made.

What the evaluators found was how far many providers had moved away from the teaching and learning infrastructure developed and funded by the Skills for Life Strategy.

Centres participating in the pilot had developed their own unique approach to improving English and maths and as a consequence there was no consistent, coherent or universal approach to initial assessment, diagnostic assessment or individual learning plans.

In reality, the only remaining legacy of the strategy appeared to be a focus, wherever possible, on securing the qualifications.

The results in the OECD report appear to be most disappointing for the 16 to 24 age group and I fear the FE sector is going to take the brunt of the growing criticism.

At least in the House of Commons debate, Matthew Hancock had the courage and insight to address this directly, by suggesting schools have an important role in stemming the flow of young people leaving school without GCSE A* to C in English.

An enormous stock of young people has already passed through the school system and once again the sector is expected to address the disappointment and shortcomings of those who do not possess A* to C in English and maths.

Many of this year’s intake, unlike their predecessors, will also arrive in the autumn to find a GCSE re-take is a mandatory part of their study programme.

Providers and teachers in the sector will do everything they can to encourage young people to study these subjects, not because of a political imperative or a funding mechanism, but because these skills are essential.

There is there is still enormous disquiet about the government’s solution being the GCSE”

But they need support and employers and trade unions must take more responsibility for ensuring our young people have access to information that helps them better understand these skills are more than “nice-to-haves” — they are “must-haves”.

Parents and carers will always have a role in ensuring they encourage and enable young people to have a realistic understanding of the importance of learning, but without the learners’ belief and trust in what has been done, offered or said to them, nothing can or will change.

The sector supports the need to improve English and maths and wants to make it meaningful and motivational for our young people.

But there is there is still enormous disquiet about the government’s solution being the GCSE, especially a GCSE that we are told is about to become even more “demanding, rigorous and stretching”.

Within both DfE and BIS, there is recognition that not everyone can achieve a GCSE and that is why functional skills have been created and “stepping stone” qualifications have been approved.

There is also a commitment to developing programmes where English and maths are contextualised, as this makes the learning meaningful and relevant to young people.

I understand within DfE there is work planned to see how best to align the GCSE requirements with learner expectation and motivation.

These are challenging times for the sector, as we await the outcomes of the Review of Adult Vocational Qualifications, the Consultation on Apprenticeship Funding and the Implementation Plan for the Richard Review.

One thing is certain — English and maths will remain essential whatever policies are in place and the sector will, as always, rise to these challenges and remain relentless in its commitment to improving standards and increasing opportunities.

Barry Brooks, Strategic Adviser to the Tribal Board