This week saw the end of the government’s adult numeracy initiative “Multiply”, part of the landmark UK shared prosperity fund (UKSPF) that replaced European Union funding, and we mustn’t lose its transformative gains.
I’ve been privileged to the £550 million three-year programme, delivering Multiply for the Working Men’s College in Camden, North London over this exciting time.
Maths and ukuleles really is a ‘thing’ in Hawaii
We have reached out to large numbers of learners from all communities and backgrounds, and made a tangible impact on their lives by helping them conquer lifelong fears and anxieties around maths. Hearing a learner say, “I used to hate maths, but now I love it!” is one of the greatest rewards as a teacher.
Maths should be taught so that learners flourish and the mantra on the walls of our classrooms is ‘teaching mathematics should be an act of love, not an exercise of power’.
Necessity is the mother of invention
Because of the government’s rather stuttering rollout in 2022, many Multiply providers were still staring at blank sheets of paper at Christmas of that year, wondering how on earth they would deliver their year one targets. I can remember the bemused faces of colleagues as we ran some of the most imaginative and eclectic courses that will probably never see the light of day again:
- Ceramic glazes: mixing and precision measurement
- Textile jewellery with maths
- Geometry with Japanese Ainu textiles
- Maths for ukelele playing
(For the sceptical maths teaching purists out there, maths and ukeleles really is a “thing” in Hawaii!)
Many Multiply courses were centred around food – shopping, offers, portion sizes, diet, healthy eating, leftovers – providers even surfed the air fryer wave of 2023 as household bills went through the roof.
Social Prescribing – transfers from the health to education budgets?
I’m particularly proud of some high impact work we did, and want to continue, helping those with diabetes with their diet and with their maths. The world of someone with diabetes is non-stop mental maths; imagine overlaying this with maths difficulties; and then trying to do some of that mental maths as your blood sugar level is falling dangerously!
The UK’s diabetes problem (12 million adults) is massive, and the country’s adult numeracy problem is even bigger (22 million). Perhaps now’s the time for the Department of Health and Social Care to surprise DfE with a social subscribing budget helping diabetics improve their health through improved maths skills?
After all, diabetes costs the NHS £10.7 billion a year and that’s projected to rise to £18 billion within 10 years.
A drop in the ocean
The country’s adult numeracy problem has a massive impact: £25 billion a year in 2021, according to National Numeracy. That’s £75 billion over Multiply’s lifetime. Its cost represents less than 1 per cent of that.
Adult numeracy is going in the right direction. But cutting adult education spending now risks losing these gains and momentum that Multiply has given.
Maths education and social justice
I’ll end with a serious observation about maths teaching and social justice. There’s a wide consensus that the over-arching mathematical concept that has caused young adults (16-18) to not succeed in maths is proportional reasoning (fractions, ratio, scaling up/down, when to multiply, when to divide).
Three years of working with older adults has given me a different perspective – namely that for these learners the principal difficulty is with place value (just how big is that big number? how small is that small number?).
Our newsfeeds are littered with millions, billions and, increasingly now trillions. Understanding the size of these numbers is critical to people’s ability to have an informed opinion about society’s choices. Critical maths education finds its natural home in adult education, helping learners understand and debate a wide range of issues: environmental change and sustainability; income and wealth distributions and disparities; social exclusion, racial injustice and empowerment; mortality trends and imbalances.
Maths education is a social justice issue. Funding is essential.
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