Autumn budget, 2021. I was prising the cork out of a bottle of Lidl Cava and texting my mum to turn on her TV. Rishi was about to announce £559 million of funding for a side project I’d been working on.
We’d all laughed at the first attempt at official branding for Multiply that alternated ketchup-red and mustard-yellow lettering like a seven-year-old let loose with a bubble jet printer.
Then, laughter was replaced with slack-jawed disbelief when we’d finally scrolled further down the email to see that the then-chancellor’s reverence for maths was bringing half a billion pounds of new money to our national problem with adult numeracy.
There will be differing views of the merits and success of Multiply, but after indulging myself in that unusually exciting moment in the work of a civil servant, I returned to my day job on 16-19 policy. I let others get to work on dragging us up from among the lowest levels of adult numeracy in the OECD and reversing the decade-long decline we’d seen in take-up of adult maths.
I looked on with great interest though. £100 million of that money was earmarked for an online maths tuition platform.
I imagined one approach could have been building on the best of existing products’ industry-contextualised video lessons, low-stakes practice exercises and adaptive diagnostic assessments, quickly re-skinned for an older audience. Those elements could feed into the free entitlement to sessions with remote tutors which made up most of the hefty price tag.
In the back of my mind was how it could be used to supplement maths delivery to apprentices, mitigating one of the most common complaints from the sector.
And it wasn’t a huge leap from there to see it becoming a resource to support teachers of those continuing maths in their 16-19 study programmes; a sort of ‘Oak for resits’, eventually expanding to English too.
It won’t have escaped your attention that we don’t have a £100m online maths tuition platform. The project was shelved in 2023.
You will be forgiven for thinking this is a crap system
Perhaps two years and £100 million just wasn’t sufficient to set up a website. Admittedly, all I had to go on when I conceived it was the profitable X Files fan site I ran when I was fourteen years old.
Another big chunk of the Multiply millions was to fund research trials into effective approaches to adult maths. Three years later, those are just beginning.
The rest was devolved to local areas to experiment and innovate. It was hoped that the decline in participation could be reversed by offering more flexibility. FE rose to the challenge, teaching everywhere from buses to food banks.
But March 2025 brings the end of the three-year spending review period, meaning a funding cliff-edge. Right now, provision is winding down while local areas rush to spend the last of the cash.
You will be forgiven for thinking this is a crap system.
While I can poke fun at it taking years to set up a website, more complex projects such as local delivery require periods of procurement, implementation, staff recruitment, participant on-boarding and scaling up. Add six months of wind-down time to that and three years doesn’t seem too long after all.
Which is why my heart sank to see that our new chancellor, Rachel Reeves is set on running two-year spending reviews from now on. It guarantees continued inefficiency, ineffectiveness and chaos.
One solution, of course, would be to speed government departments the hell up.
Yes, I made myself laugh there too.
There is another option. Empower departments and local areas to offer five-, or even seven-year, contracts regardless of SR length. All you need is a three-month termination clause (which government contracts should have anyway) so that if priorities change, taxpayers’ money isn’t left committed.
That would shift the mindset of delivery to long-term, embedded quality, rather than this quick-buck, pop-up shop approach to government spending that we’re stuck in.
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