Abbot's Maths Problems are the Tip of the Iceberg

Diane Abbot’s car crash of an interview on LBC radio hit the headlines. Asked politely but firmly for the numbers and costings of Labour’s plans on the police, her answers varied wildly from sentence to sentence.

Of course, being charitable, it was always open to Labour’s Shadow Home Secretary to spend a few minutes actually bothering to read her brief before going on the programme.  But the whole Labour leadership give the impression of finding numbers difficult. 

They are by no means alone in their apparently low level grasp of even basic mathematics.  At the end of last year, the OECD released the detailed results of its global Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) tests.  PISA assesses the extent to which 15 year olds have acquired the skills which are essential in modern societies.

Over half a million students from 72 countries took the tests.  These are in reading, science and maths.  PISA does not just ascertain whether students can reproduce knowledge. It also examines how well students can extrapolate from what they have learned and can apply that knowledge in unfamiliar settings.

The tests divide the results into six levels.  At the top level 6, in the OECD’s words, students “are capable of advanced mathematical thinking and reasoning...they can apply this understanding to develop new approaches and strategies for attacking novel situations”.   The UK comes out almost exactly in line with the OECD average in terms of high performers, with 10.6 per cent of students achieving levels 5 or 6 in maths, compared to the average of 10.8 per cent across the 72 countries as a whole.

In contrast in mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore, more than 25 per cent of students had scores which put them in these top levels.

Perhaps even more worryingly, no less than 21.9 per cent of those taking the tests in the UK scored “below level 2”, as the OECD tactfully puts it.  In plain English, they were in level 1, the bottom set. 

In 2016 the Joseph Rowntree Foundation (JRF) carried out a major study on literacy, numeracy and ICT skills just within England.  Both their age groupings and their definitions of the ability levels differ somewhat from those of the PISA report, but the results are the same.  No less than 29 per cent of 16 to 18 year olds are at level 1 or below.  Below level 1, people are not able to understand price labels in shops. 

But there is even worse.  People over 55 have better literacy and numeracy skills than those under 25.  So what, you might say, my everyday experience shows me this very clearly.  But the JRF points out than in all other developed countries, the exact opposite is true.  Only here are the young less well educated than the old.

This whole body of evidence is a devastating indictment of the educational establishment and the teachers’ unions who enthusiastically support the likes of Dianne Abbott.  Time for a real shake up!