Voices: I dropped maths at A-level and I’ve got one thing to say to Rishi Sunak

In his first speech of 2023, Rishi Sunak is expected to set out plans to ensure all students continue to study maths up until the age of 18. In some ways, it might seem like a sensible idea – from Australia to the United States, Japan to France, students study maths until 18. But I can’t help thinking a one-size-fits-all approach isn’t right.

And for their part, Labour have criticised the idea. Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson said that Sunak should “show his working”, and highlighted the government’s lack of success in hitting their targets for new maths teachers.

At school, I was good at maths, but I never enjoyed it. I got an A at GCSE, but knew I wanted to go into writing; I couldn’t wait to drop maths and science. I don’t have the sort of brain for which these subjects come naturally. At A-level, I did English language, sociology, and economics instead. Even in economics, where some maths knowledge does come in useful, there was no need to know anything about vectors, or kinematics, or differentials.

Although the government have said they don’t expect to make the maths A-level compulsory, for someone like me who got a solid grade in GCSE maths, what would be the other logical next step? And would I have had to drop one of my other A-levels to do one I had no interest in, or take on four and make a stressful couple of years even more difficult?

It will have been eight years since I completed my GCSEs. As cliched as it might sound, I’ve seldom used maths. Or, at least, nothing I didn’t learn as a young teenager at the latest. I use maths to budget and manage my accounts, but if I was to have continued maths up to the age of 18, would I now find a use for anything I’d have learned in those two years?

What if someone is good at maths at GCSE level and is then essentially made to take it as an A-level, but struggles and loses out on a place at university because they didn’t get the four As they needed? However well-intentioned this plan might be, it risks setting some students up to fail.

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The period from 16 to 18 is difficult for everyone, whether you’re doing A-levels, an apprenticeship or something else. Towards the end of 2020, over a quarter (27 per cent) of those aged 13-19 said they felt “nervous, anxious or on edge” most or all of the time, while new NHS data shows a 39 per cent increase in mental health referrals for under-18s in a year – that’s over a million referrals. Why make life more stressful for an already vulnerable group that has just spent the last two or three years working tirelessly to get their GCSEs?

And maths isn’t for everyone. It’s understandable that we might want to encourage people to get a qualification, as a basic grasp is important, but once somebody has passed a GCSE in maths, they’ve proven that they have it.

Of course, if someone wants to continue studying maths, they should certainly be encouraged to do so, and nobody is disputing that. But not everybody wants to, and that should be OK too.

Sixteen-year-olds are a couple of years away from either university or full-time work, from being able to vote or to get a mortgage. Let them decide what they want to study – there’s no need to thrust another two years of maths on them if they don’t want it.