Often, when physics academics like me meet up with each other, we moan about how little maths our incoming students can do. Certainly here at Surrey we are finding it difficult to convince some students with weak maths and little confidence in their maths ability to work hard at it, and to ask for help. Their lack of confidence can make some of them reluctant to put up their hand and ask for help in tutorials. Without this help they struggle.

Clearly there are problems in maths education in schools. Many have noted this and recently a report has been published. This was commissioned by the Conservatives when they were in opposition. It was written by a panel chaired by Carol Vorderman and the report has received some publicity.

I am working my way throught the report, it is full of rather scary statistics. Half of all children fail to get a get a GCSE grade C or above in maths, at age 16, and of those children who don’t meet a target at 11, 90% fail to go on and get this grade C.

I have to say that I am finding myself nodding in agreement to a lot of it. There is a schematic on page 11 that I think summarises quite well the situation we are in. Also one of the findings is that the students are often poorly prepared for the maths part of their university education. This is true and it is not just applicable to physics, but also maths of course, as well as engineering subjects, economics and other social sciences.

There is an interesting blog post by Stephen Curry who works life sciences at Imperial College, about the possibility of requiring A level maths for biology degrees. At the moment all physics degrees (that I know of), a handful of chemistry degrees, and no biology degrees (that I know of) require maths to A-level standard. As science advances, biology (or at least large parts of biology) is becoming more quantitative but I am not sure how many people outside biology appreciate this. I would guess that this is not obvious from A level biology. A-level physics has virtually no maths (unlike university physics), I can’t imagine A-level biology has more.

Anyway, it is one thing to criticise, but it is much harder to improve matters. I hope that resources are put into this problem, to help teachers teach maths better, and to attract more people into maths teaching. Without that, I don’t think things will improve and that will be a crying shame. A decent maths ability is a fantastically useful thing to have, it can change your life.