Today Carol Vorderman’s review of maths for the Conservative Party is unveiled and I was invited to talk about it on BBC Radio Leeds (I’ll give a link when one appears, UPDATE: For one week from today see here from 1:18:15). The report is hard to find on the web so I was only going on the rumoured recommendations. [Update: it’s here. The report was actually mainly written by Roger Porkess rather than Carol Vorderman.] The main points are 1. Maths should be compulsory until the age of 18. 2. There should be a two types of GCSE. The first of these is not going to help the standing of maths with the general public, is it? Maths is not the most popular of subjects and forcing people to do this until 18 is not going to help. However, that is a rather small point. The real killer of this proposal can be summed up in the question “Where are we going to find the teachers?”. The country has an acute shortage of maths teachers already; enacting this proposal will only make it worse. It will force teachers to be spread more thinly leading to poorer learning. So I can’t see it going ahead, at least for a number of years. The secretary of state for education, Michael Gove, has said he would like the majority of students to be doing maths up to the age of 18. This may turn out to be like Tony Blair’s 50% of young people going to university, i.e., end up being “more of an aspiration”. [UPDATE: See section 9.3 of the report. This problem is not really dealt with in my opinion.] The second proposal, two types of GCSE, is something we have got already with the...