Fighting to reverse Britain’s decline
THERE was a time when British governments of all political hues would relentlessly downplay the UK’s educational decline. No longer. Michael Gove, the secretary of state for education, was appropriately blunt yesterday in a speech to the Royal Society, in which he endorsed City A.M.’s appeal to raise money for maths teaching as part of our long-running campaign for financial literacy (see interview, p15).
Britain is now at an immense competitive disadvantage. Half of undergraduate degrees in China, Singapore and Japan are awarded in science and engineering– against just a third in the UK, EU and US. This matters immensely in today’s world: many of the best jobs – be it for technology firms such as Facebook or Google, or in finance in hedge funds or banks – are highly quantitative. The rise and rise of liberal arts degrees has gone hand in hand with the revenge of the nerds: if you are good at maths, you will also be good at making money. No educational system is perfect – some Asian systems favour too much rote learning and don’t do enough to develop critical faculties. But others are pretty excellent all-round, and they definitely grasp the need to focus more on mathematics. China has seen a more than tripling of its output of new science and engineering graduates – and astonishingly, this growth rate took place between just 1998 and 2006. Numbers in America and Britain stagnated during that time.
The depressing statistics just go on and on. Asia now awards a quarter of all engineering PhDs – almost as many as the EU and the USA put together. The number of journal articles published by Chinese researchers has almost quadrupled, against a rise of just three per cent in the UK. In the decade to 2009, China’s patent applications soared over 1,000 per cent, albeit from a low base; the number declined by a quarter in the UK as we turned our backs on innovation and success. Appallingly, our 15-year-olds are now over two years behind their Chinese equivalents when it comes to maths skills.
So what should be done? Gove wants more 16-18 year olds to continue studying maths, as part of a major shake-up of UK education to begin to reverse the UK’s relative decline. But the private sector and individuals must also do their bit. City A.M.’s appeal to the City is to raise funds for Mathematics in Education and Industry, a brilliant charity which operates the Further Maths Support Programme (see www.mei.org.uk).
It has to be said that the government’s sober realism when it comes to the quality of the UK’s school system is in stark contrast to the mass strikes we will see today. A large number of schools will be shut down by strikers protesting against necessary reforms to their pensions, which will remain more generous than those of most private sector workers even after the cuts. This action will rob children of a day’s education and disrupt many parents.
It will be a sad sight, made all the worse by the abject lack of any alternative, realistic and workable proposals from the UK’s more militant trade unions. Britain must face up to reality – and that means recognising that not only are our public finances in a terrible state but that the public sector is in need of reform and downsizing. Unless we get our act together, the UK will face decades of relative decline, gradual impoverishment and a slow descent into economic, cultural, scientific and educational irrelevance.
allister.heath@cityam.com
Follow me on Twitter: @allisterheath