Rebranding maths as numeracy? It doesn’t add up

Name: Good question. Let’s go with “the discipline formerly known as maths”.

Age: About 2,500 years old.

Appearance: Loads of Xes and Ys and triangles and stuff.

Ah, finally we get to talk about the soaring beauty of Euclidean geometry and the pure intellectual satisfaction of algebra. Shhh, stop it. You’ll scare people.

So we’re not talking about maths? We are, but we’re not calling it maths. According to Andy Haldane, former head of the government levelling-up taskforce, mathematics sounds “academic and scary”.

What’s he suggesting instead? Numeracy. “Calling it mathematics … makes it sound quite conceptual,” he says. “Some people don’t get conceptual stuff.”

But it is conceptual! That’s why it’s exciting: maths is a beautiful and creative way to make sense of the universe. Pipe down, Pythagoras. For most of us, it’s bad memories of broken protractors and reducing fractions: stuff we never used after struggling through the GCSE. Haldane thinks we should be emphasising “real world” maths, not freaking people out with the square on the hypotenuse. We need to convey the message that numbers matter “because it’s important that we can live our lives in a financially sustainable way, making choices about money and savings, spending and pensions and jobs,” he says.

Pfft. He’s taking something thrilling and making it deathly dull. It’s all very well raving about Fermat and Lagrange, but not everyone can get excited about calculus. Four out of five adults have low functional mathematics skills, according to a 2014 report from National Numeracy, and nearly 17 million adults in the UK have numerical skills roughly equivalent to primary schoolchildren. We need to make maths more approachable to address that.

This all sounds like intellectual snowflakery to me. But “mathematics anxiety” is a real phenomenon: research at Cambridge University found that many children and adults experience “feelings of anxiety, apprehension, tension or discomfort when confronted by a maths problem”, even when they’re good at maths.

How can anyone be intimidated by pi? It’s so satisfying. No, you’re thinking of pie.

Ha ha. If we’re rebranding maths, should we call algebra “the one with the letters” and trigonometry “triangle studies”? Are quadratic equations “number Wordle”? Good thinking. Government social mobility commissioner Katharine Birbalsingh recently and controversially claimed girls don’t do physics because of the “hard maths” – maybe she would like us to tell them it involves “interesting numeracy” instead?

Do say: “My improved numeracy skills mean I really understand my household budget now!”

Don’t say: “With inflation nearing 10% and wages only up 4.2%, you don’t need to be Rachel Riley to work out that something doesn’t add up.”