What does a decline in maths really add up to?

With single honours maths degrees being axed for lack of applicants, are we beginning to witness the slow death of a core subject? Lucy Hodges looks at the crisis and what can be done about it

Published: 07 March 2002

The proposed closure of maths at Essex University has set alarm bells ringing around the country. Essex may be a campus that conjures up images of Sixties demos and brutal concrete, but it is highly regarded for the quality of its research and teaching. If Essex has to shut down maths, how many more universities will follow?

"There is a very real threat of other places closing," says Tony Gardiner, reader in maths at Birmingham University. "This decision sets a precedent. It is a crack in the dyke. Essex is just the start."

Maths professors are shaking their heads in horror. The fear is that maths will start to go the way of physics and be phased out of the universities in which it is haemorrhaging students. Physics and chemistry have already been excised by Essex because they were attracting so few applicants.

According to Charles Goldie, professor of maths at Sussex University and chairman of the Heads of Departments of Mathematical Sciences, the Essex decision is "exceedingly regrettable". He adds: "Although Essex intends to continue to keep maths alive for the other sciences, whether that will actually work – whether people are going to want to be at a university that has closed down its maths department – is another matter."

For Professor Saunders of King's College London and chairman of the schools education committee of the London Mathematical Society, the move is worse than regrettable. "Maths is a sufficiently important subject that not to have a department of maths puts you in a very weak position," he says. "It is one of the core subjects. The real disadvantage is that it probably means that they're not going to be able to provide much in the way of maths in their other courses."

Everyone agrees that maths is in crisis, both at school and university level, with fewer and fewer young people opting to study it. This year the number of students applying for maths at university slumped by 12 per cent, compared with a rise of almost 4 per cent across all other subjects.

The reasons are thought to be many and various – the dearth of qualified maths teachers, today's airhead culture, the notion that maths is hard and boring, and, crucially, the disastrous performance of 17-year-olds in A/S-level maths in the summer of 2001. Almost one third of candidates failed the new exam introduced last year as part of a reform of the sixth-form curriculum.

"It was a catastrophe," says Essex's vice-chancellor, Professor Ivor Crewe. "It has deterred people from doing maths at A-level." That, in turn, means that fewer upper-sixth- formers are applying to study the subject at university.

The Qualifications and Curriculum Authority is currently engaged in a review of A/S-level maths. The problem is thought to lie with the fact that 17-year-olds have to study three tough modules in the first year of the new exam. That is considered too much for them. Before the reform they did two modules in the lower sixth and four in the upper sixth, which eased them more comfortably into the rigours of mechanics, statistics and pure maths.

The experts say that one solution is to keep the three modules in the first year, but to make them easier and have students take three harder modules in the second year of the sixth form. "We hope that will happen," says Professor Saunders. The problem is that change cannot come into force until October 2003 at the earliest, which could spell more bad news for the universities in application figures.

Maths department closures are not new. According to a recent report conducted for the Heads of Departments of Mathematical Sciences, they have been closing or merging – mainly in the new universities, the former polytechnics – for some time. In some, they have now become little more than service departments. This is partly a result of the decline in applications.

But the latest university to merge its maths department with another, Nottingham Trent, where maths combined with computing last autumn, says that application numbers had nothing to do with it. The reason was that the subjects were put together on to the same site, so it made sense to marry them up. The same rationale was given for the merger of Bangor's maths department with engineering, to form informatics. The two were related to one another, so a merger made sense.

All the university experts are convinced that the problem lies in the schools. So does the solution. By the time people get to university, it's too late. Professor Alan Smithers of Liverpool University attributes it to "the negative feedback loop". This describes what is happening in maths – few undergraduates apply for the subject, therefore few graduate, therefore the pool from which to recruit maths teachers is small, therefore there are few qualified teachers, therefore pupils have unhappy experiences.

"It's a loop that has to be broken," says Professor Smithers.

Many state schools have got rid of further maths, a subject that the medical schools decided they no longer needed for doctors' training. That has not helped, either.

The irony is students may not want to study maths, but their job prospects are vastly enhanced if they do a maths degree, points out Professor Chris Robson of Leeds University.

No one agrees on what should be done. Professor Smithers believes that the Government needs to take action. "I think the Government and interested bodies, such as the research councils, have to look for any levers they can pull to make a difference," he says. One thing they could do is to introduce scholarships for students who take subjects such as maths and physics, so that they pay no tuition fees.

According to Professor Goldie, the Government is well aware of the situation. What is needed is a better understanding of what needs to be done, otherwise politicians could rush in and make things worse, he says. "No one knows the answer to the problem of how to make maths attractive to young people. I reject the argument that maths is a hard subject. For those who can do it, it's easy. The aptitude is there, it's just not being tapped, and young people are not being excited by the subject."

Another irony is that this is happening despite Curriculum 2000, which was supposed to see sixth-formers broadening their subject mix and combining languages with maths or sciences with humanities. As it is, the British study very little maths after the age of 16 compared with students in Europe or the US. Any good US university makes students take freshman maths in the first year.

"The result is that people in the USA who have taken social science or biology know a little maths," says Professor Saunders. "Whereas in Britain, it's quite possible to do a PhD in biology not having done any maths beyond GCSE."

The Government should make maths compulsory for 16- to 19-year-olds, he believes. But that doesn't mean that the course content would be the same for everyone; it would be tailored to each individual's needs and abilities. That, combined with a properly structured curriculum and a Baccalaureate-type certificate, would transform the position of maths.

l.hodges@independent.co.uk