Sunak is talking the talk, but not walking the walk

I read Roisin O’Connor’s column with interest and she is right: maths can work when it is correlated to a specific issue, as with her pub calculations. As someone who felt distinctly nauseous when viewing your maths quiz and suffered disturbed vision, with all those black-and-white questions with unequivocal answers and no blagging, I gave up at the first mathematical hurdle.

But O’Connor makes valid points; making maths more relevant to young people’s everyday lives as opposed to just giving them abstract calculations could help swing the balance. Maths is Rishi Sunak’s passion and good for him, but to come out with all these Pi R squares without the necessary expansion of maths teachers is somewhat nonsensical and doesn’t add up.

So yes, he is talking the talk but not walking the walk. How this can be achieved is yet another unsolvable equation, but it sounded good at the time!

Judith A Daniels

Norfolk

The prime minister’s stated aim of integrity appears to be partial. He grasps the fact that many adults and children in this country dislike maths (here I would argue that they are scared of maths, and that is the reason for the “anti-maths mindset”) but fails to understand that a long history of Tory government is responsible for instilling this mindset.

I worked in SEAC (Schools Examination and Assessment Council) when the National Curriculum was being devised, and still remember the chaos that ensued when the then education secretary, Kenneth Clarke, casually said on a radio interview that the Statutory Assessment Tasks (which were in the process of development) would be simple “pencil and paper tests”.

We had a later Tory government shut down SureStart Centres, where preschool children and their families received essential support at a critical time. We had the sneaky change from Level 4 at KS2 SATs being the “average” grade to being the “expected” grade – a clear example of the lack of mathematical understanding by those in power who were responsible.

We had the mind-blowing idiocy of reversing the phasing-out of the imperial system of measurement, condemning all children to learn an archaic system which is inevitably dwindling into misuse anyway. And more recently we had Michael Gove’s decree, when he was education secretary, that the way to raise standards in schools was to insist on much more rote learning and regurgitation of facts and formulae.

Then, of course, we had five education secretaries in a very short space of time – most people can’t even remember their names, but I do recall there was one in post for not more than one full day.

As a teacher who has covered a fair number of maths lessons, I’ve seen that negative attitudes to maths develop at a very young age. The primary maths curriculum should be reduced to concentrate on the four arithmetical operations of addition/subtraction/multiplication/division until ALL pupils are fully conversant with them. No child is capable of understanding more complex maths without a solid grounding in these. There’s no point in intervention at 16-18 if the system has already failed by the age of 10.

Finally, learning a musical instrument is one of the best ways of improving both maths and language skills – and behaviour – which scientific research has proven. That was the reason behind the Labour government’s introduction of free music tuition into all primary schools. Unsurprisingly, the Tories prefer this to be restricted to the wealthy. Levelling up will never happen while they are in power.

Katharine Powell

Neston

Your recent editorial calls for an independent review into the future of the railways. I have conducted such a review. It was published by the government in 2021 and re-endorsed by the current secretary of state for transport just two months ago.

It found that the railways have lost sight of their customers (both passengers and freight), that they lack strategic direction and they struggle to innovate and adapt. The root cause is fragmentation and diffused accountability in a sector that requires joined-up thinking across track and train, stations, and staff. The pandemic has only served to magnify these weaknesses.

My review proposed a single, accountable leadership responsible for running services reliably, keeping people safe, and making fares simpler to understand and buy. Rail should play a big part in the nation’s green transport future but yet another review is the last thing that’s needed. The government must get on with the legislation necessary to implement the last one.

Keith Williams

The chairman of the Great British Railways transition team

Vladimir Putin, the chronically neurotic war-monger, is obviously running scared of his own people. Not content with killing innocent Ukrainians, he is gaoling his own populace – a double whammy.

His latest evil deed was to gaol Vladimir Kara-Murza, a dissenter and perpetual thorn in the side of Putin, for 25 years. Kara-Murza’s “crime” was to disagree with Putin and criticise the illegal war being waged against the Ukrainians.

The Russian leader has clearly lost command of the country and the war in Ukraine, relying on mercenaries, foreign nationals, criminals and Russian youngsters attempting to take over the country.

Russia appears to be run for the benefit of Putin and those Putin favours. He is able to manipulate his government and the judiciary in order to get his own way. Many people have and are suffering as a result of his neurosis, and dangerously warped ideas regarding freedom of speech.

I am sure that his Russian detractors are many but silent, to avoid the same fate as Kara-Murza or worse. Suppressing freedom of speech is the key component that all illegal and autocratic regimes, such as Putin’s, use to keep control of the country. I am surprised that the downtrodden people of Russia have not stirred against his ruthless excesses over the past 20 years.

Keith Poole

Basingstoke

I almost feel sorry for Humza Yousaf – almost, but not quite. It seems, at last, to have dawned on him that he is the fall guy for the Sturgeon-Murrell failures, and that is not a pleasant place to be.

It looks to me as though he now realises that, while backing (even pushing) him as their choice of SNP leader, they didn’t – by his own account – vouchsafe to him the various problems that they were bequeathing to him.

It would also appear that he had no knowledge of the difficulties with the party’s finances, nor of the mysterious camper van. Nor did he apparently know about the fall in the party’s membership, nor yet that the party’s auditors had quit as long ago as September 2022.

When all seemed to be going his way, with Scottish ministers, MSPs and MPs backing his candidacy, did he never once ask himself “What’s the catch?”

Did it not puzzle him that there was so little competition for the post of leader? That Sturgeon’s deputy, Keith Brown, refused to stand? That Angus Robertson held back when his frequent travels gave the lie to his pleading of family responsibilities? Did he not ask himself why Kate Forbes radiated delighted relief when he defeated her?

Politics can be a mug’s game. Yousaf’s demeanour suggests that he is not best pleased to have found that out the hard way.

Jill Stephenson

Edinburgh