It's not so much poverty as a direct cause, but rather a culture which acts across all levels of society which is secondary to widespread poverty and what was in the past a basic economic reality of the need for a very large industrial and manual workforce. That cultural assumption (that a large percentage of the population can only ever do that kind of work) is now wrong, because of automation and globalization, but it has its own momentum, and an inertia which gives it a continued reality for someone living in amongst it and trying to make their way.

It is multi-factoral for sure, but there is also a culture of being fine with saying "I can't do maths", and having people responding with "Yeah, I cannot do maths at all".

The exams I took had trig & literary analysis, but, then the lowest possible grade I could get was a C. The bottom set could get a D or C if they got pretty much everything in the exam right, and being sat next to someone taking those exams, I can assure you there is no trigonometry or analysis of passages in there.

http://filestore.aqa.org.uk/subjects/AQA-43651F-QP-NOV13.PDF

There is still some geometry which I think is a bit futile (questions 12 and 13, particularly memorizing the terminology about 'alternating angles' and so on), and perhaps a bit too much emphasis on specific ways of representing data (the pictogram and the stem and leaf chart).

But in general the emphasis on calculating costs, amounts, sizes, areas, percentages etc is, as you say, about functional numeracy.

Let's be clear, most jobs don't require "academic excellence" they require abilities pertinent to the job. Primarily a first degree demonstrates intellectual capacity, motivation, and focus. Some positions require a particular academic attainment but it's a first-pass filter for demonstrating one has the capability to acquire and apply domain knowledge.

For example chemical engineers can have a first class honours degree but no knowledge of the financial world, their degree demonstrates they have the analytic abilities and mental capacities that make them valuable in the financial world.

>The reason why it's so difficult to get a lot of kids to pay attention at school is because they're well aware that they won't need trigonometry or literary analysis in the job that they're going to end up doing. //

I don't believe it's that at all. I don't believe that most children have an idea what they will do for work until late in to their adolescence - beyond when they'll have first come across trig and way beyond when they start literary analysis (which basically starts when you start reading books for yourself). How many athletes have to do a press-up [push-ups] in their career? Yet kids don't say "I want to be a football player I'm not doing press-ups".

IMO those same kids will be more than happy learning to make stuff out of wood, or learning about drawing, or learning to grow plants, or learning to make clothing despite not knowing if those skills will feature in their careers later. We treat all children as if they're academically inclined and I thing this is entirely wrong - yes basic literacy and numeracy are important. Yes the more academic subjects should be open to all those who wish to follow them. But also, those who don't want to sit and do book-work all day should have educational options too.

OT: Britain is always going to be a classed society with a monarchy.

Don't most kids look at what their parents do for a living and assume they will be doing that? I know I did, and it certainly affected my perception of the usefulness of school. Why bust ass to make good grades if my future is most likely in something that involves none of the skills I'm being taught?

Coming from a lower-middle-class background, the concept that some people actually enjoy their jobs was always foreign to me. My impression was that a job was some stupid thing that adults have to do to put a roof over their heads. So what I was being asked to do in school was to sacrifice my free time and work really hard now so I can continue sacrificing my free time and continue working really hard in the future. Since sacrificing my time and working really hard were going to be a big part of my future regardless of how well I did at school, I saw no reason not to blow school off and enjoy my life while I could.

I pulled my head out of my ass later on, but hopefully my experience can shed light on why many students who stand to benefit the most from school fail to see the point of it.

I agree, perhaps I wasn't clear enough that I fundamentally disagree with the system I'm describing. The separation between academic and trade jobs was false even in the 19th century, and it is absurd in the modern economy.

> I don't believe it's that at all. I don't believe that most children have an idea what they will do for work until late in to their adolescence

They pick up implicit ideas from their environment and their parents. It is not as conscious as you are making it out to be.

> IMO those same kids will be more than happy learning to make stuff out of wood, or learning about drawing, or learning to grow plants, or learning to make clothing despite not knowing if those skills will feature in their careers later.

Yes, I agree, but the difference is these things feel more immediate than learning trigonometry, which seems like a very long-term investment which is unlikely to pay off, or literary criticism, which feels like a shibboleth for being able to pass for middle class.

I actually think we need to meld the practical and the academic much more - it's not about allowing the 'non-academic' to learn practical skills which will allow them to scrape through, it's about using design, electronics, programming etc to justify picking up useful academic skills which would otherwise seem remote, and also to teach practical skills and practical problem solving to students who would otherwise disappear off into the realms of the ivory tower.

Re your final paragraph - I support that idea though I'm not entirely sure it will be effective. Yes, for some they'll see - "right, if I learn about fluid flows I can move from domestic plumbing [say] to designing optimised mains water fixtures" or "if I learn biology I can help ensure water resources don't negatively impact river ecosystems", but most won't be that inspired, just as most couldn't care less to learn about who signed the Magna Carta just because you told them it influenced the entire legal system from then on. I'm all for child-led learning and have done some flexi-schooling with my eldest child to that end. That said it seems a better basis to move forward on then the current pedagogy - notify parliament and let's make it happen!!

Hah, I was thinking a bit more 'I have ordered a 5x10x7cm electric motor for my model car project, the materials are 2cm wide, so what dimensions do I need to make the casing so that everything will fit'. Or, 'I want to make this computer animation bounce, how do I use maths to tell the computer what I want'.

> notify parliament and let's make it happen!!

We shall inform our MPs, and anticipate legislation being brought forward in the Spring.

Typically, a student who can interpret and answer simple ratio and proportion questions will reach a C grade.

I would expect a student who scores lower than a C grade to have some significant difficulty in answering this type of question:

"Here is an ingredient list for 2 cakes; write an ingredient list for 5 cakes."

As you might understand, students below this level are excluded from almost every skilled career.

In my experience, there are very few students who are intellectually incapable of reaching this level, but there are many (37% of all students in the UK) who don't reach this level because they don't have appropriate educational opportunities.

Universal access to good education is not a solved problem.

I happily stipulate that grading to a curve doesn't, in itself, imply that. But the reality is that some students are not mastering the core material, and we should not be okay with that.

Those children are being failed.

The numbers of children who cannot (not just do not) attain grade C in English and math are a rough proxy for rates of innumeracy and illiteracy. The UK has worryingly high levels of innumeracy and illiteracy.

Here's the English national curriculum.

https://www.gov.uk/government/collections/national-curriculu...

Here's the maths national curriculum. Key stages 3 and 4 cover the GCSE exam.

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curricul...

This sounds reasonable for 16 year old children, but don't forget that this work covers clever children who will easily achieve A.

You can get a rough idea of what a grade C means by comparing it to the new numerical grading system to be introduced in 2017. In that system grades range from 1 (low) to 9 (best) (with U still meaning failed). A 4 is expected to be equivalent to a current C.

http://www.aqa.org.uk/supporting-education/policy/gcse-and-a...

> But there are a couple of indicators to help us with this matching. Firstly, a grade four is going to be set at the level of a current grade C. What this means practically is that the same proportion of students who would achieve at least a grade C now will achieve at least a grade four under the new system. We also understand that a grade seven is going to be set at the level of the current A. That means we’ve now got grades four, five, and six to cover C and B… and grade seven, eight and nine to cover A and A. And if we look a bit more at this very top level – where three grades now allow for greater differentiation – we might expect the top half of the current A* students to achieve a nine grade in the new world.

It's great that there is more differentiation between very high attaining students but it's a pretty low bar.

Whether the scale puts a C on 4 out of 10 or 7 out of 10 doesn't really tell us anything about the ability if we don't know how the grading is done.

Might be worth pointing out that the GCE O level was only taken by around 30% to 60% of population depending on the policy of the Local Education Authority in which the child lived, the other half (roughly) took the CSE (Certificate of Secondary Education). A grade 1 CSE certificate was regarded as of a similar standard to a pass at GCE O level. So the figures were not that far away from one third not achieving a pass in the good old days when you think about it. These exams were/are taken at age 16.

It might also be worth pointing out that the change from GCE O level/CSE to GCSE took place in 1984. Therefore anyone under the age of (rougly) 47 would have taken GCSEs, and then if academically inclined, would have progressed to GCE A levels, which have remained the main public exam taken at 18 for University entrance. We seem to be managing OKish despite continuous negative commentary on the education system.

GCSEs themselves have changed significantly over the years (pre-National Curriculum, first 14-target NC then various reconfigurations of the NC based on subject after that, then the 2010 and 2012 changes, and now, in England, the 2017 changes).

The UK PISA scores are (currently) bang on the average for OECD nations, and a point or so higher than France in Mathematics and the national language. I'd invite all here to have a look at the PISA sample test questions for Maths, their format and content might surprise you.

At present, I think that the experience in the UK seems to support the thesis in the OA that socio-economic factors are quite significant in educational achievement in the sense that poor (depending on your definition of poor) children don't do especially well on average. I shall dig around a bit more about this whole historical data thing as I feel an essay coming on...