Upskilling The Workforce Starts At School.

Jamila Robertson outlines in City AM why upskilling the workforce starts at school. 

With youth unemployment on the rise, now is not the time to scrap proven job-boosting skills like Latin and maths, writes Jamila Robertson

Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty recently announced the launch of the Richmond Project, a charity that helps to break down barriers to numeracy and unlock the socially mobilising power of numbers.  

In an op-ed in The Times, Murty revealed that poor numeracy costs the UK economy up to £25bn annually; 8m adults have maths skills below those expected of a nine-year-old; and people with poor numeracy are more than twice as likely to be unemployed.

Skills matter, which is why teachers across the country were collectively perplexed by the government’s decision to remove the Advanced Maths Support and Latin Excellence Programmes halfway through this academic year.

As a Latin graduate who fell in love with the subject in the “Caecilius est in horto” days of Year 7, I will resist the temptation to go on a tangent about the importance of studying Latin, and it being integral to developing one’s analytical and creative thinking skills – skills which, coincidentally, ranked highest with employers in the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2030. 

Created under education secretary Gavin Williamson in 2021, the Latin Excellence Programme aimed to increase accessibility in state secondary schools to what was deemed an elitist subject, and more than a third of the pupils it reached were eligible for free school meals. Unfortunately, it isn’t the only socially mobilising programme, specifically created to level the playing field for state school pupils, that the government has ditched.

Also given the axe by this growth-getting Labour government were the Stimulating Physics Network – designed to increase the uptake of A-Level Physics, particularly among secondary school-aged girls – and the Advanced Mathematics Support Programme (AMSP), which launched in 2018 to increase participation in core maths, AS/A-level maths and further maths by providing national support for teachers in state-funded schools and colleges. The latter is largely credited with boosting the uptake in advanced maths and in 2024, entries in A-Level Maths hit 100,000 for the first time. 

Read the full article here: https://www.cityam.com/scrapping-latin-and-maths-is-weakening-the-workforce-of-tomorrow/