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16-to-18 Mathematics Education

My hon. Friend makes a good point. It is a huge shame when businesses have to look overseas to recruit quantitative staff, engineers or people to carry out numerical analysis, when this country has so many students who could fulfil those roles if they received appropriate training and qualifications. Even for those who do not go on to study maths and science at university, a good background in maths is vital. The next generation of primary school teachers, journalists and politicians must ensure that they know the basics of that subject, because if their maths is not up to scratch, we will have a damaged ecosystem. The next generation of children will not get a proper maths education at school, and that will lead to poor quality numerical analysis in our press and media and poor quality statistics in public life.