Adding up to problems

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We live in a data-driven world. It’s a familiar refrain, but it’s true. To succeed in a data-driven world, one needs a head for numbers and the ability to understand them, interpret them and analyse them. But in the UK, such skills are in limited supply.

Maths, in particular, is not our strong point. Last year, 42% of school-leavers failed to achieve grade A*-C in their maths GCSE. Worse, a study commissioned by the Sutton Trust found that the post-GCSE participation rate for mathematics education in England trails the rest of the world: only 26% are studying any maths after secondary school, compared with more than 90% in Hong Kong and Germany’s Rhineland-Palatinate, 84% in Massachusetts, USA, 71% in New Zealand and 66% in Singapore.

Sutton Trust chairman Sir Peter Lampl says: “Maths matters too much to cut it off after [the age of] 16… It is at the heart of everyday technology, from our smartphones and tablets to the increased automation in daily tasks from driving to shopping.”

It extends to the work environment too. “All the evidence suggests that workplaces are now technology-rich environments,” say Professor Jeremy Hodgen and Dr Rachel Marks of King’s College, London – authors of the Sutton Trust report. “Many people in the workplace are engaged in ICT, particularly in using spreadsheets and graphical outputs. However, this study finds many examples of people in the workplace using a ‘black-box’ approach to some mathematical techniques, where they lack the mathematical knowledge to understand fully the techniques they are using, to control the technology, and to understand and use the outputs.”

The public wouldn’t necessarily agree that there is a problem. In an Ipsos MORI survey 93% of workers said they were either very confident or fairly confident in their ability to use numbers and data in their jobs.

Employers might well side with the Sutton Report, however. The Confederation of British Industry’s annual Education and Skills Survey found widespread demand for science, technology, engineering and maths skills, but nearly two in five firms said they had difficulties finding people with the requisite knowledge.

Add this all up and it’s clear to see that the paucity of young people studying high-level maths in the UK will eventually lead to real problems for business and for society.

Work it out

How might this affect the research industry? At this point, the looming skills shortage isn’t so apparent. Bobby Duffy, Ipsos MORI’s managing director for public affairs work, says that recent graduates applying for jobs with the company have been “very strong” candidates.

However, he accepts that this surfeit of talent might be a reflection of the fact that there are not an awful lot of jobs out there for the current generation of young people.

“While I would say that the analytical and data manipulation skills of the people we’re getting are better than they were a few years ago, that is more to do with economic circumstance than it is a demonstration of the fact that we’ve managed to crack the difficult problem of embedding these skills among a wider group of people,” says Duffy.

To put it bluntly, demand for the quantitative skillset is depressed at the moment – but once the economy recovers, demand will easily outstrip supply. “The quantitative skillset has always been sought after by research agencies, investment banks, management consultancies and accountancy firms,” says Caroline Plumb, the co-founder of FreshMinds and a business ambassador for the UK government. “But we’ll increasingly see more graduate employers across the board biasing their interests in favour of quant skills.”

That places more pressure on the research and insight market generally, says Plumb. Anecdotally, the evidence suggests that jobs in market research aren’t top of mind for graduates when they leave university. Banks, accountants and management consultants are better known as employers – and they are also able to spend more on salaries to secure the best talent.

“We need to be mindful of the fact that while it looks ok now – that we’re getting good candidates – we can’t take that for granted,” says Duffy. “When other bits of the economy do pick up, everyone is going to be competing for these types of people so we’ve got to be creating the right sorts of spaces to make sure that research is seen as an attractive job for them.”

Sum of the issue

Growing demand for quantitative skills will also force the UK to confront the fact that the education system is not turning out enough competent, capable mathematicians – but as Duffy says, this will be a difficult problem to crack.

A lack of respect and appreciation for maths appears to be deep rooted. Ipsos MORI has been working with the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), providing polling work to support the RSS getstats campaign that aims to increase statistical literacy. Duffy admits to being shocked by some of the results. “While we, as researchers, are all living in this world where we realise that data is very important – and how being a statistician is the ‘sexy’ job of the future – we forget that’s not what people out there in the wider world are seeing,” says Duffy. “Nate Silver might be a hero to us, but no-one else knows who the hell he is.”

Here’s the stat that surprised Duffy the most. When asked which one of several statements would make a parent most proud of their child, 55% said ‘If they were very good at reading and writing’. Only 13% picked ‘If they were very good with numbers’. Similarly, far fewer people would be embarrassed to admit that they aren’t very good at numbers than would admit that they aren’t very good at reading and writing ( 6% versus 15%).

Not only is maths a skill that most don’t appreciate, in schools, many children find themselves being turned off maths as the examples they are given to work with become more abstract, and less relatable to the real world, as their studies progress. “We could make relatively small changes to curriculums to make sure that we have real-world data, real-world social issues that students are working on – so we’re not just appealing to one type of mindset,” says Duffy.

In addition, Plumb says the education system as a whole needs to get better at highlighting the consequences of the selection of certain subject choices that people make at 14 and 15. “If you choose to bias yourself more strongly in a quantitative way, then you are strongly influencing your employability five or 10 years down the line,” she says. “But I don’t think the education system is helping people make those kinds of choices.”

Plumb thinks mathematics also faces an “aspiration issue” – that students are much more likely to pursue more creative subjects, like art, design and media, as that’s where they perceive the most desirable jobs to be.

This is certainly borne out by a recent study of the aspirations and expectation of young people and their parents, carried out by ResearchBods and BritainThinks. Their ‘(Ex)Aspiration Nation’ survey asked 14-16 year-olds to state which industries they imagined themselves working in when they left school. Creative arts and culture came out on top, chosen by 24% of respondents. Admittedly, science and healthcare weren’t that far behind, at 21%. However, the more obviously maths-oriented subjects like banking, accountancy, financing and engineering were chosen by just 15% of respondents, less than media and publishing ( 20%) and teaching and education ( 19%).

Equals

There is reason to be optimistic, though. Asked to pick their role models, boys frequently cited Steve Jobs, Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg (although girls preferred Demi Lovato, Beyonce and Justin Bieber – but that’s a separate problem entirely). “My hope is that the great influence of Silicon Valley globally will make technology, data and quantitative skills sexy again,” says Plumb.

However, she stresses that improving the UK’s stock of quantitative skills shouldn’t come at the expense of the creative skillset we have in this country. “While we’re not producing the quantitative skillsets in the numbers we need to – or aspire to – you need the combination of both quantitative and creative skills to make change in business,” Plumb says. “We need to combine the power of both.”