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By Elizabeth Truss MP - 30th November 2011
Elizabeth Truss MP warns that children struggle with mental arithmetic after becoming too reliant on the use of calculators in schools from a young age.
When talking to local employers I often hear about candidates for job interviews who lack the basic ability to do sums. The truth is that too many young people fail to gain the mathematical skills they need to maximise their future career prospects. Many also struggle with managing their finances. Britain's performance in maths is abysmal, with the UK currently at 28th in the world in the OECD PISA tables. Whilst there are many factors that have contributed to this poor performance, I am concerned that government policy that encourages calculator use for students as young as 8 is diverting time away from mastering the basics.
In schools I have visited calculators and computers are too often viewed as "magic boxes" by students and sometimes used as a replacement for mathematical operations. The present National Curriculum has a section on "Calculator Methods" for those at junior school (ages 8-11) while the Key Stage 2 SATs in maths have a paper where calculator use is allowed, but asks questions where a calculator is superfluous. Rather than boosting their basic arithmetic abilities we are creating a 'Sat-Nav' generation overly reliant on technology.
According to a Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) conducted in 2007, virtually all primary school students in England use a calculator, making it the country with the highest use in the world. Singapore, which came second for maths in the 2009 PISA tables, only introduces calculators to the classroom at age 11. Meanwhile the study found restricted use of calculators in primary schools in other top performing countries, such as Hong Kong and Chinese-Taipei. However, limited calculator usage was not just restricted to the Pacific Rim, the study showed lower levels of calculator usage in Germanic nations, which outperform Britain in maths.
Calculators are more heavily used in Anglophone and Scandinavian countries such as America, Britain, New Zealand and Denmark. This is changing with concerns over the early use of calculators in school. In Massachusetts, the top-performing American state for maths education, the curriculum states that pupils should learn how to perform basic arithmetic operations independently of calculators. In Sweden, there is a non-calculator paper for 18 year olds.
In the debate today, I will argue that the government should abandon advice encouraging calculator use for 8 to 11 year olds and make the 11 year old SATs tests calculator-free.
Elizabeth Truss has been Conservative MP for South West Norfolk since 2010
Dods Parliamentary Communications Ltd