All change in 2025

Chris Brignell, Deputy Director

There’s a small person that appears at my breakfast table each morning looking slightly dishevelled and inevitably wearing the same pyjamas as the day before.  Despite my reminders that the pyjamas could really do with a wash and that he owns more than one set, he seems reluctant to share the pyjamas with the washing machine for just 24 hours. It’s a reminder that, for some, even the smallest change can be difficult.

At the other end of the change scale, the Observatory’s Senior Operations Manager talks of the potential of our research to ‘change the world’. Given that we’re ‘only’ tasked with studying the English education system, this feels a little like mission creep in much the same way that ‘redoing the kitchen’ can turn into a full blown 6-month house extension project!

So, given we are focused on England for the time being (unless anyone wants to fund our work elsewhere), what change could our research bring about in 2025? In 2024 we expanded the team, established infrastructure, liaised with stakeholders, formulated research questions, secured ethical approval, recruited schools and colleges, designed instruments and much more besides.

In 2025, the Observatory’s work will start to bear fruit. In early January we printed surveys for over 6,000 Reception pupils and 25,000 Year 7 pupils and couriered them to schools, carefully batched in class sets to aid completion. At the end of January, the couriers will collect them, and soon afterwards we will find out what today’s young people think about maths and how they learn it. Simultaneously, their teachers (c. 400 primary and 1000 secondary) are completing their own surveys telling us about how they plan and teach maths. Meanwhile, 2,000 of their parents have already responded to our survey asking for their views on maths and their child’s maths education. By linking these different data sources together, we will be able to see how pupil responses relate to pedagogical practice and parental attitudes, and how this varies by pupil, class, school and region – enabling us to start disentangling the effects of policy decisions at national, institutional and classroom level.

And I haven’t got space here to mention the work we’re doing with A level students in schools and colleges or undergraduate students in universities, or our case study visits to schools and colleges, or our analysis of the national pupil database. It is sufficient to say that by Easter, this statistician will have enough data to keep him happy for a long while yet.

Through 2025 the Observatory will be publishing reports on the maths teacher workforce, an analysis of maths lessons, the economic effects of studying maths, the higher education maths landscape and much more. And then we will go back to the same learners and their teachers next year and repeat the process to understand longitudinal effects.

So, what change will this study bring about? That’s the exciting part – we don’t know yet.  Once we have analysed the data, we will put key findings in the hands of the decision makers, whether that’s the Secretary of State who needs to address teacher recruitment and retention, awarding bodies designing qualifications, MAT leads organising professional development, individual teachers planning lessons, or the many other professionals trying to make a positive difference.

Our hope is that, in time, it will lead to increased attainment, better attitudes towards mathematics, less inequality in learner outcomes, and improved access to appropriate qualifications for all.  But all that is for the future. Right now, I need to go wash some pyjamas.

Author information

Chris is the Deputy Director of the Observatory and an Associate Professor of Statistics in the School of Mathematical Sciences.  

Observatory for Mathematical Education team

Observatory for Mathematical Education on LinkedIn.