Shocking reality of maths teaching in Wales exposed

Wales' secondary schools are failing to recruit enough competent maths teachers, a Senedd committee has been told. When vacancies arise they are "lucky" to have even one applicant and often they are unemployable.

Owen Evans, chief inspector for Estyn, told the Senedd's children and young people's committee: "If you speak to secondary heads and talk about maths, they will frequently tell you if they advertise for maths teachers, they'll get some applicants if they're lucky. And sometimes that person isn't employable. So we have too many people without the requisite skills for teaching maths. That is a problem for the system. It is something to discuss with government.

"The other point that you mentioned about it is not cross-curricular enough. We do see that, you know, everyone tends to think that literacy, well that's the job of the English teacher, Welsh is for the Welsh teacher, maths for the math teacher. But the point of the curriculum is that it's embedded in virtually everything you do and we're not seeing that enough. If you haven't got strong maths expertise in that setting, you're going to struggle." For our free daily briefing on the biggest issues facing the nation, sign up to the Wales Matters newsletter here

Asked by Conservative MS Natasha Asghar who needed to take responsibility for delivering training to improve the situation, Catherine Evans, assistant director of Estyn said: "I think it's a multifaceted approach, our view is that you need some sort of national group who identifies excellence in mathematics teaching and plans for the professional learning that involves all the partners. So that would be local authorities, school improvement, services, it would involve our best mathematics teachers in Wales.

"We would tap into expertise outside Wales to develop the strategy of professional learning for teachers on the ground in mathematics. So we need to have high expectations, develop a national strategy for professional learning, and then have a model where we can scale that through local authorities where we have maths experts that will support the schools to develop the capacity for improvement."