Why maths should be your friend

Young people often have many frustrations with maths, from "it doesn't make any sense" to "I'll never be able to do it" to "why can't they just write in English?" But perhaps the biggest one is "Why do I have to do maths"? I've heard it from children in primary school ... and I've heard it from university students shocked that old foe has followed them, and their course includes a compulsory maths or statistics module.

Schools seem determined to inflict mathematics upon their hapless, innocent students: even the ones who have no intention of taking the subject any further than GCSE, find themselves getting more hours of maths lessons than they do for their favourite subjects. And things seem destined only to get harsher, with government proposals to make maths compulsory until the age of 18 for students who don't get a grade C at GCSE first time around! What justification could there be for the educational emphasis on mathematics? Why should mathematics be your friend, not your enemy? This common complaint deserves an explanation.

Because maths opens up many paths in life. If you see a future for yourself studying natural science or social sciences, a career in engineering or construction, working with figures or with computers, or making big bucks in the worlds of business or finance, then your skills in maths will be crucial for you. Basic maths qualifications are essential for entry to jobs as diverse as primary school teacher, doctor, vet, midwife, accountant or architect. And many challenging and rewarding careers require more advanced levels of mathematics, for example: epidemiologist (tracking the spread of diseases), meteorologist (predicting the weather), climatologist (studying phenomena like global warming),  engineer (designing and building things), cryptanalyst (working on secret codes, often for the secret services) as well as computer programmer, financial analyst, economist or forensic scientist. If maths wasn't compulsory at school, people who chose not to study it would miss out on many of these excellent opportunities in life.

Because maths is a valuable skill. In a list of the top 12 university degree subjects by graduate salary, nine were in maths-heavy subjects such as mathematics, physics, engineering and economics. One of the best-paid jobs in Britain is to be an actuary, crunching the numbers for the insurance and pensions industry: a task that requires excellent maths skills. Another maths-based career rising in prominence is working as a statistician, to analyse and interpret large amounts of information. Google's chief economist described being a statistician as the "dream job of the next decade", as companies and governments seek to understand and benefit from the massive growth in data brought about by the internet and computerisation. Pharmaceutical researchers and the NHS employ many medical statisticians to make sense of all the information they gather, and help improve treatments and health services. If you can learn to use mathematics as a tool to solve real problems, not just the questions your teachers set in class, then you can help build a better world, earn good money, or maybe do both at the same time!

Because money is a number. Even if you deliberately choose a career which uses as little maths as possible, you can't escape the fact your income, savings and debts are measured using numbers! So to look after your own finances, it's vital that you have some basic numeracy skills. For example, percentages might be the most boring subject you do at school, but when you're looking at savings accounts or a mortgage then it's really important to understand how percentages work and how to calculate them!

Because maths can describe and make sense of the world around us. We can use maths to work out how likely we are to win the lottery, or (a common GCSE question) to work out the chances of picking a blue marble from a bag containing marbles of different colours. But exactly the same ideas from the fields of probability and statistics are used to calculate the cost of our travel insurance, or every time doctors evaluate a new treatment - is its success rate because it really works, or was it just due to chance?

One of the greatest scientific breakthroughs came when Isaac Newton was able to describe the positions of objects using the recently-discovered idea of co-ordinates, and then wrote equations to describe how they move, and are attracted by gravity. The language of mathematics provides a really natural way to talk about ideas like speed, acceleration, force and momentum, and makes it easier to understand (and make predictions!) than just using words. This is why engineers and physicists today spend a lot of their time just learning maths. Today we learn co-ordinates at primary school (or even when we play Battleships for the first time!) and it seems entirely natural and straightforward to us. But in 1637, when René Descartes invented them, it was a revolutionary idea that changed the way that people thought about the world. If you sent your primary school self back in time to the year 1600, and explained the idea of co-ordinate systems to the thinkers of the day, you would have been hailed as one of the greatest mathematical geniuses of all time! Still feel like you can't do maths?

Because you can succeed at maths. A common mistake people make is to assume that mathematical ability is innate: either you're born to be good at maths, or you're not. Then, when they find the subject difficult at school, they assume they are naturally bad at it, maths is just too hard for them, and they will never understand it. When your confidence is so badly sapped, it's hard to make any improvements.

But actually maths is a skill that can be learned. It might take patience, practice, self-belief and some good teaching to get there, but that is no different to many other skills in life. I have worked in adult education, where I taught students who first tried learning maths at school 20 or 30 years ago. Many of them had had awful experiences back then, and felt that they would never be able to understand it - but now they were coming back to maths classes out of curiosity, or because they wanted to help their own children with their homework, or they needed GCSE Maths to complete a career change to teaching or nursing. To their surprise, they found they made much more progress second time around! All along they had been able to succeed at maths - they just hadn't realised how good they were. And along the way, after a lot of hard work, they learned new skills that would help them look after the household finances, understand better the world around them, and go on to further study or new careers. Those are all great reasons to make friends with maths - after all, it never wanted to be your enemy! The best thing you can do is not to wait 20 years to do it. There's never been a better time to make friends with maths.