Oral Answers to Questions

Elizabeth Truss Excerpts

Wednesday 26th January 2011 Commons Chamber

[The Prime Minister]

I can give the hon. Gentleman one tip. Before writing the question, it is always good to work out one’s own party’s policy. The Opposition are now committed to increasing benefits by CPI rather than RPI. His party is backing our policy and is far from opposing it.

[Elizabeth Truss (South West Norfolk) (Con)]

Q5. Recent work by the Nuffield Foundation has shown that Britain has the lowest proportion of 16 to 18-year-olds studying mathematics of any of our competitor countries in the OECD. Just as bad, we have a chronic shortage of maths teachers in our schools. What action are the Government going to take on this issue?

[The Prime Minister]

My hon. Friend makes a very good point. The Nuffield Foundation has produced an extremely worthwhile report on how badly we are doing with maths teaching and in terms of the number of people studying maths. We will be taking a series of steps to sort this out, which will be announced by my right hon. Friend the Education Secretary. One is to expand Teach First, which is an excellent scheme to get graduates from our best universities into schools, and which, for the first time, will include primary schools. Many of them will be maths teachers. We also want to raise the bar for teachers as regards the qualifications they need to teach maths. That is vital in our country and my hon. Friend is right to highlight the issue.