Maths qualifications in England need “urgent reform” to address the high number of students leaving school without essential numeracy skills, according to one of the country’s leading exam boards.
Oxford, Cambridge and RSA Examinations (OCR) has called for the government to introduce a “short course” maths qualification to be taken by all students in the first year of their GCSEs.
The exam board said the course would be focused on fundamental maths skills, such as fractions and percentages, and provide a better alternative for the 40 per cent of students who fail maths GCSE.
Thousands of students resit maths exams each year in line with a 2014 policy. The practice has been repeatedly criticised for demoralising students while failing to ensure they leave school with the necessary skills for the workplace.
Maths resits have a high failure rate — less than a fifth of resits are marked grade 4 or above, equivalent to a C — meaning many students leave school without the minimum qualifications needed for most work and further study.
Jill Duffy, OCR chief executive, said introducing a short course GCSE would improve outcomes for students who were “left behind” by a “cycle of resits, misery and a sense of failure”, without lowering standards.
“The current GCSE is too often a race to get through content, with no opportunity to properly embed understanding,” she added. “There is a risk we get too focused on the arbitrary qualification and forget what matters to our economy, for our society and to students’ lives.”
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OCR also called for cuts to the number and length of assessments for maths GCSE, with research showing the average English 16-year-old spends 31.5 hours being examined, far more than their international peers.
Further reform to maths education is expected as part of the government’s curriculum review, launched last July, with interim findings scheduled for the coming weeks.
The government announced last week that over-19s will no longer need a GCSE-equivalent maths and English qualification to access apprenticeships, allowing up to 10,000 more people to qualify each year.
This followed from a widely criticised decision to cut funding for a programme designed to encourage teenagers to take up higher-level maths courses. There were more than 98,000 entries for A-level maths in 2024, up from 64,500 in 2009 when the predecessor to the programme was introduced.
Sam Sims, chief executive of charity National Numeracy, agreed that reform was needed to ensure more students gained the numeracy skills needed for everyday life.
“The current system is falling significantly short. Negative experiences at school, often compounded by the resit policy, turns many people off maths for life,” he added.
The Department for Education said it was committed to ensuring maths remained a core part of every young person’s learning.
“We know there are parts of the current curriculum and assessment system that work well and other parts that need improvement to support all young people to achieve and thrive,” it added.
