Times letters: Sunak’s plan to make maths compulsory to 18

Sir, The prime minister’s aspiration to widen the curriculum for older students is admirable although his desire to teach the young analytical skills would be better served by also requiring students to study English and logic in a baccalaureate-style curriculum. If, however, he is to avoid the Nightingale syndrome of wards without nurses, or classes without teachers, he must immediately implement a plan for training more maths teachers. He will also need to find the money to attract and retain them. As he has pointed out, good mathematicians get good jobs — but it appears likely from the data published on the government’s own website that there will be a considerable shortfall in applications for secondary teacher training this autumn.
Richard Willmott
Headmaster, The Dixie Grammar School 1993-2005; Hereford

Sir, To make pupils continue to learn a subject that they cannot engage with is torture. That so many pupils fail GCSE maths highlights that it is an inaccessible subject to many. The way maths is taught and the lack of maths teachers in school is already a problem. How extending maths teaching for another two years is going to work in reality is difficult to imagine. I agree that data and statistics are part of our lives now, but these can be taught as a separate subject, which might help and engage a lot more people as they will see the relevance of it.
Rachel Watson
Bearwood, West Midlands

Sir, The best way to put schoolchildren off mathematics is to make it compulsory; we should make it available to everyone but compulsory to none, beyond basic arithmetic. Instead, we should use bribery. An award of, say, £1,000 at the age of 18 for success in a special examination is all we would need. This would be far cheaper than hiring non-mathematical teachers, faced as we would be with the inevitable ensuing shortage of teachers.
Norman Sanders
Ipswich

Sir, It is all very well for Rishi Sunak to suggest that everybody should study mathematics until they are 18 but some people have absolutely no aptitude for it and their time would be better spent improving their grasp of the English language.
Fiona Wild
Cheltenham

BONFIRE OF EU RULES
Sir, Daniel Finkelstein’s criticism of the retained EU law bill is well taken (“Tories’ dash to burn EU rules is disreputable”, Jan 4). The bill would give ministers law-making powers wholly at odds with the claim that Brexit would restore parliamentary sovereignty. Nor would it be possible to ensure the continuing security of our legal system, even were those exorbitant powers to be exercised to the maximum, given the range and complexity of the body of law that would have to be reviewed before the sunset clause became operative at the end of this year (with the possibility of extending the deadline to June 2026 liable to be used sparingly).

Brexit can be made to work much better for the UK than it has done so far, but only if an appreciation of the country’s real interests triumphs over ideological posturing, of which the bill provides an egregious instance.
Professor Sir Alan Dashwood KC
Cambridge

Sir, Daniel Finkelstein is right that plans to rush through the scrapping of EU-derived legislation by the end of the year are misguided. A “sunset clause” of the end of 2023 works for nobody. Extending the deadline by three years would be an improvement, but an even better approach would be for the government to replace the arbitrary sunset with a hard deadline for reviewing EU-derived legislation by the end of 2026. This would not only enable ministers to drop unnecessary and burdensome EU-derived regulations but allow parliamentarians, civil servants and organisations such as Which? the chance to shape and modernise our laws for the better.
Rocio Concha
Director of policy, Which?

END-OF-LIFE REVIEW
Sir, Unlike Lord Brown of Eaton-under-Heywood (Thunderer, Jan 2), I believe that the Commons health and social care committee is asking the right foundation question as the first stage in its review of the law relating to assisted dying. Setting out the law as it is and asking for broad approval or disapproval is exactly what one should expect of a committee taking its responsibility seriously and objectively. As he knows, the “approve” or “disapprove” question prevents nobody from stating their views about whether changes should be made in the law. He refers to “successive private member’s bills successfully promoted in the House of Lords”. This involves a very selective use of language. One such bill was rejected at second reading — I moved the rejection. Generally, the Lords does not vote against second reading; on other occasions bills were given an unopposed second reading but none ever has come anywhere close to becoming law.
Lord Carlile of Berriew KC
House of Lords

Sir, Lord Brown’s simplification of the case for assisted dying is unhelpful when he talks of agreed safeguards that allow terminally ill people to be helped in ending their lives. Baroness Finlay of Llandaff (letter, Jan 2) rightly talks of subtle, perhaps unconscious, coercion that leads to a person feeling a burden on the family. It is impossible to list safeguards against sighs, glances and other signals that lead to a person feeling unwanted. We need to make ours a more caring society in which those nearing the end of their lives through illness, age or infirmity are made to feel life is still worth living.
Lord Singh of Wimbledon
Member, joint parliamentary committee for human rights

Sir, As I have seen too often, palliative care is not sufficient to alleviate all suffering at the end of life. There are now more than 20 overseas jurisdictions that deal safely and compassionately with persistent and prolonged suffering at the end of life. The answer to Lord Brown’s question must be: Yes, there are circumstances where a patient should be allowed to accelerate their death. These are when a person is suffering unbearably at the end of their life in spite of excellent palliative care.
Richard Scheffer
Ret’d hospice medical director and consultant in palliative medicine; Totnes, Devon

WALRUS COMEBACK
Sir, Matt Ridley is right that the Atlantic sub-species of walrus has been recovering slowly since 1952 when Norway made it illegal to hunt them (Thunderer, Jan 4) but his claim that they are thriving in a warming climate is incorrect. In 2016, the walrus was classified as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, which noted that “climatic warming will surely require them to live in a much different environment as sea ice recedes and disappears from many of the areas they have used in past centuries”.

Ridley wrongly stated that Arctic sea ice has “declined hardly at all in winter since 2002”. The data show a clear downward trend, and the maximum ice area last year was more than 700,000 sq km smaller than 20 years earlier. The changing climate is already affecting both the feeding and breeding of walruses, as numerous scientific studies and Sir David Attenborough’s television programmes have documented.
Bob Ward
Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change, LSE

SPYING ON CITIZENS
Sir, Your leading article (“Digital Danger”, Jan 2) warns of the use of Chinese-made surveillance systems to track people in the UK. But neither your editorial nor the surveillance watchdog, Fraser Sampson, seems to have any qualms about British-made equipment being used for the same purpose. In 1786 Jeremy Bentham designed the Panopticon, in which a central prison watchtower could shine a light on all the encircling prison cells without the inmates being able to tell that they were being watched. This, he thought, would motivate them to behave legally. Bentham thought his contrivance was equally applicable to hospitals, schools and factories. In Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, one-way TV systems are installed in every flat. Big Brother would always be watching you.

The danger of where a surveillance system is made seems of minor importance compared with our acceptance of the right of democratic governments to spy on their citizens whenever and wherever they please in the name of national security.
Lord Skidelsky
House of Lords

CARE WORKER MOVES
Sir, You report that care workers “are quitting to earn more stacking shelves in supermarkets” (“Quick fixes that could help service survive the winter”, news, Jan 4). I worked for 20 years in a supermarket, finally leaving last year. In that time many supermarket staff left to work in care homes and much preferred it. I do not know of any coming in the other direction.
Christopher Lees
Stalybridge, Greater Manchester

BRINGING UP BABY
Sir, I was amused that the custom of leaving babies to sleep outside needed an explanation (“We’ve left your parcel in an unsafe place”, Jan 4). My mother often left me to sleep outside in my pram in the 1940s. Once she discovered me sitting on the concrete path beside the pram. I was unhurt — and at least the postman did not try to leave a parcel on top of me.
Sheila Wood
Lewes, E Sussex

ACQUIRED TASTES
Sir, Carol Midgley’s distaste for port (Notebook, Dec 31) may change with the passage of time — it is possible to suddenly find a liking in later life for something that seemed repellent. Port and mussels have been examples for me; eggs and gin still await.
Tony Titchener
Seaford, E Sussex

SPIT AND POLISH
Sir, Like most soldiers I will miss my tins of Kiwi shoe polish (Jan 2; letters, Jan 3 & 4). But as I twist the little key to get the lid off, I often recall my (Normandy veteran) history master’s words on entering his classroom to be confronted by a room full of CCF cadets dressed up for a parade. “The most depressing sight in the world,” he groaned, “is a row of shiny toe caps. Why can’t you all just use dubbin?”
Lieutenant-General Sir Hew Pike
Commandant, RMA Sandhurst 1994-95; Bentley, Hants

Sir, If one of my curates turned up for church with unpolished shoes I sent him home to remedy the imperfection. The priest’s shoes are what the parishioner, head bowed, sees when kneeling at the altar rail to receive the blessed sacrament. Scruffy footwear is disrespectful.
The Rev Canon Godfrey Hirst
Ansdell, Lancs

Sir, I was brought up to believe that the job interview was not over till the candidate had turned to leave. This allowed the examiner to determine whether he had bothered to polish the back of his shoes or merely the front.
Mark Haszlakiewicz
Goodworth Clatford, Hants