Why Australia’s maths crisis is at a tipping point and how we can fix it

“There’s a perverse incentive. Students are choosing subjects they might be more likely to get a top band in,” she said.

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HSC chemistry enrolments have dipped to their lowest 20 years, with 9834 taking the course.

Greg Ashman, maths researcher and deputy principal at Ballarat Clarendon College, believes the slide in enrolments can be traced back to primary school.

“The single biggest thing we can do to encourage kids to do maths at higher levels is teach it really well from primary,” Ashman said. “From the ground up, from the first year. If we do that, students will learn the maths, see their success and become motivated.”

Basic operations, times tables and maths facts need to be taught explicitly in primary to build fluency, he said. “When this happens students gain confidence, see themselves as capable, and then will be more likely to take it in senior years.”

Ashman said the decline in advanced maths students “is a crisis”.

“We are going to have nuclear submarines, and we will need nuclear physicists and engineers. Where are we going to get them from without that pipeline,” he said.

University of NSW Emeritus Professor John Sweller, who developed cognitive load theory, said if a student “has not learnt the basics, they won’t have a clue later on”.

“Maths is hierarchical. We need to test students to make sure they know a concept before moving to the next topic,” and don’t switch to problem-solving tasks too early, he says.

Sweller has previously said Australia’s declining performance in Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) coincided with the rise in inquiry learning. “The best motivator for any school subject, including maths, is a student’s feeling of competence.“

Last month, the Herald revealed PE and science teachers are covering maths lessons, even at HSC level. Tim Marchant, director of AMSI, has called for urgent action on the “crisis in maths enrolments” and for a federal-state program to upskill teachers.

YouTube star and maths teacher Eddie Woo said trend is alarming at a time maths is becoming more important.

“There are lots of schools out there without a qualified teacher to take extension maths. When an extension teacher in a regional area retires it leaves an enormous gap. Schools can go five or six years when there’s just no one to fill that gap,” Woo said.

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Woo says teacher retraining programs are needed at scale. “We need to be serious about that, and recruiting. We need to think about covering the cost of education degrees and more support for our existing workforce,” he said.

Acting chief engineer Bernadette Foley said Australia needed an estimated 100,000 extra engineers by 2030, but warned this was unachievable without more senior maths students.

Programs designed for primary teachers in explicit maths instruction they can tailor for their class, with a suite of materials and resources, would be useful, says Ashman.

“We should also avoid selling maths apologetically, pleading its usefulness in everyday life. We don’t do that with other subjects. It’s not motivating, that comes from progress and success.”

He says at the start of year 7 students should have automatic recall of number facts such as number bonds, times tables up to 12×12, primes up to 100 and four operations with standard algorithms, including for long division.