UK slips one place in global maths rankings

Britain has slipped one place to 27th position in the global maths survey which is topped by Singapore which measures skills among high school students.
The top performer in maths is Singapore, which overhauled their education system in the 1980s following poor international performance.
The UK remains a middle-ranking performer -- behind countries such as Japan, Estonia, Finland and Vietnam.
According to the report run by the OECD, UK has slipped down one place in maths to 27th in the world.
Nearly 90 per cent of respondents to a survey by 'Singapore Maths publisher Maths - No Problem, said they believed that there is insufficient funding for training teachers in the mastery method and rolling it out in British schools.

Nearly 80 per cent teachers called for more information on the mastery method from the Department for Education.

They also said the government is not giving enough funding, or support, to encourage take-up of the mastery method of maths teaching used by top-performing Singapore.
The mastery method has the support of the government, which recently announced funding of 41 million pounds over four years to support teaching maths for mastery in 8,000 primary schools in England, the UK-based group's survey said.
But a majority of survey respondents (60.5 per cent) said that lack of understanding of maths mastery remains a barrier to wider adoption by schools and over 49 per cent said teachers' lack of confidence in their own abilities in teaching maths also hampers roll-out.

"Today's Pisa results show that 22 per cent of our 15-year-olds did not reach level-2 in Maths, which means that they are unable to solve problems routinely faced by adults in their daily lives," said Martin Casimir Managing Director of Maths--No problem.
"We need to build the foundations in primary school. In a global economy with increasing automation, there simply won't be jobs for those who aren't confident in maths," he said.
The PISA results showed the top seven maths performers were from Asian countries/jurisdictions.
Casimir said that because East Asian countries continue to outperform the rest of the world, it was tempting to assume that mathematical performance is linked to cultural differences.