Counting
on maths

Remember that speech? Well, back in 1996, around the time Tony Blair was declaring these priorities for government, researchers at Cambridge’s Education Faculty were brainstorming what would become NRICH.

Ems Lord explains: “There's a long history of people sharing maths problems and solutions with each other, but that used to be slow and small-scale. When the internet arrived, colleagues at Education decided to create an online maths club.”

“Meanwhile, researchers here at Maths were thinking about how to mark the new millennium with a public outreach project. It made sense to bring both together so today NRICH is at the heart of The Millennium Mathematics Project.”

NRICH remains a collaboration between the two faculties. Lord took charge in 2015, following a career as a maths teacher, local authority consultant and head of one of the country's largest maths teacher training professional development programmes.

She was president of the Mathematical Association in 2019–20 and is a regular contributor to the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Teaching Profession, as well as being a member of the Joint Mathematical Council and a founding fellow of the Chartered College of Teachers. 

Complementing her work at NRICH, Lord uses her research fellowship at Clare Hall to identify ways to improve student outcomes, address the gender imbalance in mathematics study post-16 and widen participation in the subject.

Lord says: “As many children get older, their curiosity often dips. And in this country especially, there are pervasive negative attitudes towards maths, so it's important that we catch people young and sustain their interest.”

“It's impossible to separate mathematics from imagination.”

_{Dr Ems Lord}

“How do you have a breakthrough if somebody isn't curious and thinking, ‘I wonder if that's where the magic happens?’ Imagination is how we go from just solving problems to posing even more ambitious questions and moving forwards.

“What's really special about NRICH is that we encourage children to problem solve in different ways, take different approaches, and use and apply their maths. And by doing that, when students leave school, they are truly ready to solve problems.”

To take just one example, in Tree tops, a challenge aimed at 14–16 year olds, NRICH users are invited to enter the forestry business and work out the maximum profit that they could make after 100 years.

In 1996, Tony Blair complained that the UK was

“35th in the world league of education standards … They say give me the boy at seven, I’ll show you the man at 70. Well give me the education system that is 35th in the world today and I will give you the economy that is 35th in the world tomorrow.”

There have been significant signs of improvement since then, not least in mathematics. In 2019, the Pisa tests, run by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, ranked the country 18^th for mathematics.

“The UK education system has done fantastic things,” says Lord, “but big challenges remain.”

She points out that while maths is now the most popular A-Level subject, only 6% of maths professors in the UK are female. “We still have a lot of work to do on that front. We need to ensure that the subject reflects the country’s diversity in lots of other ways too.”

NRICH maps onto the national curriculum for mathematics, which currently has three major strands: fluency, reasoning and problem solving. But even Ofsted, the school inspectors, admit that there isn’t enough emphasis on problem solving. If this is going to change, schools, students and policy makers will need to make even greater use of NRICH.

“Yes, we can improve exam performance,” says Lord, “but our ultimate goal is to help students to think flexibly and solve problems.”

“In the UK, assessments at primary and secondary schools focus on number skills. These are important, of course. We need to know when our calculations are accurate, but we also need to value problem solving because that's what we face in everyday life. That isn’t evident in our exams yet.”

“There’s a difference between passing an exam and thinking like a mathematician. NRICH focuses on the latter.”

_{Ems Lord, Director of NRICH}

At the same time, Lord thinks that the UK curriculum needs to put greater emphasis on developing collaborative skills, something which she has discussed with the All-Party Parliamentary Group for the Teaching Profession.

Lord remembers a six-year-old telling her that she couldn’t work on a maths task with someone else because it would be cheating.

“I was horrified,” she says. "Solving problems together is crucial. If you want proof of that just walk around our faculty and you’ll find some of the greatest mathematicians in the world working in teams all the time.”