Column: It doesn't add up - Dennis Richards, former headteacher's view on education

​And he may well be right. I’m hopeless at Maths. There you go I’ve said it. He is right. Very few adults would make the same jokey reference to the same ineptitude in English.

The PM’s solution? Maths for all up to the age of 18.

We now await a suitable three-word slogan for the next manifesto. Make it count? Sum it up? Maybe we also feel useless at Art and even more so at French.

But neither of those subjects has the cross-curricular significance of Maths. Its fans rightly point to its intrinsic value in terms of other subjects.

All three Sciences immediately come to mind. Design Technology, Engineering and Business and Economics can quickly be added to the roster. Music as well.

The PM’s predecessor but one would have been more likely to explain the Greek derivation of the word, rather than actually do any Maths. As would I.

Maybe we all look for a comfort blanket in terms of what we know.

I am sure that the PM is a superb mathematician. But imposing it on all his fellow citizens up to the age of 18 is not such a brilliant idea.

He could have praised his own Government and a generation of Maths teachers, who took the subject to the top of the examination league tables in 2022. 96,000 entries at Advanced Level.

That’s a great result. But all students. I don’t think so.

Curriculum planning is a highly technical, specialist area of study. It fluctuates according to the flavour of the times. Design Technology is a case in point.

Two decades ago, I recall saying on a BBC 2 documentary that we needed to devise a curriculum for a world which includes Japan.

Technology for all was the cry. It hit the buffers when we discovered that most of our Technology teachers had trained as woodwork or metalwork teachers.

Maths for all will just as surely have a crash landing when the PM realises just how many more Maths teachers we would need.

The final part of the PM’s argument is that students need a better grounding in areas of learning important to us all.

A former student berated me last week for the fact that she had never had any grounding in the financial implications of managing a household budget. She is now 25. I apologised, but I’m not sure I really meant it.

Remembering how she was when she was 15, the last thing on her mind was how to secure a mortgage, understand a unit trust or consider hedge funds and shorting the pound.

By the way, one in six adults have a reading age of five – seven.

Teachers are mindful that literacy is every bit as important (more so?) than understanding money markets.

Mathematics is a Greek word meaning “that which is learned”. Just in case you were wondering.