Contribution
It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Ms Furniss. I congratulate the hon. Member for Morecambe and Lunesdale (Lizzi Collinge) on securing this important debate. Some Members may remember a debate that I held a few months ago on the contribution of maths to the UK. There was, I think, cross-party agreement that increasing the quality and uptake of mathematical education will be central to the Government’s growth mission. I will not repeat the arguments I made in that debate, but I will focus on maths today. Historically, it is one of the worst-performing subjects in terms of gender equality, and one where issues emerge long before women reach the leaky pipeline of STEM careers that others may mention today.
The gender imbalance in STEM is not just about fairness; it is about meeting a national need. Jobs in engineering and technology are expected to grow faster than other occupations across the UK through to 2030, yet women make up just 15.7% of the engineering and technology workforce. That is quite stark.
Around the country, excellent work is already being done to increase the participation of women and girls in maths. Yesterday evening, I attended a reception to celebrate the achievements of uMaths, the network of university maths schools that tackles under-representation in STEM through core programmes of maths and further maths A-levels, with university-linked enrichment. One of these schools is Cambridge maths school, which serves my constituency, and which I was delighted to visit earlier this year. Already nearly 50% of the school’s year 13 pupils are female, which is something to be proud of—indeed, it is amazing, considering the national figure on the uptake of maths and further maths A-level is nowhere near that level of parity. More than 10,000 male pupils took A-level further maths in 2023-24, but the number of female pupils taking the subject was less than half that.
Cambridge maths school has clearly made a huge impact simply through its core offerings and ethos, and it is looking to increase support for female students even more. Over the summer, in partnership with the university and Raspberry Pi, it ran a free Girls Enjoy Maths summer school that offered interactive workshops, talks from leading female mathematicians and time to speak to current Cambridge maths school students about their experience. It gave female students a much-needed opportunity to meet role models and see that mathematics does not have to be the masculine-dominated world it may have been for quite a long time. That is vital to increasing participation. Days such as Ada Lovelace Day should not be a historical anomaly. We should be celebrating Ada as much as possible, and I am really glad that we have this debate to do that.
If we are truly to open access to STEM careers to all, I do not think we can rely just on the provision of maths schools that separate students into the STEM versus humanities dichotomy. The Liberal Democrats believe in a broad and balanced approach to the curriculum that gives students, no matter what subjects they study, the skills that they will need in careers that are increasingly technology-driven. That matters particularly to women because research shows that the gender gap opens early—by age 10, only 11% of girls aspire to engineering careers compared with 44% of boys. Between 2019 and 2023 alone, interest in science among 11 to 14-year-old girls declined by 10 percentage points.
Evidence shows that female students are generally more likely to want to study a broader range of subjects than their male peers. It is speculated that it is partly for that reason that the uptake of further maths, a subject that makes one twice as likely to pursue a mathematically intensive STEM degree, is so low. If someone takes further maths, that means filling two of their A-level options with maths, which narrows the opportunity to choose a broader option with more humanities. As a result, many female pupils opt for only single maths, even if they are capable of much more.
Given that suffering from early pigeonholing, the other thing that I would highlight is the opportunity to reskill.