With youth unemployment on the rise, now is not the time to scrap proven job-boosting skills like Latin and maths, writes Jamila Robertson
Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty recently announced the launch of the Richmond Project, a charity that helps to break down barriers to numeracy and unlock the socially mobilising power of numbers.
In an op-ed in The Times, Murty revealed that poor numeracy costs the UK economy up to £25bn annually; 8m adults have maths skills below those expected of a nine-year-old; and people with poor numeracy are more than twice as likely to be unemployed.
The power of Latin
Skills matter, which is why teachers across the country were collectively perplexed by the government’s decision to remove the Advanced Maths Support and Latin Excellence Programmes halfway through this academic year.
As a Latin graduate who fell in love with the subject in the “Caecilius est in horto” days of Year 7, I will resist the temptation to go on a tangent about the importance of studying Latin, and it being integral to developing one’s analytical and creative thinking skills – skills which, coincidentally, ranked highest with employers in the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2030.
Created under education secretary Gavin Williamson in 2021, the Latin Excellence Programme aimed to increase accessibility in state secondary schools to what was deemed an elitist subject, and more than a third of the pupils it reached were eligible for free school meals. Unfortunately, it isn’t the only socially mobilising programme, specifically created to level the playing field for state school pupils, that the government has ditched.
Also given the axe by this growth-getting Labour government were the Stimulating Physics Network – designed to increase the uptake of A-Level Physics, particularly among secondary school-aged girls – and the Advanced Mathematics Support Programme (AMSP), which launched in 2018 to increase participation in core maths, AS/A-level maths and further maths by providing national support for teachers in state-funded schools and colleges. The latter is largely credited with boosting the uptake in advanced maths and in 2024, entries in A-Level Maths hit 100,000 for the first time.
The state of youth unemployment
Paradoxically, in their manifesto, the Labour Party claimed they were imposing VAT on private schools for the sake of employing 6,500 new expert teachers in shortage subjects, but since its enactment have cut specialised teacher training programmes like the AMSP and forced academies to stop hiring specialist teachers via the Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill.
So why does it matter? Let’s look at jobs. According to the ONS, between October-December 2024, unemployment rose to 4.4 per cent (1.57m), an increase on the four per cent seen in the same quarters in 2023 and 2022. This was highest amongst the young, with youth unemployment up from 11.9 per cent in the final quarter of 2023 to 14.8 per cent in the final quarter of 2024. Youth economic inactivity also followed suit, rising to 41.1 per cent, compared to all working-aged adults at 21.5 per cent. There are now almost as many young people in employment (3.69m) as there are out (3.672m). The Autumn Budget will further impact young people looking for first jobs, with the biggest on-year fall in vacancies recorded in wholesale and retail (-29,000), health and social care (-24,000) and accommodation and food (-21,000).
With youth unemployment at its highest rate since the pandemic, now is not the time to cut programmes like the AMSP. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2030 identifies robotics engineers, data analysts and fintech engineers as three of the fastest-growing global jobs for 2030 and beyond. And the skills you’ll need? Maths, data analysis, problem-solving and critical thinking.
So, if growth is the goal, and you want to equip our young people with the skills they will need for the jobs of the future, now is not the time to cut the programmes that will do just that.
Jamila Robertson is the director of the Centre for the Future of Work