Are girls really worse at maths than boys?

The stereotype that maths is a “boy subject” is deep-rooted and enduring. A survey this week for the newly launched campaigning group, National Numeracy, showed that, while 71 per cent of men describe themselves as “good or excellent” at maths, only 59 per cent of women do. Their confidence has no doubt been dented during their own childhoods by the makers of Barbie dolls – who produced a “Teen Talk Barbie” which announced, straight after “I love shopping” that “math class is tough”, and by retailers who continue to adorn pink girlie T-shirts with the words “Allergic to Algebra”. And then there is the past president of Harvard University, Lawrence Summers, an economist and former Treasury secretary under president Bill Clinton, who in 2005 attributed the shortage of women in top academic posts in maths and science to there being more men “at the high end” of aptitude. He may have resigned shortly afterwards, following an international outcry, but the perception he promoted that men are better than women at maths remains alive and kicking to judge by my visit to Ormskirk School in Lancashire for the Telegraph’s Make Britain Count campaign. Take Jade, 15, who said she had always struggled to “get” maths, and put it down to the fact that “girls are more creative”. And the boys in her year made no more than cursory efforts to persuade her otherwise. In fact, given her own low estimate of her maths skills, Jade’s theory on the girl-boy divide over maths demonstrates a grade A grasp of statistics. For the figures show that there is a gender gap in this mixed comprehensive among those going forward to take A-level maths. The group is heavily weighted towards the boys. And that is a pattern repeated across the country.

Should we now embrace GM food?

A new survey commissioned by the British Science Association suggests that public concern in the UK over genetically modified foods has fallen slightly in recent years compared to the period a decade or so ago when campaigning against the technology was at its most strident. The survey’s results – which show a 5% fall since 2003 in those who say they are “concerned” about GM – do not suggest a radical change in opinion, but they do align with the common perception that there is less hostility now towards the technology, coupled with signs of positive support from some politicians within government. The EU is also currently considering whether to relax its rules on the technology and allow each member state to decide whether to impose their own ban on cultivating GM crops, or make their own deals direct with biotech companies on commercial growing. So, after a period of sometimes extreme hostility towards “Frankenfoods”, could the UK be among the first countries within Europe to embrace the technology? Have the arguments both for and against the technology changed enough in recent years to see GM crops grown around the UK and foods containing GM ingredients routinely offered on supermarket shelves? Traditionally, there have been three points of concern regarding GM foods: 1) The fear of unintended consequences; hence why environmentalists have long called for the application of the “precautionary principle”. 2) The opportunity for the biotech industry to “own” the technology and, thereby, tightly control and dictate how farmers around the world use it. 3) The instinctive desire within many of us not to consume something that is “unnatural” – the fear of so-called “Frankenfoods”. Have any of these concerns dissipated enough to see the UK embrace GM food? Do issues such as climate change, poverty and a fast-rising human population mean we now have to put aside these fears?

Raise teacher status to improve schools

Teaching must be made more attractive for the brightest students, says a report from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. Report author Andreas Schleicher says teachers need to be given “status, pay and professional autonomy”. The international report identifies the quality of teachers as the key to raising education standards. The most successful systems, such as Finland and Singapore, recruit high-achieving students, says the report. The report is being published at an international summit on the teaching profession, held in New York and arranged by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and the US Education Department. Mr Schleicher, the OECD’s special adviser on education, argues in his report that if school systems want to be competitive they need to recruit and reward the right type of staff. He says that a modern economy needs teachers who are “high-level knowledge workers” – able to support the learning of children in a digital age. Where children can access facts and information through Google, he says, there is now a need for a different and more versatile kind of teacher. “But people who see themselves as knowledge workers are not attracted by schools organised like an assembly line, with teachers working as interchangeable widgets in a bureaucratic command-and-control environment,” says Mr Schleicher. At present, teachers across the industrialised world are not receiving levels of pay that reflect their importance, says the report. It highlights that the most successful countries for education are often those that deliberately recruit the best students into teaching. It says that good levels of pay, progression and training are necessary to keep high quality teachers. In Finland, a high social status is attached to teaching, making it very competitive, with nine out of 10 applicants for teacher training being turned away.