TV LEGEND Johnny Ball has backed Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s plan to shake-up the ways maths is taught in the UK.
He told GB News: “I’ve just listened to Rishi Sunak for the first time and what he says is absolutely right, learning about the angles you kick a football at is still maths but it’s sport as well.
“So that’s what he’s talking about, involving maths and bringing maths to the fore in all the other subjects, and here I think he’s absolutely right.
“It is essential to everybody for life, it really is.”
In a discussion with Patrick Christys, he said: “What’s been done wrong is over many years, education ministers have said, ‘I know, I’ll change the curriculum slightly, and that way I get better figures next year, and they’ll think I’ve done better educationally’ and of course, that has failed.
“When I did my programmes in the 1980s, we studied how people did maths and in Singapore, they had the best mathematical turnout in the whole world.
“And when they looked at it, they were using old British maths books which are now stuck on the shelf and we didn’t use.”
Asked how maths can be made more appealing, he said: “There are so many things. First of all, you choose to use more geometry.
“The Greeks were the greatest maths nation ever and they didn’t do numeracy.
“They didn’t even give the numbers names but they did geometry and with geometry you could really understand so much more.”
