Last year (Saturday 1 March 2025), The Times devoted a page to the Richmond Project, a charity that is being set up by the former prime minister Rishi Sunak and his wife Akshata Murty. The project’s purpose is the improvement of numeracy. Such a project poses quite a challenge. On 12 January 2026, the Sunaks were interviewed on the BBC Breakfast program about the progress of the project.
During the interview Murty made the point that understanding numbers was more important than understanding algebra, trigonometry or calculus with the implication that one cannot understand these more advanced mathematical topics unless one understands the basics. I do however feel that in the interview, she did not address the point as to how the issues of numeracy should be addressed other than saying that it was a joint effort between parents and teachers.
The Sunaks are not the first to tackle poor numeracy. One of the pioneers of infant teaching was Maria Montessori (1870 – 1952) who in 1906 opened her “Casa dei Bambini” (Children’s house) in Rome where she applied her educational theories to working-class children from poor backgrounds up to the age of seven. Her approach encompassed teaching the whole child, not just the “three R’s”. She used many teaching aids to promote both reading and numeracy. It is significant that all her teaching aids for numeracy are based on tens – after all, her native Italy used the metric system and had a decimal coinage (at the time one lira was equal to one French franc). In 1916 she toured the United States and was invited to be the keynote speaker at the founding of the UKMA’s sister organisation, the US Metric Association. During her address she said “… the advantage of the metric system over other systems is shown by its simplicity and the ease which it gives to accomplishing all research work”, something that is evident in her teaching methods.
Although Rishi Sunak was born and brought up in the United Kingdom, he was the child of immigrant parents while Murty was brought up in India. Both come from a culture where the metric system has been in use for 70 years, namely India where the metric system and decimal currency have been in use since 1956. Prior to Indian Independence (1947), the issue of metrication was one on which Ghandi and Nehru had differing ideas – Ghandi opposed metrication on grounds that the poor might well be exploited during the change-over process while Nehru saw metrication and decimalisation as the way forward in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Many nurseries have a height chart where a child’s height can be measured and optionally recorded. An internet investigation shows that in the UK, some height charts show only metric units while others show both metric and imperial units. The centimetre scale is the simplest to use as it reinforces the concept of counting and also does not require complicated explanations as to why there are 12 inches in a foot. This suggests to me that many of the suppliers of height charts are driven not by what is good for the child, but by what grandma and grandad are familiar with (and it is often grandma and grandad who will buy height charts for use in the home). In this context, it is worth noting that it is difficult to buy metric-only tape measures in the UK. Unlike its operation in the UK, Amazon advertises both dual unit and metric-only tape measures in India and mostly metric-only tape measures on their Australian website.
In addition to monitoring children’s heights, parents often also monitor their children’s weights. Virtually all bathroom scales in the United Kingdom (apart from those that are professionally calibrated for use by medical practitioners) have dual scales allowing the user to choose between metric or imperial units. Again, this appears to be driven by consumer demand. The same applies to digital kitchen scales. What is missing in many households (my own included) is the traditional kitchen balance scales where one can actually see the weights and visualise exactly what 100 grams is.
One area where the British education system does lend itself to mathematical teaching is the use of the Celsius scale for measuring temperature – when it goes below freezing, children can learn how to handle negative numbers!
I believe that many children, especially those who come from a background where learning is not valued, tend to write maths off because they are taught weird things like centimetres, kilograms and kilometres at school but real people use feet and inches, stones and pound and miles. In short, what they are being taught at school is not being reinforced in the outside world.
In conclusion, I am sure that everybody in the UKMA, whatever our political leanings, wish the Sunaks well in the Richmond Project.
References
Nicola Woodcock (Education Editor) – The Times, Saturday 1st March 2025, “The Sunaks seek formula for numeracy”
Aksharta Murty – The Times, Saturday 1st March 2025 (Comment) – “Fear of maths is life-limiting – let’s conquer it”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maria_Montessori
https://usma.org/a-brief-history-of-the-usma#locale-notification
Gandi, Nehru & Metrication: https://pure.manchester.ac.uk/ws/portalfiles/portal/65152126/Past_Present_Author_Accepted_Version.pdf
Metric Views 