To have not known kids have to attain grade 4 in maths?

So what skills would people deems as essential?

I can think of...
Money
Shopping (budgeting etc)
Calculator use
Time
Understanding time tables
Bank statements
Loans & Mortgages
Tax
Basic calculations

Which is why I suggested using the 11+ as the "life skill" benchmark instead for struggling pupils.

Agreed everyone needs basic maths ,most peop!e don't need most of the maths taught on the GCSE .

Did OP mention having kids in the first post?

But more and more jobs need basic Maths skills. Normal life is more complicated these days with internet banking, apps, pensions, insurances, utility contracts, etc., so again, even people not needing Maths in the workplace will need basic Maths skills just to navigate normal life. It really is an essential life skill - even just to work out which option is better on supermarket shelves when comparing different sized items or comparing products on BOGOF or 3 for 2 offers against other cheaper items sold singly.

Fair enough, unless you work in STEM you probably don't need to know the equation for the volume of a sphere, but you still need basic numeracy skills such as fractions, percentages, areas of basic shapes, etc. Tradesmen need to know how many bags of cement to buy to lay a patio, how many tiles for a kitchen floor, how many rolls of wallpaper for a lounge, etc. All that is basic numeracy. Chefs need to know the costings of the meals they cook and how to scale up/down recipes for bigger/smaller portions etc. Self employed people (even window cleaners, gardeners etc) need adequate numeracy to deal with tax returns, invoicing, etc.

I'm not saying that the current GCSE Maths is suitable for "life" numeracy - it's deficient in lots of ways, but a lot of it IS applicable to "normal" people for their "normal" lives. Personally, I'd rather see a "numeracy" exam taken, something akin to the 11+ Maths paper which really does test basic numeracy skills, to concentrate on the basics. With the Maths GCSE only offered to more able students who can actually access the syllabus. I think the foundation GCSE Maths paper is an attempt to do that, but it's still "too heavy" on more complicated Maths, and some schools have "middle" streams/sets where part of the class are doing foundation and others doing the "full" syllabus which is crazy and won't help the lower level students at all! To my mind, we need two completely separate subjects at school, one called "numeracy" and another called "maths" - one being life maths skills and other aimed at STEM.

I agree.

English Functional Skills is very good at including useful stuff and excluding the less needed.

Most apprenticeship, require a person To have at least grade fours in Maths and English or eqivalent.

Now this may blow your mind but not every body has a STEM career
And most people will not be an economist like your son
I hope your son isn't as narrow minded as you and able to.think outside of his little bubble.

If she’s doing an apprenticeship, she won’t even have to do that. Also, she could just not turn up to the lessons/exams. No one’s going to physically force her.

@Ghsvdf if your maths is as poor as your comprehension and critical thinking skills, I suspect you would fail to achieve a grade 4. I don't understand how you can't understand that different DC have different abilities. Good for you for having a studious, intelligent child. In spite of you, rather than because of you I imagine.

One college I taught at students who did not have a grade 4 had to resit at every opportunity. Personally I thought this was not a great idea, you are not going to go from a 1 to a 4 in the three months between results and November resits.

I agree. There is a whole creative writing paper for English Lsnguage, which is fairly subjective. We should be testing competency in literacy and numeracy, not these ridiculous writing off kids who can't possibly get 4's because the system is designed so that a certain percentage will always fail.

Everyone says about GCSE maths that when in real life do you need trigonometry, geometry and simultaneous equations but no one mentions that to get get marks in GCSE English there is a lot of poetry and creative writing which are a waste of time.

There are are a lot of teenagers who are brilliant at science and maths (often boys) who have no interest in this and may struggle to get the 4 but have good English otherwise and can write a scientific report, instructions or a news article which is understandable for the reader.

you do realise that 30% of 16 year old fail GCSE maths every single summer....

wow wow wow

And I can (and do) understand all that without ever having achieved a grade 4 equivalent in GCSE maths. Meanwhile, my high achieving niece has no understanding of budgeting, and has had trouble with store card debt.

OK I'll bite.. kids who can't.. kids who don't have the intellectual ability to get a grade 4, however hard they work at it. Kids like my son, who is currently sitting his GCSEs because he is in a mainstream school, and if he achieves a 1 will have absolutely aced it.

Of course, nobody is taking away GCSE maths for those of us (like me) whose entire career is based on STEM. But face it, we aren't "most people".

I can still understand a range of qualifications is needed to make sure everyone has a chance to succeed in their own way.

30% of kids fail by design.
If 70% of kids had done better than your son, he would have failed.

You don't need extreme learning difficulties to struggle in certain subjects. That's a ridiculous thing to say.

My sister was a primary school teacher for 25 years she sat her maths GCSE at least four times before she got a C ,whilst she mainly worked in early years
She ended up helping prepare kids for their SATS !

Here in Australia if you don't pass math you need to repeat the year it's a core subject

No it isn't, it's about 60%

And Maths isn't used for a wide range of careers. It's no indication of a struggle in future life at all.

As others said, it used to be a grade C. A relative is a primary school teacher and sat her maths GCSE 4 times before getting a C to get onto her teacher training course. Thankfully she has never taught higher than y2.

Compound interest is one of the things we do use in life... understanding loans, mortgages etc.

Maybe a topic for a different thread... what maths should we all understand!