NSW One Nation’s Leader Mark Latham told Sky News on Wednesday the drop is partly due to an “unfortunate habit” where students in Year 12 choose to do the easiest maths stream, colloquially known in Australia as “veggie maths,” to get better marks, leading to a falling number of students doing the harder real maths.

But he said the low enrolment in math is also a result of the declining teaching quality caused by the “woke agenda”.

INCLUSIVE

Mr Latham criticised the NSW Teachers Federation for releasing “woke” training videos instructing teachers to be more inclusive of the LGBTQ community than focusing on how to teach the curriculum.

The NSW upper house MP said there had also been a new shift from the traditional approach to learning math to project-based learning, such as learning to run dating sites like Tinder.

“This is as wacky as you’ll ever get,” he said.

“If we just taught straight maths, which students can enjoy, it gives your brain a sense of order and the power of logic. That’s the benefit of mathematics beyond the pure discipline.

“If we could just get the wokeness out of maths and every other subject, we’d be so much better off.”

Mr Latham also warned that there are “alarming statistics of a very high number of teachers who’ve got no training in maths, no particular expertise, who were standing in front of maths classes”.

“It’s a dismal failure on every front to try and lift students’ results and build an academy of more mathematicians,” he said.

According to data released last week by the AMSI, participation in Year 12 maths fell in 2020 to just 66 per cent, compared to around 71 to 73 per cent during the past decade.

Meanwhile, Year 12 participation in advanced maths plummeted below 10 per cent for the first time, to 9.2 per cent (compared to 11.6 percent in 2009), and enrolment in intermediate maths dropped to 17.6 per cent (compared to 23.3 percent in 2008).

AMSI Director Professor Tim Marchant described Australia’s declining mathematics participation as a “multi-faceted problem” that requires “national collaboration between government and educators to reverse”.

TRAINING

“It is critical we act now to tackle out-of-field mathematics teaching, which is happening 40 per cent of the time. We need to be working with these teachers, increasing their training and professional development,” he said.

The AMSI report also found that only 6.7 per cent of female students were enrolled in advanced maths (compared to 7.5 per cent in 2019), and 16.8 per cent participated in intermediate maths (compared to 20.5 per cent in 2019).

A greater drop was observed in the male category, with the participation rate in advanced maths decreasing from 12.9 per cent in 2019 to 11.9 per cent in 2020.