As late as the 1960s, the Prime Minister’s driver used to always have to make sure he had four one penny coins in his pocket because if there was an alert of imminent Soviet nuclear attack when the PM was travelling, that was how the PM would dial Whitehall and coordinate the UKs response.

(And they’d have done better to drop half the signatories, however grandly titled, who have irrelevant bugbears shoved in)

But for the elite scientists and mathematicians here, writing about more elite science and maths, it is wholly untrue to say a prescription of more woolly relevance and more breadth would give us more of that, or indeed more Fellows of the Royal Society in future.

We absolutely need more people with greater maths capacity at all stages (GGSE 4+ at a minimum, ideally higher), and we need everyone to be more mathematical for society and the economy. Not just cos AI, but because almost every field of life is becoming more mathematical.

Thirdly, they espouse the tired trope of real world relevance. For an august body that focusses on evidence, this is very disappointing. Work from David Thomas and Axiom maths, and our own work in Maths Horizons, shows a necessity for problem solving and challenge, not “maths through recipes”

Secondly, the prescription doesn’t match the challenge. Delivering more top talent in stem - which I strongly and wholly agree with - would tell us we need *more* stretch, and *more* focus - including pathways from GCSE to A Level. The widening approach would completely tell against this!

Firstly, it is wholly inconsistent, largely because it has had to take the hobby horse of each signatory, many of which aren’t relevant or consistent.

In one breath, it calls for more focus on maths and science and data literacy. Then in the next, it calls for a much wider set of options at 16+18

Claudia says in the morning if that’s an option in previous series, I think. But even if she doesn’t, we know in this series that a) they only got one traitor out (which still leaves 2 left and they don’t recruit with 2 left), and b) there was a murder every night there could have been!

Let’s not pretend that you and I wouldn’t also trade off £87k for the joy of being proven to be right and clever in front of millions of people on prime time telly

Exactly!!!

The only trouble with the first one working well is that they’ll inevitably do series 2 and 3 and 4 with increasingly shit Z list celeb contestants. It partly worked so well this year because they had some v big names.

It’s quite the twist when it turns out that the traitor is Trent

He barrelled past the defenders into the box?

And it ends with a corker of a message from Sir Gav to Boris (where, much like the Iran / Iraq war, one wishes they could both be in the wrong and lose the argument)

bsky.app/profile/john...

I am inspired by your photos to do similar…….

Also, when I’m abroad, I take photos of universities advertising in cities, and I look up whether they’re private or public provision or franchised, and wonder about their target student base and course offerings and what their marketing conclusions led them to advertise here or be based there

Quite so. Plus a renewed commitment to GCSE resits slipped in there, which is quite the commitment given the CAR….