This document discusses the British Sociological Association's response to the National Strategy for Quantitative Skills proposed by the High Level Strategy Group. The BSA advocates for a more bottom-up approach that emphasizes flexibility, ease of access, and addressing barriers faced by university staff. While acknowledging initiatives aimed at schools and undergraduates, the BSA stresses the need to evaluate their impact and ensure quantitative skills taught are relevant to the needs of social science students and researchers. The BSA also expresses concerns about benchmarking and pressures that could limit academic freedom and advocates for quantitative methods to be grounded in sociological issues rather than treating mathematics as common to all subjects.

1. Clapping with One Hand?
Sociology’s response to the National
Strategy for Quantitative Skills
Consultation.
Mainstreaming
Professor Geoff Payne Quantitative Methods
School of Geography, Politics and Sociology Cardiff Q-Step Centre
1st Annual Conference
18 September 2014

2. High Level Strategy Group for Quantitative Skills
Universities UK
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3. HLSG’s National Strategy to address the UK’s deficit in
Quantitative Skills
‘a long term plan for coordinated action’ with four priority areas (or ‘themes’)
Making the case
Coordination
Building the evidence base
Investing in the supply chain
Specific activities to include
• creating a consistent message which reinforces the importance of QS;
• giving support for existing activities, not least through helping to coordinate
them;
• monitoring QS levels in schools and universities;
• providing expert advice and joint interventions where appropriate;
• identifying the ‘research and investment opportunities that will have the greatest
impact’.
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4. Theme One: ‘Making the case’;
maximising ‘reach and impact by developing consistent key messages
championing the need and importance of QS to new and existing
stakeholders’.
For existing stakeholders
(students, HEIs, and government)
• ‘Agree key messages and deliver
consistently’
• ‘Develop case studies and an evidence
base on demand / employability’
• ‘STEM skills for no-STEM (sic)
students’
For new audiences
(employers and the wider public)
• Messages framed for non-experts,
aimed at raising public awareness
• (e.g. Big Data and the importance of
statistical literacy)
• Identify employers with a need for QS
engage them as advocates.
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5. a consistent message
A collective understanding of the causes and nature of the problem,
expressed through a shared conceptual framework and consensual
language, and
an agreement on what the best solutions are
Different interest groups?
language
‘stakeholders’ and ‘STEM subjects’
‘levers’, ‘drivers’, ‘benchmarks’, ‘league tables’, ‘student satisfaction surveys’
rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s?
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6. Theme Two: ‘Coordination’
Share resources, expertise and best practice
utilising
• websites, mailing lists, workshops, outreach, forums, materials, and
publications;
Facilitate engagement between key sectors to establish support
networks;
Influence the development of policy and practice relating to statistics
in education by:
• engaging and lobbying BIS and DfE;
• developing a manifesto; and
• responding to policy consultations
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7. BSA’s Response to Theme Two
‘We favour open publication of teaching materials in formats that maximise uptake:
for instance the preparation of material in small units which would enable their
selective and flexible integration into other module syllabuses without the latter
requiring wholesale overhaul. On-campus demonstrations of such materials, and
ensuring simple, user-friendly interfaces, would encourage adoption.’
i.e. an emphasis on local academic life, not national coordination: how to make
change work on the ground:-
• flexibility;
• ease of local access;
• decentralisation;
• how to make the transition easier for the university staff (BSA members) who will
carry the burden of making things happen. 7

8. Theme Three: ‘building the evidence base’
‘reviewing/measuring QS supply and demand’
supply
• Measure existing QS capacity at all stages of education
• Monitor the level of QS at school and university and track progress
demand
• Measure the level of demand for QS in employment, and
• Project the cost of a lack of QS skills to the UK economy
analysis of QS teaching to champion best practice
• Identify existing drivers and disincentives and challenges within schools and HE
• Identify examples of QS being taught across disciplines at the school and HE
levels and the associated benefits
• Review benchmarking exercises
• Assess teaching capacity
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9. BSA’s Response to Theme Three: Part One
‘Unless we have a base-line study, it will not be possible to monitor the
success of the Q-Step program and the National Strategy. We know relatively
little about the level of QS expertise among our members, or their QS
teaching capacity, and would welcome support in scoping the extent of QS
delivery in UK degree programs. This fundamental review should extend to
evaluating the QS capacities of school leavers, and comparing this with their
QS performance levels at graduation. Funding for such a review needs to be
found.’
• A simple ‘before and after’ evaluation design, albeit a mono-causal one.
• not only the changes within the 15 universities which have been funded,
but across all of the country’s HEIs.
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10. BSA’s Response to Theme Three: Part Two
‘National subject benchmarks are very properly in the purview of each
discipline, and there would be counter-productive resistance to outside
interference. . . . while consultation with and lobbying of the societies
might be appropriate, and contribute to stimulating change, this
requires careful handling. Changes to subject benchmarks may result
from disciplines choosing to embrace enhanced QS, and hence
voluntarily agreeing to modify the focus of their degree programs. That
is very different from the arbitrary imposition of fresh demands, or
what could be interpreted as unwelcome limitations of the academic
freedom of disciplines to decide their own content. Benchmarks have
to reflect the needs of each discipline, and these extend well beyond
QS.’
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11. Theme Four:
investing in the supply chain
Level Activity
School ACME post-16 core maths qualification
Undergraduate Nuffield-ESRC-HEFCE Q-Step Programme
BA undergraduate Summer School Scholarship Programme
Postgraduate/ ESRC-HEFCE-BA Curriculum Innovation and Researcher
research Development Initiative
ESRC Research Methods Festival
BA Skills Acquisition Awards
BA-RGS Collaboration: QS at Masters and School levels
Other RSS stats training workshops for journalists and student
journalists 11

12. BSA’s Response to Theme Four
‘clearly there is a case for tackling the numeracy deficit in schools, and
we acknowledge the potential lead role of the Q-Step program. We
recognise the contributions beginning to be signalled from the BA
Curriculum Innovation and Researcher Development Initiative, and the
success of the ESRC Methods Festival. We would suggest that the
contribution of the ESRC National Centre for Research Methods is
added to the examples.’
The test for the initiatives in the four themes is how far they tackle
‘the core issues, namely the low levels of engagement with QS among
our students; the need to promote new attitudes among academic
staff; the requirement for easy, user-friendly access to new, flexible
teaching materials; and the underlying problem of under-funding.’
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13. Two Approaches to the Quantitative Skills Deficit
High Level Strategy Group
Style:
• top down: ‘levers’, ‘drivers’, ‘league tables’,
‘benchmarks’,
• Centralised national program
• maths as common to all subjects
Goals
• a more efficient economy
• helping employers and mathematicians
• larger labour market supply of highly
numerate workers
• advanced statistical expertise
Problem
• inadequate maths skills
Solution
• more maths teaching
British Sociological Association
Style
• bottom up: ‘hearts and minds’, help to
change; local diversity, access and control
• attention to ‘on the ground’ factors
• treating social sciences as separate disciplines
with different needs
Goals
• a more informed and critical population
• helping social scientists/researchers
• better social science education and research
• Basic numeracy/statistical literacy
Problem
• inadequate research skills
Solution
• Less maths; more and better applied statistics
grounded in sociological issues
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14. Alternative Baseline questions
• Why do we need to produce a more numerate population?
• How are school and university students actually going to use their
enhanced QS in their later lives?
• What range of QS expertise is needed for different groups in society?
• What is the precise content of ‘QS’?
• Are QS the same as mathematical literacy?
• Where, and how, in the educational system are QS to be taught?
• Which QS skills do social science undergraduates and postgraduates
need?
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15. What QS do social science students require?
‘QM is more about the logic of evidence handling than fancy
maths. However, students still need to be comfortable enough
with the numbers to keep their focus on what it is that they
are doing with them and why, not the machinery of the
calculations. There are some basics that students do need a
firm grasp of, but they are all in GCSE Maths: fractions,
decimals; rules of addition, subtraction, division and
multiplication; powers and the concept of an equation. That’s
it.’ (MacInnes 2014, 3-4)
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16. Sociology: the ‘Great Expansion’
c. Second World War Early 1970s
Output of ‘sociology’ graduates:
33 in ‘sociology, social anthropology 1,700 in ‘sociology and
and social administration’ social anthropology’
Lecturers in sociology
c.60 in a dozen universities: 1,200 teaching (+ 900
researchers) in 88 HEIs
BSA membership
None c.2,500
Sources: Smith 1975; Payne et al. 1981
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17. Other reasons QS was devalued in Sociology
• subject specialization in English Sixth Forms: no number work after age of
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• emphasis on non-empirical ‘grand theories’ of society and human life
• interest in topics which lent themselves to ‘qualitative’ methods of data
collection and interpretation
• convenience and cheapness of small-scale projects compared to large-scale
surveys
• absence of formal research training for postgraduates
• expansion of sociology in HEIs funded as a cheap Humanities ‘reading’
subject, not a lab-based subject
• attachment to ‘new’ methodologies by young sociologists seeking to
legitimize their place in the profession
• employability of sociology graduates in an expanding service sector, due
to other, non-quantitative skills like communication and critical thinking.
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18. Why has the failure to include QS been tolerated
for so long?
‘These reasons must go beyond the pedagogical, technical or
intellectual challenges of teaching statistics. They must also account for
why, for most university social science faculty, teaching statistics has
not been any kind of priority. They must account for why, for most
students, this has not only been no disappointment, but rather a
source of relief. And they must account for why those who employ
social science graduates have been content to recruit those with few
quantitative skills.’ (MacInnes 2014, 1)
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