British primary school children could face calculator ban

Updated on: Monday, December 05, 2011

British government is planning to limit the use of calculators in primary schools to ensure that excessive reliance on the device does not leave the students with poor math skills.

Pupils should not "reach for a gadget every time they need to do a simple sum," Schools minister Nick Gibb was quoted by the Daily Mail as saying.

Instead, Gibb said, children should master arithmetic using written methods.

Teachers could be told in the future to disallow children aged under nine in state schools to use calculators, the newspaper said.

Math exams taken by 11-year-olds will also likely be reformed with the scrapping of an existing section that allows them to use the device, it said.

This follows a recent survey which said that the country was falling behind its international rivals in league tables rating children's mathematics skills.

The Skills for Life survey questioned more than 7,000 16-to 65-year-olds in England to examine literacy and numeracy levels.

Among its results, the government-commissioned research showed that British teenagers now rank 28th among peers in developed nations, slumping dramatically in the last decade, while Singapore, which has virtually no calculator use for 10-year-olds, was second.

The findings also revealed that many adults had math and English skills similar to those of primary school children.

Almost half of all adults had basic math skills that were no better than those of children aged nine to 11, it said, adding that more than five million people were struggling with simple reading and writing.

British primary school children could face calculator ban

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