Sunak is right that our students need financial literacy – but that shouldn’t mean yet more maths | Simon Jenkins

W hat is it about ex-ministers that they suddenly know how to run the country? Tony Blair hurls thunderbolts at his successor, Keir Starmer. His former colleague, Alan Milburn, is shocked that a million young people aged 16-24 are not in education, training or a job – one in seven of them with degrees: a rate double that in Ireland and three times that in the Netherlands. Meanwhile the former prime minister, Rishi Sunak, complains that pupils are never taught “financial literacy”. They are left unprepared for life outside the school gates. Sunak is clearly right, though we might wonder what he did about it when he was in Downing Street. His proposed numeracy project aims to teach children how to handle money, a skill at which he sees Britons in the dark ages compared with Germany and elsewhere. His only obsession is to believe this requires mathematics taught to the age of 18. For the vast majority of people, numeracy begins and ends with arithmetic. I remember an army education officer saying that school maths was so useless he had to teach soldiers addition and subtraction through darts and carpentry. Arithmetic is indeed needed in learning how to handle money. It is the foundation on which are built percentages, proportions and rates of interest. Children should learn how to measure inflation and judge risk, how to detect a scam and a fiddle. But algebra, calculus and quadratic equations are for the birds – and boffins. …