Simon Jenkins earns his corn through provocation but does not need to encourage young people to follow his example by studying subjects which do not require mathematics (Comment, 19 February). Most people would assume that we have more than enough lawyers, now that they are pestering the public to take out vexatious prosecutions on terms of "no win no fee". As for salespeople, I do not wish to denigrate the importance of the arts and fashion industries to our economy, but buyers of manufactures are probably more prevalent in the UK than sellers of the same. They require scientific literacy and preferably an ability to speak a foreign language (too much like hard work!).

Since the UK is in the business of buying nuclear power stations, fast trains and flood controls, as well as updating IT systems without wasting more billions, the shortage of scientific/technical expertise in the government, the civil service and the opinion-forming media is a gross disadvantage. Far from castigating mathematics, we should reform pre-university education along the lines of the international baccalaureate, in which all major subjects are compulsory.

CN Dack

Leicester

• The problems that Simon Jenkins points out are widely recognised in the mathematics education community, here and around the world. It is scandalous that most adults cannot use the mathematics they are taught in secondary school in their later lives, and that pupils actively dislike the subject (even more in the high-performing countries, for reasons that Jenkins outlines).

The potential of a different mathematics curriculum for empowering and enriching lives is well-established. We know how to enable teachers to teach like this, but it involves a profound change in the balance of their practice from pupils' learning procedures to their thinking through problems that seem worthwhile to them. The reasons these changes have not happened are systemic – a mixture of self-inflicted wounds in policy and bad "engineering" of the design and implementation.

There has been a government decision to broaden the kinds of task in maths exams to include substantial problems; given the inevitable pushback, we shall see what actually emerges.

Professor Hugh Burkhardt

Nottingham