Unruly Joins George Osborne To Launch New UK Government Initiative To Get More Pupils Taking Maths And Science At A-Level
Education Minister Elizabeth Truss chats to Unruly COO and co-founder Sarah Wood about the new Your Life campaign during a visit to Unruly’s London HQ
Unruly is proud to announce its participation in a new campaign to get more pupils taking Maths and Science at A-Level, announced by George Osborne today.
Unruly COO Sarah Wood – part of an independent board of eight entrepreneurs and advocates – joined the Chancellor on stage at the Science Museum in London this morning as he launched “Your Life”, a new Government initiative designed to encourage more students to pursue careers in engineering and technology.
The new campaign wants the majority of young people to study Maths until they are 18 by 2020, and for the number of students pursuing A-Levels in physics and maths to rise significantly.
Currently, fewer than 20% of pupils in England currently carry on studying Maths at any level after GCSEs – the lowest rate of 24 developed countries, behind Estonia, France, USA, Spain, Russia and China (source: Nuffield Foundation).
Unruly joined organisations such as Arup, L’Oreal, Microsoft, Ford, BP, BSkyB, Airbus, Balfour Beatty, Laing O’Rourke, IBM, Nestle and Samsung in pledging to do more to highlight the career opportunities open to those studying STEM subjects.
Mr Osborne said: “Backing growth in sectors such as science, tech and engineering are part of our long-term plan to deliver economic security and sustainable growth for a more resilient economy.
“This campaign, which brings together some of Britain’s best businesses, institutions and government, will help inspire young people into jobs in these exciting sectors that are essential to our economic prosperity.”
Education Minister Liz Truss, Minister for Skills and Enterprise Matthew Hancock and Financial Secretary to the Treasury and Minister for Women, Nicky Morgan, was also at the Science Museum to announce the new campaign.
Education Minister Elizabeth Truss added: “Rising numbers of people are taking maths and physics A-levels — but it is still very low. Too many teenagers, especially girls, don’t realise that maths and physics get you everywhere. They have the highest earnings and can open doors to careers in business, journalism, technology, engineering – in fact anything you can probably think of.
“That’s why I am so delighted that entrepreneurs like Sarah Wood and Edwina Dunn have agreed to lead this drive to show young people, especially girls, how science and maths have helped them to make it big.”
Truss and Wood speak to Unruly CFO Lucy Greggains on a tour of Unruly’s London HQ
Sarah said: “Many of Unruly’s key milestones simply wouldn’t have been possible if we hadn’t hired people with Maths and Science A-levels. Unruly = maths + memes. We don’t just watch the videos, we make them famous and we couldn’t have built a world-leading social video technology company without a lot of maths brains round the table! Our programmatic video platform is the brainchild of a team of world-class software engineers, who are heroes in our eyes!”
“We wouldn’t have secured $25 million in Series A funding without the nous of our Finance team. We wouldn’t have been able to run award-winning campaigns like Evian’s Roller Babies or Three’s #Singitkitty without the data wizards in our Operations team. And we certainly wouldn’t have been able to algorithmically predict the shareability of videos without our team of rockstar data analysts.
“Unruly’s growth is part of a broader story about the booming digital economy. The whole world is going digital and if we want British companies of tomorrow to compete effectively on a global stage we need to equip British pupils with the right skills today. There’s an acute skills shortage threatening the UK’s economic growth and more STEM skills are desperately needed.“
“Pupils who have studied Maths and Science at A-level are better equipped to apply maths principles to real world situations and they have experience of solving complex problems – these skills are highly valued and highly rewarded in the digital economy.”
To find out more about the initiative, click here.
