Children in care are six times less likely to pass GCSE Maths.

The thing about maths is that you need each building block in place to make sense of what comes next. Miss a month of history and you might miss the Romans, but the Victorians still make sense. Miss a few weeks of algebra, and everything that follows stops making sense. Maths learning is so sequential, and placement instability doesn’t accommodate for that.

Over a third of children in care are moved home in Years 10–13, often during their GCSE years.⁴ For maths attainment this is an issue, given the clear relationship between house moves and outcomes. Among children generally, 65% of those who never move home between Reception and Year 11 achieve five GCSE passes including English and Maths, compared with just 11% of those who move nine or more times.³

As a result, children in care are six times less likely to achieve a grade 5+ in GCSE Maths than all other children.⁵

Numeracy is one of the clearest levers of social mobility we have — and a way out of NEET (Not in Education, Employment, and Training).

Across nine GCSE subjects, securing one grade higher is worth around £207,000 in lifetime earnings, and maths returns more than any other subject: a single grade improvement at GCSE Maths is linked to a £15K boost — more than double what you get from English.⁶

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Longitudinal research finds that maths attainment remains one of the strongest pathways through which children can outrun their parents’ socio-economic status.⁷

The cost of not getting there is profound. Adults in the UK with low numeracy earn around 6.5% less than they could,⁸ and are more likely to be unemployed.⁹ This generalises to care leavers, who are three to four times more likely to be NEET.¹⁰

Recent research shows GCSE Maths attainment is the single biggest measured predictor of whether a care leaver enters sustained employment or education by age 21 — bigger than placement type.²

Young people without passes in Maths are significantly more likely to be NEET at age 20.

Without a maths GCSE, the routes forward narrow sharply. Most Level 3 courses — A-levels and vocational equivalents — require maths as a baseline entry qualification, meaning young people are blocked from progressing even where they have strong attainment in other subjects.

Apprenticeships, including those designed specifically to support young people into work, routinely require a ‘good’ maths pass, closing off one of the few structured pathways into stable employment available to care leavers without traditional academic routes. And without Level 3 qualifications, access to higher education becomes near-impossible — the data shows care leavers who achieved 5+ GCSEs including maths were nearly three times more likely to have studied at degree level than those without.²

The maths barrier is solvable.

We can’t undo the disruptions that put children behind in the first place, but knowledge gaps are not permanent. They can be located, sequenced, and filled. That’s what we’re building.

Our goal: 1,000 children in care on track for a 5+ GCSE Maths grade by the end of 2027.

See how we’re building it →