THE rare sound of backs being slapped echoed around the offices of British education bureaucrats this month, with the news that an international survey showed children in the country's primary schools the third-most-avid readers in the world, after Sweden and the Netherlands. But although it is gratifying that the move back to basic classroom techniques is paying off in reading, there is worrying news from other bits of the curriculum.

In the country that discovered gravity, evolution and DNA, maths and science are on the slide. Numbers of secondary school pupils studying these subjects are falling. Candidates for physics A-level are down by a sixth since the mid-1990s. For maths A-level, they fell by a fifth in the past year alone. The authorities' response is to make the course a lot easier, starting in September 2004.

Which points to the other side of the problem, the fall in quality. Today's exams—not just in maths—are much easier than in past decades. Simultaneously, their importance has grown. Schools tend merely to teach for the test rather than taking time also to impart skills that will be useful to pupils in later life—to make sense of data, spot trends and mistakes, and use spreadsheets.

Employers and universities alike are dismayed. The Ministry of Defence, for example, started a large remedial maths programme when it found that soldiers with a ‘C' pass in GCSE maths (normally taken at 16) were often baffled by fractions.

University departments in science, engineering and economics find it hard to teach people whose grasp of algebra, calculus and statistics is weak or worse. Around half the country's universities now have remedial maths-teaching centres for new students who fail diagnostic tests. These uncover startling gaps—at least compared to what was taught in the past. Coventry University's tests show that those with a ‘B' grade at A-level now have the same or worse maths as those with an ‘N' (fail) grade in 1991.

There is a limit to universities' gap-plugging abilities. If students are really flummoxed, they will drop out rather than catch up. At worst, that means departments simply close. King's College London said this week that its chemistry department, a pioneer in discovering DNA, was “unsustainable”. Applicants to read chemistry have declined by more than a sixth since the mid-1990s.

Maths and science are suffering most from a series of problems that afflict education as a whole. Teachers across the system are ageing, but the problem is acute in maths and science. Recruiting people to teach those subjects is getting ever harder. There is a shortage of 3,500 qualified maths teachers alone. Last year just 350 newly graduated mathematicians went into teaching.

One of the main reasons why maths and science graduates are in such short supply is increasing demand for their skills: good maths graduates are snapped up by, for instance, financial-services firms. Whereas most new history teachers have good degrees, most maths teachers have bad ones. That creates a vicious circle. Subjects badly taught now will produce fewer teachers in future.

The government has an array of carrots to attract maths and science teachers, but keeping them is difficult. Bad teaching elsewhere, often by non-specialists, has left many pupils thoroughly put off the subjects. They are no fun to teach. Rowdy classrooms and antique facilities make lab work in science subjects difficult.

Even good teachers with good students suffer from the fashion for syllabuses divided into easy-to-test chunks, called modules. These may work in, say, English, but not in maths and science. In chemistry A-level, for example, the “what” and “how” of reactions are taught quite separately. In maths A-level, pupils hop from topic to topic, never gaining the fluency in, say, algebra, that comes from frequent practice.

The increasing importance of A-level points scores for university admission—because other ways of assessing students' abilities, such as interviews, have faded away—also makes maths and science unpopular. Maths has one of the highest failure rates of any A-level. Fear of failing outweighs what ought to be a powerful signal: maths A-level is one of very few educational qualifications tied to a measurable economic benefit—around 10% higher earnings.

Even students who want to study maths and science face obstacles. Since pupils now have to do four subjects rather than three in the first year of the sixth form, the limited number of science and maths teachers is under even greater pressure. That makes it harder to accommodate logical, self-reinforcing combinations such as maths, physics and chemistry. State schools have all but abandoned the only really demanding course, further maths.

There is no quick fix. The government is rethinking post-16 education, and may well plump for a continental-type school-leaving qualification, where everyone does at least some maths until they leave school. That would please employers wanting more general numeracy. It has also set up a maths inquiry under a top university administrator, Adrian Smith of Queen Mary College. His report, due out in the autumn, may make painful reading for some vested interests in the education world.

An obvious long-term answer is to pay teachers more in hard-to-fill posts such as maths and physics. That would breach the taboo that all subjects are of equal value. In the short-term, it may be necessary to tap the universities' maths expertise. Students and postgraduates may be pleased to earn some pocket money teaching in schools, but academics may not. Moreover, the teaching unions guard jealously their monopoly on the blackboard. Saving British maths and science education will mean binning such cherished notions. If so, other subjects may benefit too.

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