EAST Lancashire teaching unions today called for radical action to halt the crisis in maths teaching.

Schools are increasingly struggling to fill maths posts and maintain quality teaching.

Now the National Union of Teachers and the National Association of Head Teachers have spoken out after a damning report by leading professor Adrian Smith, who has released a 15-month inquiry for the government on post-14 maths education.

Professor Smith found that the introduction of Curriculum 2000 made a bad situation worse by dividing A-Level maths into two parts, and he stressed the importance of maths as a life skill as well as a qualification.

Commenting on Professor Smith's report, Making Mathematics Count, Simon Jones, Blackburn with Darwen NUT secretary, said: "Professor Smith is right to describe the shortage of mathematics teachers as a crisis.

"The enormous pressures placed on teachers by this government, combined with highly competitive salaries outside teaching are driving our mathematics graduates away from teaching.

"It is the poisonous combinations of excessive workload, deteriorating pupil behaviour, lack of professional freedom and depressed salary levels generally which have created shortage subjects, and not just in mathematics.

"Solve these problems and the crisis in mathematics teacher numbers will be solved also.

"The disaster of the AS-Level has led to too much of the time available for teaching being taken up by assessment, thereby discouraging young people from carrying on with mathematics."

The LEAs largely mirror the national picture in finding it more difficult to recruit maths specialists. In Blackburn with Darwen,16 newly qualified teachers with maths as their specialism have been recruited over the last two years. In Key Stage 3 Maths the borough was the most improved local authority in the country.

Pleckgate High School also intends to bid for Specialist College status in maths and one of their teachers runs an annual residential maths weekend.

Specialist maths consultants work with all the high schools in East Lancashire specifically to look at ways of enhancing maths teaching and raising the profile of maths in school. There are also maths booster classes, study skills seminars, and young enterprise schemes, to encourage pupils to use maths in different contexts.

But according to the unions more needs to be done. David Fann, council member for Lancashire's NAHT, said: "The report is the right way forward. Radical action needs to be taken to halt the decline in maths and start to restore it to the crucial position it held some years ago."