Up until now, maths has been a compulsory subject. Now that you are at the point of deciding whether to take A levels, and, if so, which subjects to take, you will no doubt be looking further into the future, possibly to university, and to a career beyond. Is it worth keeping maths, or should you drop it in favour of something more specifically aimed at your choice of degree or career? 

It is important to remember that you will need maths in order to study many other subjects, and that it makes those subjects easier to understand. While you obviously have to study maths in order to be a mathematician, you don't have to want to be a mathematician in order to keep studying maths! The laboratory and social sciences all rely on maths to a greater or lesser extent, and very many other subjects available at third level - such as economics, archaeology, medicine, psychology and architecture - usually require at least a C in GCSE maths, and will be much easier to study if you have a good grasp of the subject at this level.

School leaving qualifications

In these pages we will use the terms "GCSE" or "A level" when we talk about the qualifications people normally leave school with. This is just to keep things simple - if you live in Scotland, and will leave school with an SCE Standard Grade or SCE Higher Grade, then all the information here applies just as well to you too. Indeed, wherever you come from, the information here will be useful to you.

Employability

It's not just at university that that the ability to follow logical instructions, to manipulate equations and deal with basic geometry come in useful. Many people, in all walks of life, find that the topics they were taught at GCSE come up again and again. For example, employers rate data-handling ability as one of their top requirements in new recruits: the ability to get information from graphs and charts, to manipulate percentages and fractions, and to make sensible predictions from data.

Maths graduates earn more!

A wide range of career options also means a chance to earn more money: a recent study, conducted by economists at the University of Swansea, showed that maths and computing degrees make the biggest difference to lifetime earnings. On average, a graduate of any degree can expect to earn £149,760 more in his or her lifetime than a person leaving education with two A levels. For maths and computing graduates, this figure rises to over £220,000!

And those that are really committed can achieve salaries far above the average: a look at job adverts from the finance sector shows figures between 40K and 150K offered to people with a maths background and a few years experience.

Learning to learn

The most fundamental reason to study mathematics is that it teaches you to learn - to build up an understanding from basic principles (for example, starting from shapes, triangles and angles), to build upon existing knowledge to develop general concepts (Pythagoras' theorem, trigonometry), and then to apply this general concept to specific examples (solving specific geometric problems using the techniques of trig). You learn to think logically, to ask questions, and do thorough and rigorous investigations to answer them.

Maths is everywhere

Maths can also be both interesting and challenging in its own right. But the most important reason why GCSE maths is important is that to live a successful life in the modern world you will need it every day.