Maths4Girls

The Maths4Girls project aims to increase the confidence of girls in maths and encourage more girls to take maths beyond GCSE level. In the UK, significantly less girls take maths beyond GCSEs than boys. We have created a scalable digital platform which acts as a two sided marketplace. It enables educators to easily invite a trail-blazing female role model from a maths-related industry to inspire their students, either in their classroom or through an online webinar.  On the other side, the platform enables businesses to offer their employees a flexible yet meaningful way to make a positive difference in their community. We have just completed the pilot in London and would now like to extend Maths4Girls across the UK and beyond to help girls open their future career options, and address the global gender wage gap and increase the economic power of women.

In the UK, despite evidence of girls’ and boys’ equal ability in maths at GCSE, in 2018 only 39% of Maths A-Levels were taken by girls (28% Further Maths A-Levels). Research demonstrates that gender norms suggesting that maths is a male subject are pervasive globally, diverting many girls away from the subject and limiting their career possibilities. Many girls chose not to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics because they do not have the confidence to excel in those subjects despite having the capacity to do so.  The under-representation of girls in maths matters both at an individual level and a societal level. It contributes towards the gender wage gap and limits women and girls’ financial mobility and economic power.

The Maths4Girls project is part of the educational-tech charity, Founders4Schools. Through our digital platform, educators are able to easily invite volunteers from maths-related industries into their classrooms (either in person or online). We have almost 30,000 business leaders registered on our platform and educators are able to filter by industry, gender, educational background and company turnover when selecting speakers. Once educators have made their selection, our system automatically sends out invitations until the event request is fulfilled. Pre-event briefings are then sent out automatically to both the educator and the volunteer in advance of the event. 

When an event takes place, volunteers are invited to share their career journeys so far, and help students to make connections between the maths that they learn in class with their destinations afterwards. 

Our scalable digital platform is fully integrated with LinkedIn, making volunteer sign up quick and easy. We are also fully integrated with Edubase, which ensures that teachers are able to organise a Maths4Girls event in just a few minutes. We have consulted widely with specialists from academia and industry in the creation of this project to ensure teachers and business volunteers are empowered and not burdened with another initiative. 

Maths4Girls aims to increase girls’ self confidence in maths, change their perception on the importance of maths for their careers, increase their desire to pursue maths beyond GCSE and ultimately to increase the percentage of girls taking maths to A Level and beyond. 

We have recently finished the pilot of Maths4Girls which took place in six boroughs in London which had the lowest number of girls taking maths beyond GCSE. The results from our evaluation demonstrate that the Maths4Girls encounters both helped to increase girls confidence in maths and increased their desire to take maths beyond GCSEs. 

We would now like to extend the Maths4Girls project nationwide, particularly targeting girls from disadvantaged backgrounds who may not have access to professional role models and face additional barriers to future opportunities. To do this, we would like to extend the Maths4Girls project to those schools with a higher than average number of students receiving Free School Meals. We would like to specifically engage the maths teachers and Career Leads in those schools and support them with videos and lesson plans to demonstrate how the Maths4Girls project can be incorporated into the curriculum and encourage them to book Maths4Girls events for their students. 

Our Maths4Girls project provides a technology based solution which levels the playing field for girls in the UK. By connecting disadvantaged girls to inspirational role models through our scalable digital platform, we are to provide additional learning opportunities for students who may not have access to professional role models and face barriers in accessing opportunities. 

Our aim is to debunk the myth that maths is for boys and encourage more girls to feel confident and continue their learning in maths, thereby increasing their opportunities for employment and preparing them for the rapidly changing world of work.

While there are many organisations that help to improve the provision of career education to students, Founders4Schools and our Maths4Girls project is unique and innovative in our digital and scalable approach. 

Our digital platform is a two sided marketplace which both enables educators to access a wide range of business volunteers to inspire their students and gives businesses an easy and flexible way for their employees to volunteer. For many schools, the success of their careers education programme had been based on networks within their parental body. Our platform breaks down these barriers in order to connect all children and young people, no matter their background, with inspirational business leaders from within their local community to raise their aspirations and help close the skills gap. 

The platform is innovative for educators in the reach that it gives and the time that it saves them - they can organise an impactful career event in as little as 4 minutes (something that would normally take up to 5 hours without our technology). It is also innovative for businesses both in the way that their employees can access a flexible yet meaningful way to inspire children and young people and also in the data that we are able to give them through our insight reports which alerts companies to all of their employee activity and students reached. We can also measure activity by Local Authority or LEP to benchmark progress across the country. 

The Maths4Girls project uses the award-winning Founders4Schools digital platform to connect inspirational maths role models to girls aged 11-14. 

Our simple, free-to-use, digital platform, is somewhat like ‘airbnb or uber’, except that rather than booking a hotel-room or a taxi, our platform enables teachers to book business leaders to come to their classrooms to speak about how they got to where they are, what jobs they are hiring for at the moment etc. Just like airbnb, we also suggest to educators who they should also next invite to speak to their students. As we are integrated with LinkedIn, Duedil and Edubase, registering and navigating the site is extremely quick and efficient. 

Our platform enables the educator to be able to enter their postcode and will give them a list of available business volunteers. The educator can then filter this list by gender, industry, company growth and revenue. We have also built in algorithms to prompt educators into selecting equal numbers of male and female speakers. 

Once educators have made their selection, our platform will send out invitations until the event has been accepted and pre-event briefings and reminders are sent to both the school and the volunteers.

The Founders4Schools platform is used widely across the UK by schools and businesses. We have so far facilitated over 1.25 million student employer encounters and have reached almost 400,000 children and young people. 

All of our encounters are tracked on our homepage: www.founders4schools.org.uk

With regards to our Maths4Girls project, all of our activity is being tracked on our Partner page which demonstrates that 260 volunteers have registered, over 80 have participated in an event with students and they have reached over 11,000 students so far. This can be seen here: https://www.founders4schools.org.uk/partners/100women/

The Founders4Schools theory of change is based on the following objectives: 

• To tackle inequality by providing equal access to the world of work for young people
• To help young people connect what they are learning with the world of work
• To provide young people with the confidence to take their next steps in finding their future roles. 

Within these aims, the Maths4Girls project specifically focuses on improving the confidence of girls in maths and increasing their participation in the subject. 

In terms of outcomes, we aim to ensure young people gain at least one student-employer encounter per year (which research shows will make them 86% less likely to become Not in Education, Employment and Training). Additionally, we aim to enable young people to make better informed subject choices and to broaden their career aspirations. In the long term, we expect our activities to improve school’s Gatsby Benchmark scores, to influence student subject choices over time and ultimately to help close the skills gap. 

In terms of outputs, our aim is to facilitate a range of student-employer encounters including the Maths4Girls project for as many students as possible. We have selected 25 different student-employer encounter types, all of which have been proven to have a positive impact on children and young people. We measure all of our outputs through our platform including the number of student-employer encounters that have taken place, the number of students reached, the number of hours volunteers, the types of encounters taking place and the industries that our volunteers come from. 

We facilitate all of these activities through a range of inputs which include our volunteers (we currently have almost 30,000 business volunteers registered), our schools (we work with over 2,000 in England and Scotland) and our corporate partners. 

Founders4Schools  currently works with over 2,000 schools and in the last year, we reached 85,099 students. In terms of the Maths4Girls project, we have reached almost 3,000 students within the pilot project. 

With funding, we would like to expand the project across England and within the first year, we would like to reach a minimum of 20,000 girls, growing to 100,000 in 5 years.

Following the successful completion of the Maths4Girls project pilot in London, we are now eager to extend the initiative to schools across England. We believe this project will catalyse a cultural shift in girls’ attitudes to maths, will increase their confidence and self-esteem in the subject, improve gender sensitivity in maths classes and increase the proportion of girls taking maths beyond GCSE level. 

Our approach to this project has been built in partnership with the global membership organisation, 100 Women in Finance and in collaboration with the Maths Anxiety Trust, the Advanced Mathematic Support Programme (AMSP), The National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics, the Department for Education, The Royal Society, The Royal Statistical Society, Maths Inspiration and the Girls’ School Association.

Our goal is that every girl in the country will have experienced a Maths4Girls encounter in school within the next five years. We would also like to explore options of replicating this project in other countries. 

We intend to work with partners to encourage teachers across the country to request a Maths4Girls encounter in order to increase the life chances of girls in their classes. We will also be working with an increased number of corporate partners to encourage volunteers to accept requests made of them to do a M4G encounter.

We will report on the number and the impact of Maths4Girls student-employer encounters by comparing attitudes of students about confidence of maths, the perceived importance of maths and the desire to pursue maths after intervention. 

We have received funding from the global membership organisation 100 Women in Finance to support the pilot and first year of Maths4Girls. However, we are looking for additional funding to roll the project out further.

We are actively applying for funding and seeking supportive corporate partnerships to acquire the necessary funding to roll out Maths4Girls. We are also confident that once we have rolled the project out to more schools, it will be possible to attract long term institutional funding either on a national or regional level.

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Founders4Schools currently has 6 Full time staff members and 6 part time staff members. 

Specifically for the Maths4Girls project, we have a full time Project manager and we are looking to appoint a part time relationship manager and content writer shortly. 

The Founders4Schools award-winning platform has been endorsed by the Institute of Directors, the Federation of Small Business, the Chamber of Commerce and the Confederation of British Industry. 

Our approach to our Maths4Girls project has been built in partnership with the global membership organisation, 100 Women in Finance and in collaboration with the Maths Anxiety Trust, the Advanced Mathematic Support Programme (AMSP), The National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics, the Department for Education, The Royal Society, The Royal Statistical Society, Maths Inspiration and the Girls’ School Association. The project works through Founders4Schools’s award winning digital platform that has been built in consultation with educators and business to best ensure it meets their future needs. In this way, teachers and business leaders are empowered and not burdened with yet another initiative. 

We partner with over 200 organisations which are all listed here: https://www.founders4schools.org.uk/partners/

We have a variety of partners including: 

Funders - who invest in specific projects

Corporate Partners - who we work with to fulfil their goals around social responsibility and provide volunteering opportunities for their staff

Technology partners - who provide us with the tools needed for our digital platform

Third sector organisations within the ecosystem  - which we partner with to extend our reach and expand our offer

Founders4Schools is a registered charity within UK. 

We operate a free to use digital platform which is universally available for all students in the UK to use. We have thousands of business leaders who have registered on our platform to volunteer their time free of charge in their local communities. 

The Maths4Girls project will follow a similar structure. While the project will be available to all schools within the UK, we would like to invest effort and resources into reaching the most disadvantaged students. 

We are a registered charity and achieve financial sustainability by seeking regular grants and donations. 

We aim to achieve financial stability by diversifying our income streams and our fundraising strategy is based on securing: 

 - Grants from trusts and foundations

 - Grants from Government bodies and institutions

 - Corporate partnerships

 - Gifts from Major Donors

 - Smaller gifts from an individual giving campaign

We are applying to this program because we believe the way to create and impactful solution to help girls to succeed is to work together with other partner organisations. By applying to SOLVE, we hope to partner with like-minded organisations who will be able to help us extend our reach across the UK and beyond so that we can improve the confidence of more girls in maths. 

First and foremost, we are applying for funding to help us expand our programme. However, we would also love to receive some technological support to help further develop our digital platform and make it more accessible.

We would be delighted if, in addition, to funding, we could also receive support to further develop our digital platform; we require additional Developer support to fully integrate the Maths4Girls project across the platform. 

The Maths4Girls project directly engages with disadvantaged girls to give them access to inspirational learning opportunities and encourage them to continue with STEM learning. Our aim is to encourage more girls to continue with maths which will ultimately address the gender imbalance in so many industries and improve womens' economic power.