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The history of UK maths schools

A 2011 Treasury pitch, two schools for six years, a false-start revival under Theresa May, then a real expansion from 2020 — the policy history behind the schools on this site, sourced.

Every school on this site exists because of a single idea pitched to the Treasury in 2011. What's less well known is how long it took to go anywhere: for six years after the first two schools opened, there were still only two. The rapid expansion that produced the network you can browse today is barely five years old.

2011: an idea sold to the Treasury

The policy's origin is unusually well documented, because the person who came up with it wrote about it himself. Dominic Cummings, Michael Gove's special adviser at the Department for Education, has described on his own blog how he arrived at the idea after reading about Grigori Perelman — the Russian mathematician who solved the Poincaré Conjecture and turned down both a Fields Medal and a $1 million prize for it. Perelman had been educated at a specialist maths school founded by the mathematician Andrey Kolmogorov, part of a Soviet and Russian tradition of pairing exceptional schoolchildren directly with university mathematicians.

Cummings gives three reasons he pushed the idea: a belief that maths and physics teaching had been hollowed out by curriculum and exam changes under successive governments (in his own words, "the corruption of the curriculum and exams started by the Tories and continued by Blair" — his characterisation, not ours), a concern that advanced teaching for the mathematically gifted was concentrated almost entirely in private schools, and what he called the "civilisational value" of properly educating a small number of exceptional young mathematicians. He's also explicit that none of this was meant as a case for selective education generally: "these arguments do not translate to arguments for selection in general."

The route into government was opportunistic rather than the product of a formal policy process. By Cummings' own account, Gove's team had the proposal ready and waiting until the Treasury needed a science-flavoured announcement for the Chancellor's Autumn Statement — at which point specialist maths free schools, with an ambition of around a dozen of them, became government policy.

2012–2014: a competition, and only two winners

The Department for Education ran what amounted to a competition for university sponsors. King's College London was first to be confirmed, announced in December 2012; the University of Exeter followed in January 2013, in partnership with Exeter College, planned for 120 students including weekly boarding to reach across Devon, Cornwall, Somerset and Dorset. Announcing the Exeter school, Michael Gove said: If we want our mathematicians to prosper, we must encourage innovative approaches to maths teaching, and pointed to STEP, Cambridge's demanding maths admissions test, as the level of achievement the schools should be aiming students towards.

The government kept looking for more. A March 2013 DfE announcement invited further university bids, framing the goal as reconnecting excellent university maths departments with school-level teaching. Liz Truss, then a junior education minister, wrote to universities that year encouraging proposals. Almost none of it converted into schools: a later Freedom of Information request turned up five expressions of interest that never became formal bids, and one bid — from the University of Central Lancashire — that was submitted and rejected. Exeter and King's College London remained the only two.

In November 2013, with both schools recruiting their first students, the two ran a joint outreach competition for GCSE pupils to make short videos explaining a mathematical puzzle. Presenting the prizes, Gove put the rationale in the language of the day:

"We need specialist maths free schools like King's College London (KCL) Maths School and Exeter Mathematics School. They will develop the talents of exceptional young mathematicians and ensure they can compete in the global race."Michael Gove, Education Secretary, November 2013

Both schools opened as planned in September 2014 — the first two specialist maths schools of their kind in England, against an original ambition of around a dozen.

2014–2020: the six-year stall

What followed was not the rapid rollout the 2011 announcement implied. The 2015 Conservative manifesto dropped explicit mention of maths schools, a fair signal that momentum inside government had faded. Coverage from the time was openly skeptical about what came next: a Tes report in July 2014, just before the schools opened, noted that only three universities had ever backed a bid — King's, Exeter, and the rejected University of Central Lancashire proposal — against an initial government aim of twelve to sixteen schools. David Reynolds, then chair of a numeracy taskforce, put the structural problem plainly: there is no mechanism to ensure a take-up of what free schools have discovered. A small number of excellent schools, he argued, wasn't inherently a problem — but without a way to spread what they learned or attract more sponsors, the policy risked staying small by accident rather than by design.

The first real evidence backed some of that caution up. By September 2015 — one year in — King's had admitted 69 students against a planned intake of 60, and Exeter 34 against a planned 30: both smaller and slower-growing than their eventual scale. Early AS-level results were strong (King's reported over 97% A grades in maths; Exeter reported all 34 students passing every AS level they sat), but early inspection judgements were more mixed than the uniformly Outstanding picture that exists today — Requires Improvement at Exeter, Good at King's. A contemporary analysis also flagged an equity question that has followed the sector since: around 15% of King's first intake came from independent schools, a striking overrepresentation for a state-funded school explicitly framed as widening access to elite maths teaching. That specific tension — selective-by-aptitude schools that still skew toward already-advantaged applicants — is one this site returns to in our piece on whether maths schools add value, because it hasn't gone away; see the present-day section below.

2016–2017: a false-start revival

The policy got a second wind under Theresa May. Her government's Industrial Strategy, published in January 2017, and the Spring Budget that followed committed funding to expand the number of specialist maths schools using leading university maths departments — alongside a wider push on technical education. Baroness Alison Wolf, an education policy figure who (per Cummings' account) had already been central to getting King's College London's school off the ground, was reported at the time to have made it a personal priority, described in coverage as a "top priority for No 10." A Conservative manifesto commitment followed in the 2017 general election.

Then the election produced a hung parliament. With the government's authority weakened and its legislative attention consumed elsewhere, the firmer funding commitments softened into vaguer language about hoping universities would come forward. No third school opened in the immediate aftermath.

2020 onward: the expansion actually happens

The third specialist maths school didn't open until 2020 — University of Liverpool Maths School, nine years after the original Autumn Statement announcement and six years after Exeter and King's opened. From there, though, the pace changed completely: Lancaster University School of Mathematics opened in 2022, then three schools in a single year — Cambridge, Imperial College London and Leeds — in 2023, followed by Surrey in 2024 and Aston in 2025. That's six new schools in five years, more than doubling the network in a period shorter than the original six-year stall. The network's coordinating body, U-Maths, was formally registered as a charity in February 2024, putting a legal structure around what had until then been a loose collection of independently sponsored schools. Durham and Nottingham are next in the pipeline, though — as covered on their own school pages — both were caught up in a 2024–2025 government review of free-school projects and now carry only provisional opening dates.

See the full schools list for exactly when each one opened, and results by year for how the newer schools' first cohorts have performed.

Where this leaves things today

A decade on from the first results, some of 2015's questions are still live. A 2024 analysis for The Conversation by Harry Richardson, a PhD candidate at the University of Leeds, found King's College London Mathematics School topped that year's Times A-level rankings with 76.2% of grades at A*, taught in classes averaging around 16 students with staff ratios as low as 6:1 in places — a genuinely different teaching model from a typical sixth form. The same analysis put King's FSM-eligible intake at 11%, against a national average above 20% — the same shape of equity question raised about King's original 2014 intake, essentially unchanged nine years later, even as the network itself has grown considerably.

The other big change since 2020 sits entirely outside this policy history. The 1729 Maths School, opening in September 2026, isn't a product of the 2011 Cummings pitch, DfE competitions or Industrial Strategy funding rounds at all — it's privately funded by Alex and Elena Gerko, run inside an existing independent school, and charges fees (with heavy bursary support). Thirteen years after a Treasury announcement tried to solve "not enough elite maths teaching outside private schools" through state free-school policy, the newest and highest-profile attempt at the same underlying problem is coming from private philanthropy instead. Whether that's a verdict on the state route or simply a second, parallel approach is not something this history can settle — but it's hard to look at both stories side by side and not notice the contrast.

Sources

  1. 1.Dominic Cummings — "maths schools" posts, his own account of the policy's origin — https://dominiccummings.com/tag/maths-schools/
  2. 2.DfE — new specialist maths free school (Exeter), 21 January 2013 — https://www.gov.uk/government/news/new-specialist-maths-free-school-to-be-regional-centre-of-excellence
  3. 3.DfE — universities to open maths free schools, 1 March 2013 — https://www.gov.uk/government/news/universities-to-open-maths-free-schools
  4. 4.DfE — maths free school competition winners congratulated, 19 November 2013 — https://www.gov.uk/government/news/maths-free-school-competition-winners-congratulated
  5. 5.Tes — "Specialist maths free schools fail to spark university interest", 29 July 2014 — https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/specialist-maths-free-schools-fail-spark-university-interest
  6. 6.timdracup.com — "Progress report on KCL and Exeter Maths Free Schools", September 2015 — https://timdracup.com/2015/09/07/progress-report-on-kcl-and-exeter-maths-free-schools/
  7. 7.timdracup.com — "The resurrection of specialist maths schools?", June 2017 — https://timdracup.com/2017/06/09/the-resurrection-of-specialist-maths-schools/
  8. 8.The Conversation — "Maths schools top the A-level rankings", Harry Richardson, 9 October 2024 — https://theconversation.com/maths-schools-top-the-a-level-rankings-and-their-students-only-study-stem-subjects-238613