The importance of statistical education

The information on the RSS Careers in Statistics website shows that statistics is used in many different jobs. There is therefore an ongoing need for good, well-trained statisticians to fill these jobs and perform the statistical work to a high standard. This requires a high standard of statistical education in schools.

Most recruitment to the profession of statistician is at graduate (or even post-graduate) level. So the budding statisticians need to be persuaded of their vocation sufficiently early that they will want to acquire the A-level, or equivalent, qualifications that will enable them to follow undergraduate degrees with at least some statistics content. This in turn means that they must be persuaded to take the appropriate A-levels at the start of the sixth form - or whatever system applies at their school. And this in turn means that they have to do well enough at the corresponding GCSEs (or equivalent). And this in turn feeds down to yet earlier and earlier years.

All of which implies that statisticians teaching in schools have a really important job to do on behalf of the statistical profession, even with pupils at quite early stages of their education where there might be little or no overt statistics teaching. They can impart an empathy, an enthusiasm, even a passion for understanding and interpreting numerical information and for dealing with the essential variation present in all aspects of life.