Forgive me for hating statistics. I know they are useful at times, but as someone who struggles with numbers and who faces a week of staring at these numbers representing the sum total of people’s work over at least two years (GCSE results come out on Thursday), I am particularly averse to them at the moment. One mark separates one grade boundary from another (and sometimes this represents ‘yes’ or ‘no’ in terms of what a pupil can do next.) Numbers are coldly clinical. They do not tell an employer if a pupil has worked or shirked; they do not indicate the struggles behind a particular subject or even the joy a pupil has found in a subject. They are translated into charts: line graphs plotting where you are in relation to someone else, bar charts which can be coloured to show where the school stands in comparison to other schools, pie charts which indicate percentages of A* grades and so on. But these charts, beautiful in their visual representation of numbers, do not capture joy or heartache, nor do they actually explain the numbers. They simply sit there, capable of multiple interpretations, depending on one’s perspective.
Some love the coldly clinical fact of numbers. Statistics don’t lie, they say. 2 plus 2 will always be 4. You know where you are with numbers. They don’t lie.
I beg to differ. Oh, not from the mathematical point of view. I agree that 2 + 2 =4 and I even acknowledge that there is something rather reassuring about maths. But not when it comes to defining people or measuring worth.
That’s not what maths, what numbers, are designed to do. But in our society, that’s what we want them to do.
Teachers are judged on the numbers. This year, schools will be ‘measured’ by the Government by a complex formula known as ‘Attainment 8’ and ‘Progress 8’, adding up points and using algorithms and formulae to decide who has made sufficient ‘progress’ to determine a school’s funding. Pupils will be judged according to their grades (which are about to be re-jigged in examination reform, leaving next year’s pupils to wonder what their numbers rather than letters mean!) Young people will experience elation or despair (some even believing that suicide is preferable to failure) based on statistics which measure a particular written response on particular days.
I think this is a sad misuse of numbers. And I long for young people, teachers, managers, employers and Government officials to realise that people are not quantifiable in the same way that a machine can be measured. We are more than the sum total of our exam results.
People cannot be measured by such things. We cannot be identified by numbers, no matter how many of these things we are assigned (National insurance numbers, NHS numbers, pension numbers, bank account numbers and so on.) We can only be identified by our humanity in relation to God: ‘fearfully and wonderfully made’ (Ps 139:14), made in God’s image (Gen 1:27), chosen and loved before the foundation of the world. (Eph 1:4-5)
Your exam days may well be long behind you. But whatever your age or status, numbers will be there to try to identify you. Blood test results. Hospital test results. Bank balance figures. The number on the bottom of your wage slip. When the numbers look good, we are tempted to believe life is good because of our health, our wealth or our business acumen. When the numbers don’t look so good, we are tempted to believe we are worthless, because that’s what the numbers say.
Let’s refuse to be identified by the numbers and let’s choose to step into our identity as God’s children: loved, chosen, special, equipped, valued and precious because God says so. No matter what the numbers say. Let’s measure success or failure in a different way and know that neither success nor failure can separate us from God’s love.