It probably hasn’t escaped your attention that maths is now the most popular A Level subject in schools, and by a wide margin too.
Maths Inspiration director Rob Eastaway.
Teenagers know that maths is a skill in demand and that a good maths qualification can be a gateway to many careers.
What they are less sure about is what they will use that maths for.
They’ll have heard of careers in finance, computing, data science and economics. But they may be less clear about how solving a differential equation relates to any of these.
Teenagers have other career anxieties, too. They want jobs that will pay well, but many are concerned about ethics and want to do work that helps the environment and the planet.
And they are increasingly aware that AI may threaten some of the careers for which maths was traditionally a requirement.
So where can a mathematically inclined teenager find a career that is well paid, socially useful and likely to remain in demand?
Civil engineering is, in many ways, the career hiding in plain sight.
I say that having spent the past 20 years working with this age group through Maths Inspiration, a national programme of lecture shows that has now reached more than 300,000 young people. My own degree was in engineering, so I have always known how much engineering is built on applied mathematics.
But over those two decades, I’ve noticed that finance and IT tend to get most of the attention. And for those who are considering engineering, “civil” often seems to be off the radar.
Part of the problem is the name itself.
If the word “Civil” has any connotations at all for a teenager it means being polite, and maybe something to do with government. Meanwhile “engineering” is often understood as something involving machines, electronics or computers.
The industry has been talking about the need to boost recruitment for many years, and the start of the pipeline lies at school, when teenagers are thinking about their degree choices. The sweet spot may be somewhere between Year 11, when they choose their A levels, and Year 12 or early Year 13, when they begin seriously considering what they will do after school.
That’s where Maths Inspiration comes in. Our shows are aimed at exactly those year groups, and we bring engaging speakers into atmospheric theatres to present mathematical ideas in a dynamic and exciting setting.
We typically attract audiences of between 500 and 1,000 teenagers to each show, where we explore the many ways maths connects with the real world, from designing video games to the statistics of crime detection and, in many shows, civil and structural engineering.
Over the years, we’ve had a number of engineers speak at Maths Inspiration events.
John Roberts, whose projects have included the London Eye and the Big One rollercoaster, has talked about some of the mathematical challenges behind these high-profile structures. More recently, Helen Marriner of WSP has joined us to explain the role civil engineering plays in dealing with earthquakes. Teenagers find these topics fascinating, particularly because they see real world connections to the maths they are studying at school.
We’ve often considered putting on an Engineering Inspiration show, and in September 2026, we decided to test out the idea, supported by the ICE.
Via social media, we asked whether any schools with a theatre would like to host a one-hour civil engineering show and could guarantee a couple of maths classes as the base of the audience.
Alleyns School in Dulwich volunteered. We created a show hosted by Maths Inspiration veteran Aoife Hunt, professor of Crowd Safety and Security Science at the University of Greenwich, and featuring three young civil engineers: Ellie Thomas from AtkinsRealis, Doug Rigden from Expedition and WSP’s Helen Marriner.
It might have been smaller than our regular shows, but over 100 students learned how quadratic equations, statistics and logarithms relate to crowd simulations, carbon emissions and the resilience of buildings.
The feedback was encouraging. As one teacher put it, it was “very inspiring for our students to see enthusiastic young engineers who work on exciting and relevant projects”.
With relatively modest sponsorship, it is a model we could roll out to other schools.
We are not going to turn every A Level mathematician into a civil engineer. Nor should we.
But if we can persuade even a handful of students in each audience to seriously consider civil engineering as a degree, that would be an extremely effective recruitment model.
And for those who have other career plans, they will at least leave with a better understanding of what civil engineering actually involves.
The biggest recruitment challenge facing civil engineering is not that young people aren’t interested in the problems that the profession solves. It is that too many of them simply don’t know who solves them.
Maths Inspiration shows are one way for them to discover it.
By Maths Inspiration director Rob Eastaway.
