Looking at the last 10 years (2004-2014), intermediate and advanced mathematics has lost ground, though you could argue that things have stabilised in the last few years.  The big problem is that we’d already lost a significant proportion of advanced maths students from 1995-2004.  Stabilisation of student numbers in advanced and intermediate maths is good, but it’s not enough.  We need to motivate a larger proportion of high school students to deepen their mathematical skill set by taking higher level mathematics units.

Reinstating compulsory (rather than assumed) levels of mathematics in first year university would go part way to addressing this problem.

If we succeeded in having a greater proportion of high school students taking higher level mathematics, I suspect the issue would be that we would need more trained, competent, specialised high school mathematics teachers to meet the demand.

References:

  1. Year 12 Mathematics Student Numbers 1995-2010
  2. Participation in Year 12 mathematics across Australia 1995-2004
  3. Participation in Year 12 mathematics 2004 – 2014