Is your workforce confident and competent to use numbers and data to make good business decisions and to manage their personal finances?
You are paid £9/hour and receive a 5% pay rise. What is your new rate of pay?
This is a simple enough question: one that every employee should be able to work out the answer to, whether in their heads, with pencil and paper or with help from the calculator on their phones. We could give many other similar examples, of ordinary, everyday maths that people need to be able to do. They need to do it to interpret and act upon business data and to get on in life. Collectively they need to do it for the sake of the future prosperity of the UK. We are yet to find any business leader who disagrees with this. It is not controversial.
However, research released today – National Numeracy Day – is remarkably consistent with other sources, which all suggest that around half of working age adults have the everyday maths skills that we expect of prim