Rhodri Marsden

The reason Britons are rubbish at maths

Tomorrow is World Maths Day, which for the vast majority of British people is like celebrating Stubbed Toe Day or International Sewage Month. The event will see six million maths whizzkids from 240 countries participate in a series of hypercharged 60-second maths games. But while the maths elite have their fun, we should take a moment to acknowledge that our numeracy as a nation is shockingly poor.

Seventy-eight per cent of the adult population is below the standard we expect of 16-year-olds, and we tend to admit to this disdain for numbers with self-conscious amusement. “I can’t even count,” said Nadiya Hussain during herwinning performance in last week’s Great British Bake Off final. “I can’t even do Key Stage One maths.” Few of us would admit to having poor literacy; but for some people, an unwillingness to engage with maths has almost become a badge of honour. What has turned us against numbers? How is it affecting us individually, and as a nation? And can the situation be turned around?

These are the questions that are driving Mike Ellicock, CEO of National Numeracy, the only charity dedicated to improving our relationship with what he calls everyday maths (as opposed to the numerical acrobatics of World Maths Day). “We focus on the essentials of numeracy, helping people to use simple maths in complex situations. Should I invest in a pension scheme? Should we take on another employee? And soon. The maths underlying these questions isn’t difficult, but the questions themselves are complex. So we focus on problem-solving, the reasoning and decision-making that use tools of maths.”

Everyday maths confronts us all the time. As the singer-mathematician Tom Lehrer once sang, “Counting sheep when we’re trying to sleep / Being fair when there’s something to share / Being neat when you’re folding a sheet / That’s mathematics!” And our finances depend on it. “From managing everyday issues such as household budgets, opening a savings account or buying your first home,” says Rebecca Langford, policy manager at the MoneyAdvice Service, “numeracy is crucial throughout life.”

But the anecdotal evidence gathered by National Numeracy suggests we’re struggling with simple calculations. Itswebsite recounts the story of a distribution centre whose employees were having trouble with weights and measures resulting in excessively large pieces of cheese being sent out to customers over a long period, costing the business thousands of pounds.

“We commissioned a piece of research that found there was a £20.3bn cost to the economy every year from poor numeracy,” says Ellicock, “which is 1.3 per cent of GDP. That’s a very conservative estimate. And there’s a massive OECD data set which shows that good numeracy is the best protection against unemployment, low wages and poor health – much more significant than literacy.”

Why are we so anti-maths? As kids, our first experience of it is a very binary one – answers either being right or wrong – and when we don’t get them right it’s very easy to give up. Throughout our lives, working out the correct answers to everyday sums can be an uncomfortable experience, prompting us to fold our arms and say that we can’t do it.

“There’ s an institutionalised, fixed mindset about maths that it’s something we either can do or we can’t,” says Ellicock, a man who evidently doesn’t recognise the phrase “I give up”, holding as he does the Guinness World Record for the fastest marathon carrying a 40lb pack. “Our contention is that nearly everyone in the UK has the cognitive capacity to be numerate,” he says, “including quite a lot of people with special needs. We believe that, if you can see that something is important, if you can believe that you can get better and you put the hours in, you’re going to get better. If you play darts every day, you get good at subtracting from 501! The reason that so many of us believe that we can’t do maths is largely psychological.”

These ideas of value, belief and effort are the cornerstone of the charity’s work, slowly chipping away at that idea that we “can’t”. It’s a tough nut to crack; data suggests that 85 per cent of kids who are put into the bottom set for maths never move from that set, and this problem persists into later life. “We estimate that 90 per cent of jobseekers probably have poor numeracy,” says Ellicock, “but while poor literacy skills become apparent quite quickly, poor numeracy is often not identified and so it’s never addressed.” He stresses that this isn’t about maths in a classroom, or the memory of such; this a confidence issue, about persuading people they can do something when our culture says it’s socially acceptable not to.

“L’Oréal did an advert recently where Helen Mirren said that age is just a number, but that maths was never her thing,” says Ellicock. “We made a fuss about this, saying that it’s not great to have a pre-eminent woman saying that she can’t do maths, and that might have come across as terribly PC – but they pulled the ad. We’re also encouraging parents not to knock maths in front of their kids; we know that if, say, a mother tells her daughter that she could never do maths either, the daughter’s performance in school maths immediately decreases.”

Tomorrow, National Numeracy is encouraging people to take its Numeracy Challenge (nnchallenge.org.uk) to check upon numeracy levels and work towards improving them. “I believe that, if you’ve become numerate in a society where it’s acceptable to say you can’t do maths,” says Ellicock, “you’ve shown a level of resilience, persistence and grit that stands you in good stead, generally, in your life.”

At the climax of the Bake Off final, Nadiya Hussain announced she was never going to put limits on herself. “I’m never gonna say I can’t do it,” she said. “I’m never gonna say ‘I don’t think I can’. I can and I will.” Maybe getting on top of maths could be her next big challenge... μ

There’s a mindset that it’s something we either can do or we can’t