Millions of Brits are paying a hidden tax for being bad at maths

For many, this is the last time they will be tested on their numeracy skills. I wish them the very best of luck.

There have been huge steps forward with the provision of maths education in this country; I saw that up close as Minister for Schools. The improvements are real and the young people taking that paper today will be better equipped for life than previous generations.

But here is the uncomfortable truth we must not let this moment obscure: ten million adults in Britain right now have the numeracy of a primary school child and pay the consequences every single day. I would go so far as to say that many pay a lifetime Innumeracy Tax.

A stealth tax made up of poor financial decisions, whether mortgages, loans they don’t understand or simple mistakes in basic household financial planning.

As we have heard from experts across numerous fields during our evidence sessions, numbers are not just an academic exercise. They are the language of everyday life - of budgets, of contracts, of mortgages, of risk. When people cannot speak that language, they are not merely inconvenienced, they are exploited.

I have been a businessman for 45 years. I have watched the absence of basic numeracy suppress wages, stifle productivity, and trap people in financial decisions they did not fully understand when they made them.

Take the student loan scandal - and I use the word scandal deliberately. Plan 2 loans, taken out by hundreds of thousands of young people from 2012 onwards, carry interest of up to 6.2 per cent and a repayment structure that many graduates still cannot explain to you today.

Yet parents - themselves often numerically underprepared - sat with their 17-year-olds and signed off on what is, after a mortgage, the largest financial commitment most people will ever make. If they had understood compound interest, APR, and the true cost of borrowing, would they have done so? Many would not.

This is not about blame. This is about a structural failure that has compounded across generations, and the evidence submitted to the Lords committee - Numeracy for Life - which I chair, bears that out.

We know that women are twice as likely as men to have poor financial literacy - a gap that feeds directly into the gender pension divide and financial vulnerability in later life.

We know that workers who cannot calculate a 10 per cent pay rise on a £15-an-hour wage are in a weaker position at every salary negotiation they will ever have.

The Army's educational arm has shown us what is possible. They take young recruits who have had poor schooling and, in relatively short order, give them genuine functional numeracy.

Employers, too, have demonstrated that workplace programmes can shift this dial. When the will is there, these examples show that improving the nation’s financial literacy is possible.

So yes, let today's exam be a marker of progress in our schools. But let us not mistake the education of today's teenagers for a solution to the crisis facing today's adults. For those in their thirties and forties, the formal system has already passed them by.

Our committee is determined to find the routes back, through employers, through community programmes, through a national conversation that treats numeracy not as a school subject but as a lifelong right.

____________________

Lord Agnew of Oulton chairs the House of Lords Numeracy for Life committee and is a former Schools and Treasury Minister.

LBC Opinion provides a platform for diverse opinions on current affairs and matters of public interest.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the official LBC position.

To contact us email opinion@lbc.co.uk