Amanda Buchanan
As a department we’re now starting to interact and bring our customers that are in work back into the job centres to see work coaches.
When it comes to numeracy it is giving them self-belief. Some believe they can’t progress in work because they haven’t got any qualifications, they haven’t got the skills, they haven’t got the confidence.
Working with the coaches they’re starting to do numeracy courses. And once they’ve got a certificate under their belts, that gives them that stepping stone to start to believe in themselves and look at where they can go. My role is also talking with employers around their recruitment, retention and progression pathways and
how they get the best out of their workforce and invest in the workforce for the future. Whether it’s around numeracy skills or more bespoke training.
Numeracy is about the whole of the work life balance, having the skills to be confident to move off state benefits and back into the workforce full time to support businesses and the economy.
Michele Lawty-Jones
Research suggests poor numeracy skills reduces productivity at work and impacts on profits. It also impacts on an individual’s ability to gain good quality employment and to earn higher salaries.
In England the average person with poor numeracy skills earns £1,600 less a year than someone with basic numeracy skills.
The government has recognised this issue, both in terms of social mobility and also in terms of businesses, productivity and profits, and has invested in Multiply, which is a national numeracy programme. In Lancashire we have more than £7.5m over three years to invest in numeracy skills, targeting adults.
It’s working with people in the communities, but also targeting businesses to work with them to boost the numeracy skills of their employees.
If you think about how numbers apply in the workplace, it’s really broad. Orders, stocktaking, dealing with money, budgeting, and more increasingly how we analyse data and understand how we’re performing as an organisation. So yes, numeracy is really important.
Neil Bullows
Historically, hospitality was always seen as the last job that you went into if you had poor numeracy. We weren’t as reliant on technology as we are now, you had to use your brain and be mentally proficient in what you were doing.
I started off behind the bar and when you’ve got 20 people who are there, screaming rounds out of £30 or £35, you learn pretty quickly in terms of mental arithmetic, and that’s when you get the confidence to progress.
The sector is more reliant on technology now. If a till goes down, it’s a catastrophe. We have ‘emergency kit’, which is a separate till, and we round the prices up when it happens to help staff members because there is no way you
would be able to say to them, ‘four pints at £4.60’ or whatever. For me it’s the three Ps. ‘People affect product affects profit’ and you need some numbers in there.
Donna Clayton
When people leave school and go into a job, if they’re not involved in an area of work that involves some numeracy skills, such as percentages, they tend to lose the skills they had when they left school.
It is numeracy for home, numeracy for work and numeracy for life. If you’re in a job you need the maths for that job, but then you need to know how to run a house and manage all your bills and then also just in general life.
It’s getting people at the lowest level of numeracy engaged. Letting them know that numbers aren’t frightening, they can be fun, letting them know how it could help them in their lives, and then helping them to raise their own aspirations as to where they want to be. And showing them the pathway to those first steps in numeracy.
James Sandwell
We have moved the business into being run completely by numbers. We have all the numbers on the board, everyone knows the numbers in the business. Numeracy is looking at the impact of the numbers and understanding what they mean.
I try and translate it into something simple, make it a game, and then it does really transform the business, because they understand the margins, what this can do, what that can do.
They’ve been told for maybe 20 years they don’t understand numbers, but actually they do, it’s just someone hasn’t taken the time to explain it properly to them.
We’ve got team members to do the reports, so they understand where the numbers come from rather than sitting in a meeting and pretending that they know it. They understand it and then they start playing with the numbers, then it becomes fun and they go, ‘Right, I get it now.’
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