54 DEBATE
Briony Fawcett
There are numerous issues around numeracy in workplaces. One is upskilling people to be better at their job and to understand it more. There are those who are scared of learning maths, they’ve had a bad experience at school and its changing that mindset.
We try to take that fear and stress away by talking not about maths but about what they need in the workplace. Because most aspects of work can be moved back to maths, they don’t need to know that it’s maths that we’re teaching them.
We’ll teach people and say, ‘You know you’ve been doing fractions and percentages.’ And they’re like, ‘Oh, I’ve never done that before.’
It’s also about educating some employers that education is important to making their business stronger and better. A lot of employers are absolutely invested in upskilling their staff but quite a lot don’t see the importance of it.
Lee Gibson
We all talk about our ‘fear of maths’ and we all know 20 or 30 people who feel exactly the same. What is being done about how maths is currently
delivered and taking that fear away from our children, our grandchildren, and the future leaders of the country? That should be a question that’s posed.
Something is obviously wrong with pushing young people down formal, academic maths qualifications when actually what we need are functional maths qualifications where it’s contextualised, where we can apply it to the work that we’re doing.
It’s not just about young people and people at work. We’re working with NatWest to put a finance module together under Multiply for small business owners.
It’s how to understand your end of year accounts, how to forecast, understand your risk rating when looking at growing your business. Is it a reason why a number of our micro businesses aren’t growing, because the entrepreneurs don’t have those maths skills?
Karen Wignall
People in the workplace are often doing maths without knowing it. In the care industry, hairdressing, construction, they are doing maths
all the time and it is important they get their maths right.
It is not acceptable for people to say they’re rubbish at maths just because that’s what we’ve been used to over the last however many decades. People are strangely not embarrassed about saying that they can’t do maths, but they are embarrassed at having to go and find out how to do maths.
One of the things we’re looking at is almost ‘maths by stealth’, getting people to do maths as a part of a course without actually knowing they are doing it. We’ve had events with card games and darts and dominoes.
We’ve had maths courses for years, but people just didn’t want to do them. Now we’ve got these more innovative approaches to getting people interested in maths or numeracy, we’re seeing an increase.
Richard Evans
There has been a stigma around poor literacy in the past unlike numeracy. Poor numeracy is a potential barrier to progression within
the workplace. You don’t necessarily need a qualification to open the door for an interview, but you do need the confidence to project and talk about it.
That’s one of the key roles that we have now, improving people’s confidence to use basic maths, not just get the qualification, although that’s really important.
You can put your faith in a spreadsheet, but you need to be able to spot trends and quantities and so on, the way things change. It’s all about confidence to question and critical thinking comes into it.
If you just accept what’s in front of you, particularly with numeracy, you could have a problem.
Recruitment for businesses would be easier if the base level of numeracy was higher, and progression within roles would be easier, more doors would open if you started from a higher level.
www.lancashireskillshub.co.uk lancashireskillspledge@lancashirelep.co.uk
Funded numeracy upskilling for your teams
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