Poor numeracy is a blind spot in the age of AI

The writer chairs National Numeracy, a UK charity, and holds advisory roles on AI

The OECD has just published its most complete picture of adult skills in the rich world. Its Navigating Life with Low Literacy and Numeracy report argues that “in an era defined by digital transformation, artificial intelligence and rapid labour market change”, foundational skills are the infrastructure that determines whether people can access opportunity.

Meanwhile, the growing dominance of AI will deepen existing inequalities unless the UK’s numeracy skills improve, according to new research from think-tank Policy Connect, with support from my charity National Numeracy.

The UK debate often focuses on mathematicians, graduates, research funding and universities but the more urgent story concerns everyone else. About half of working-age adults have the numeracy levels of an 11-year-old. That is a huge problem.

One finding in the OECD report deserves more attention. Most countries with weak adult skills have a literacy problem. But in some countries including England, New Zealand and the US, numeracy lags behind literacy. In these places, people often do not even identify this as an issue, because saying you cannot do maths has no social penalty.

What will an AI economy demand of people? The future may be less about calculation and more about supervision: reasoning about probability, understanding orders of magnitude and proportions, and judging if an answer is plausible.

The current House of Lords Numeracy for Life inquiry has heard plenty of evidence to this effect. Lord Tarassenko, a machine learning researcher of four decades, explained: “Unless you understand probability, you will not understand why a large language model occasionally gives you the wrong answer”.

As former Bank of England chief economist Andy Haldane wrote in his foreword to the Policy Connect report, information is not insight. But the public believes the opposite. The report found only one in four Britons thinks numeracy is needed to use AI, while 77 per cent of users trust its accuracy. We are handing over judgment to systems that we lack the skills to check.

Even as the need for numeracy is rising, engagement with the subject is collapsing. Adult participation in maths learning has fallen from 700,000 people in 2007 to 240,000 today, Sue Pember of English adult education body Holex told the House of Lords inquiry.

Employers see the effects. Water company Severn Trent told the inquiry that some of its apprentices struggle to tell the time, let alone read a payslip. Personal financial management inevitably suffers: according to a 2024 survey by the Financial Conduct Authority, the industry regulator, about 34 per cent (or 17.7mn) of UK adults had “poor or low” financial numeracy.

England’s overall numeracy skills did improve in the latest OECD survey, but the gain came entirely from the highest achievers. The skills of the lowest achievers have been static for more than a decade. The OECD warns that automation that removes the need to calculate will erode skills fastest in this group, because numeracy survives through use and automation removes that use.

The OECD’s diagnosis is helpful for identifying the remedy. While other countries treat maths as a public utility, the UK does not — and should. A National Year of Numeracy could help. We are currently midway through a National Year of Reading, after all.

As exam results this month put maths in the spotlight, one thing is clear: Britain cannot fulfil its AI ambitions without improving numeracy.

The prize is success not only for the economy but also for society. A country that can understand numbers makes better decisions about health, money and politics, and it shares the gains of new technology more widely. In the age of the confident machine, numeracy is more than maths. It underpins judgment, and judgment is what lets everyone thrive.