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Double Maths was, in my schooldays, an entry in the timetable that struck dread into the hearts of most pupils, other than the gifted few with a facility for figures.
In South Korea, private investors are faced with having to go back to school before they are allowed to invest in certain high-risk funds, because the government there is so worried about people losing their shirts on its highly volatile stock market.
The authorities recently raised the education requirements.
The programmes have not prevented investors, known as ‘ants’, from losing billions through bets on companies such as Samsung and SK Hynix.
It’s a very un-British approach but it caught my eye, because, despite excellent A-level results last week, the UK is in the grip of a numeracy crisis and financial education is patchy at best.
Leave aside the brilliant A-level and university students: around half of working-age adults have the mathematical prowess of an 11-year-old and many brag that they are rubbish at figures as if it were a badge of honour.
Mere mortals don’t need to grasp the Jacobian Conjecture that is gripping the world of AI at the moment, which is just as well in my case.
Around half of working-age adults have the mathematical ability of an 11-year-old
But a House of Lords inquiry into numeracy this year heard that the widespread lack of the most basic ‘number sense’ is a huge obstacle to social mobility, financial wellbeing and even health.
Professor Hannah Fry testified that there is evidence people who have type 1 diabetes end up with worse glucose control if they have low numeracy skills.
In my work on osteoporosis, I discovered many women are refusing medication because it carries a very, very small chance – as low as one in 10,000 – of causing a serious dental complication. Yet the treatment could bring a significant reduction in the much higher risk of a serious fracture, which might be a one-in-10 chance.
Bobby Seagull, a University Challenge star and maths teacher, told peers about an exercise where he asked his pupils to work out the average height of their classmates.
One insisted the answer was 2.7m, or nearly 9ft, and refused to accept it was wrong because it came up on his calculator.
Water company Severn Trent testified some of its apprentice intake had problems telling the time. (I recently encountered a young retail worker who couldn’t tell the time from a clockface in, of all places, a shop selling watches.)
Poor numeracy leaves voters vulnerable to having the wool pulled over their eyes by charlatans from all parties fiddling the stats.
And when coupled with a lack of knowledge about investment, it can lead people down potentially ruinous routes with their money from crypto to meme stocks.
The astounding gains in some AI stocks are likely to have created unrealistic expectations among novice investors that will end in tears if the bubble bursts.
Problems like these will become more acute as more people have to take responsibility for managing their own stock market-linked pensions.
Moves are afoot to strengthen financial education in schools, but even if this happens, many adults are floundering, left vulnerable to rip-offs, scams and basic misunderstandings about debt and savings, meaning their personal finances are less secure than they could be.
I rather enjoyed maths in Mr Proctor’s classroom at Stainsby School back in the day. Not so much that I would want to take a refresher. But for many of us, it might not be a bad idea.
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