National Numeracy Day

Peter Grant Excerpts

Thursday 18th May 2023 Westminster Hall

[Peter Grant (Glenrothes) (SNP)]

It is my pleasure, Dame Maria, to contribute to this debate. Like the hon. Member for Harrow East (Bob Blackman), I am a physics and a wee bit of maths graduate. A long, long time ago, I qualified as a physics and maths teacher, although I sometimes say that it is so long ago that I have forgotten half the physics I learned and Stephen Hawking proved that the other half was wrong.

As the hon. Gentleman said, we use numbers every day of our lives, very often without realising it, but a lot of people are scared of them—sometimes, too scared to even try to get over their fears. People go through their entire lives avoiding particular occasions that might show them up or make them think they look silly because their basic numeracy skills are not as good as they would like them to be. For people of my age, some of it is to do with bad experiences at school. Certainly when I went to school, teachers had a habit of humiliating any pupil who was struggling with any part of their work. Thankfully, that does not happen now.

When I go into the schools in my constituency, I am very encouraged by how supportive and patient teachers and other school staff are with pupils who, in my day, would just have been left behind. I am also amazed when I look at some of the techniques that are used now, particularly with children at a very young age, to get them speaking numbers in pretty much the same way as they learn to speak their native language without really understanding how the grammar works. The contribution that is being made by teachers at every stage of education in Scotland and the rest of the United Kingdom is making a big difference in helping young people to learn essential skills, and there is no doubt that numeracy is one of the most essential.

Not only am I a graduate in two very numerical disciplines, but I was lucky enough to be absolutely fascinated by numbers when I was a wee boy; I could not get enough of them. That, plus the fact that I was probably one of a small minority of children at the time for whom the education system was well suited, meant that I did very well. I sailed through my maths exams at school. I used to do maths Higher papers for fun, to relax after I had spent an evening studying for my other exams.

Sometime towards the end of my first year at Glasgow University, the maths caught up with me and I clawed my way along by my fingertips for the remainder of my degree, but because I still love playing with numbers, it makes it genuinely difficult for me to get the concept that people find numbers scary. There is no doubt that an awful lot of people do. If we could get an honest assessment of 650 MPs, we would probably find that most of them, or certainly a significant number, will try to avoid doing anything with too many numbers in it, or they will get someone in their office to do the number part of a briefing or a speech they are preparing.

On National Numeracy Day, the Deputy Prime Minister did not know how many years the SNP had been in Government in the Scottish Parliament. It may simply be that he had forgotten the year we first got elected, and mistook it for the much more recent coming to power of the Conservatives, but it was an interesting—although I suppose light-hearted—way to mark such an important day.

I have heard people say that they have never tried a sudoku puzzle because they are no good at maths. A sudoku puzzle has numbers in it, but there is nothing mathematical about it. We could put in letters, shapes or wee dogs of nine different kinds, and the puzzle would be exactly the same; there is something about seeing a lot of numbers or an array of numbers that puts people off. The more we try to understand what does that to people, the quicker we can help them set aside their fears and get familiar with numbers, in the same way as when we find out what makes people scared of other languages when they get to certain age, we may be able to change the fact that the UK as a whole is shamefully bad at second, third and fourth languages. Children who are brought up bilingual become expert linguists when they are a wee bit older, so there may be something to think about there.

I mentioned sudoku puzzles, but basic skills in numeracy are not just important to be able to do puzzles—in the sudoku puzzles, they are not important at all. Numeracy is an essential skill for everyone to be able to look out for themselves. As the hon. Member for Harrow East said, it is important for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of different financing offers, such as mortgages or bank loans. We had to bring in regulations about how the annual percentage rate is calculated in order to standardise it across the whole industry and make it a requirement to be brought to the attention of any customer before they sign on the dotted line, because the sales reps—the conmen and women—were presenting numbers in a very misleading way, knowing that a significant number of their victims, or customers, would not spot what they were up to.

Even a lot of people who think they are numerate do not understand what happens when different probabilities are combined. That can make someone who spends their time at the bookies or online gambling an easy target. A lot of people, for example, think that if they are being offered 10 lottery tickets per pound, it is better odds than one lottery ticket per pound, but if everybody gets 10 tickets and there is the same amount of prize money, their chances are exactly the same. People are encouraged to gamble more because the chances of success are made to look much better than they are.

We need people to be more numerate so that they can avoid being taken in when politicians use numbers to try to completely deceive them. There is a well-known saying: “Figures don’t lie, but liars figure.” Clearly, nobody present would ever think to do this, but every single time I go into the main Chamber I will hear a politician deliberately using numbers and statistics in such a way that will cause people to believe something that is not true. Technically that is not lying, but it is still deceitful. We could do with losing it entirely from our public life, but we could also prevent it from being successful by helping people understand what different combinations of numbers and percentages mean.

I am sad to say that the first example I can find comes from the late, much-lamented Margo MacDonald, an absolute stalwart of the SNP. The first time I was old enough to vote was in 1979, and I was swithering between the SNP and the Labour party, which is what my dad, grandad and great-grandad had always gone for. In a party political broadcast a few days before the election, Margo MacDonald was tearing into the record of the Labour Government on inflation. I think she said that over a five-year period prices had gone up by 50%, meaning that the pound in the pocket was worth only 50p compared with five years previously. But that was not true. As an 18-year-old first-year student at the University of Glasgow, I knew that, and I suspect I would have known it when I was 10 or 11. It did dent my confidence in the SNP of those days that it had been able to put that into a party political broadcast and nobody had picked up on it.

More importantly, a few years ago, we had a really serious issue with the marking and awarding of results in Scotland’s exams during lockdown. Students could not have exams, so all results had to be based on the school’s predictions and assessments of how pupils were likely to have done. That is never going to be a fail-safe system. Education Scotland wanted to have a pass rate that was about the same as usual, because universities would not have bought it if everybody had passed, so it had to come up with some way of amending the figures. That meant that it was very difficult to explain why some people had passed and some had failed.

One of the things that got me was that the teachers understandably spoke up on behalf of their pupils, saying things like, “We filled in the assessments, and our prediction was that everybody in the class would pass.” But that is not what they had done. They had considered each individual pupil in the class and said, “I think the probability is that that child will pass.” However, if we add a lot of individual high probabilities, we can end up with a very low probability. For example—I checked this just before I started speaking—we could say that an individual pupil is 90% likely to pass an exam. However, if there is a class of seven pupils, each of whom is 90% likely to pass, the probability that all seven will pass is less than 50%. With a class of 30, it is almost certain that they would not all pass. There is no way of predicting which one will and which one will not—and that is assuming that the 90% estimate is anything other than a guess.

Numeracy is also about interpreting what numbers mean, rather than simply being able to play with them. It is about being able to spot when people are using numbers to put a precision and reliability on a piece of information that does not really deserve it. I do not like it when numbers are applied to something that should be assessed by way of a judgment. We can say that we think that someone will pass their exam or driving test, but putting a number to it makes it look like a hard, scientific fact, because that is what we usually use numbers for. We have to make sure that people are able to tell the difference between numbers that are used in the right context, correctly and accurately, and numbers that are misused, as they all too often are, in a way that is designed to con people.

I have a number of times had to look into investment-type scams that have caught out my constituents. In the information that is sent out to people in order to reel them in, at some point there is usually something that somebody with high numeracy skills would have spotted, so they would have known there was a catch to the guaranteed investment scheme, guaranteed pension scheme or whatever it is. The scams are deliberately worded in such a way as to prevent the vast majority of people from spotting where the catch is.

That leads me to the need for much better financial education. I heard today at the Public Accounts Committee that about 25% of young people leaving school think they are financially educated to the extent that they need to be to survive in today’s financial world. Everybody here knows this, but let me say for the record that 25% is not enough.

I am looking at the number on the clock that tells me how long I have been speaking, and at the faces of Members who are probably thinking that it has been more than long enough, so I will draw my remarks to a close. Numbers are important, but sometimes they do not tell the whole story. The number of Members here today is not a measure of how important our colleagues think adequate numeracy is. It really is an essential skill. I cannot speak for England, but in Scotland we have certainly made a lot of progress in improving numeracy skills, particularly of vulnerable young people and those from disadvantaged backgrounds. That said, we have to go much further.