Numeracy for Life Committee
5 March 2026
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Numeracy for Life Committee House of Lords
00:04 - 01:25
Speaker 2
Great. Good morning everybody and for those of you listening from remotely, welcome to the first public oral evidence session of the Numeracy for Life Committee. We're very pleased to welcome today our two witnesses, Professor Hannah Fry, Professor of Public Understanding of Mathematics at Cambridge, and Bobby Segal, mathematics teacher, author and broadcaster. So thank you both very much for making your time available today. I will ask the first question and then everyone will come in with their own questions.
We want to wrap up by twelve so both questioners and answers can you just be mindful that we want to try and keep to that timetable particularly if you're only committed till midday. Each peer asking a question needs to declare any interest they have before they ask the question. So just, again, just to explain the background of that. So I am starting and I have no interests that are relevant to this committee. But my question is, how does the cultural approach to numeracy a level of acceptance of being unable to do maths impact attaining numeracy skills, and what needs to be done to change this mindset?
Let's start with professor Fry.
01:26 - 02:22
Speaker 3
Well, think the answer is significantly. The the key point here, I think, is that, this does appear to be a a problem that is worse in The UK than elsewhere. So in terms of, low numeracy skills, fifty seven percent of people, of working age are considered to have low skills, which is below average for an OECD country. So I think the question of what is it that's contributing to that, I think that, the the the cultural surrounding of that has to be part of it. And I'm speaking here now from from my own experience, having gone to visit places like Singapore, which have extremely high numeracy skills, I think that the difference is that in places like that, like South Korea, there is this attitude that that mathematics and numeracy more generally is something that everyone can be good at if they work hard at it.
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