Even those people who find employment in IT said that they often had problems doing long division, multiplication and calculating percentages.
In a completely separate survey by KPMG commissioned by Every Child Counts and released in March 2008, 47% of adults felt that they could have learned more maths at school - and now wished they had.
According to research commissioned by the online maths tuition program ConquerMaths, 54% of those adults questioned who had difficulty with maths went further and said that the problem was the way that maths was taught in school.
One survey doesen't tell it like it is, but when three quite separate surveys all suggest that many people have problems with maths, it is perhaps time to ask "why?".
Increasingly the answer appears to be that it is not in any way a question of bad teaching that is the problem, but that for a sizeable minority it is the transmission method of teaching that causes the difficulty.
"The approach to maths that we see in schools certainly does suit around 60% of young people," says Val Constable of ConquerMaths. "The problem is that for the others, the current system just doesn't do it. Our supplementary online approach works dramatically for many of these children and adults who find the classic approach does not work."
Tel: 0191 240 1990
http://www.conquermathsschools.com/
