Maths should be called numeracy to make it less “academic and scary” and to help more people to budget, the former head of the government’s levelling-up task force has said.
Andy Haldane, a former Bank of England chief economist, said using the word numeracy helped to convey why numbers were essential for making everyday decisions.
Haldane, 54, who was born in Sunderland and brought up in Leeds, was drafted into the Cabinet Office on a six-month secondment as the head of the taskforce in September last year. He said: “The important thing about numeracy is not to call it mathematics. Numbers are important not because of Pythagoras’s theorem but because it’s important that we can live our lives in a financially sustainable way, making choices about money and savings, spending and pensions and jobs, and all those things that we know are really important to us.
