Most business leaders treat numeracy gaps as a training or hiring problem. Give people better onboarding, subscribe to a learning platform, and the deficits should sort themselves out. But the research tells a more inconvenient story. The low-confidence employees who freeze when a spreadsheet appears in a meeting, who struggle to interpret basic financial data, or who consistently avoid analytical tasks, often did not develop those habits at work. They arrived with them, formed somewhere in primary school and reinforced over the following decade by an education system that moved faster than their understanding could keep up.
Why the Workforce’s Numeracy Problem Starts in Primary School
