National Numeracy Day

Today is the 18^th of May, which means in the UK it is National Numeracy Day! This was founded by the charity National Numeracy, which was established in 2012.

The aim of the charity is to raise awareness about poor numeracy levels which exist in both adults and children. National Numeracy wishes to promote mathematics and that anyone can improve their skills. In dedication of their day, they’ve requested the UK to take their online numeracy quiz to test their skills and knowledge.

So far 190,000 people have taken the quiz and are now on their way to improve their maths skills and confidence.

Numeracy plays an important part in our everyday lives, here are some examples:

• Cooking/baking from a recipe
• Setting and keeping to a budget
• Making sense of statistics and graphs when shown important information (the news or within your job)
• Telling the time
• Checking you’ve received the correct change when making a purchase with cash

According to National Numeracy there is a direct link between poor numeracy and unemployment, poor health and playing truant as a child. From just those three links, it is clear that numeracy skills and confidence are important and should be developed from a young age.

Sometimes, it is not quite as simple as saying someone has poor or low numeracy skills.

At the age of 19, I was put through to a educational psychologist as for some reason I just could not grasp mathematics. I passed all my other GCSE’s but really struggled with this one. After many sessions with the educational psychology, I was finally diagnosed with dyscalculia. It was never picked up in school, this may be because 40-50{6c082c8494c21a03d17f10d863ee8b06d7dc461388e432433da70d4d6afda271} of people who have dyscalculia do not show symptoms and may compensate in other ways such as in English or PE.

Individuals who have dyscalculia may have difficulties with:

• Connecting symbols to numbers
• Learning sequences
• Counting backwards
• Estimating
• Following directions
• Reading a clock-face
• Driving at the correct speed
• Purchasing an item/service with cash

You can still improve numeracy skills and confidence if you have dyscalculia. Especially if you have the correct, specialist support and time.

Numeracy confidence should be developed from a young age. Here at Unique Magazines, we offer a varied range of magazines that can support mathematical skills from pre-school to further education as well as reading and creativity. Our packages also encourage science, numeracy and history learning too!

We trialled the packages with a local primary school, and it was a hit for the students and teachers. You can view further information here about our packages!

If you’re an adult and would like to test your cognitive brain, we have a wide range of puzzle books such as sudoku! Check out our range here.

To summarise, numeracy is important as it can affect our everyday lives, we use maths so often that we don’t even realise we are using it. Improving maths skills and confidence is beneficial for everyone! Support and information are out there, if you’re a UK resident you can start by checking The National Numeracy website.

Good luck!

By, Jessica Austin