Public First has conducted polling for The Richmond Project on the UK’s attitudes towards the numbers that people use in their everyday lives. 

The polling has found that:

1. Ninety percent of adults in the UK agree that being able to use numbers is an important skill and a majority (seventy-five percent) are confident completing everyday number tasks, also men are much more likely than women to rate their everyday number skills positively. Most people solve everyday number problems, calculate prices or use a calculator at least once a week. The most common way of using numbers was to solve everyday problems involving numbers – for example, working out travel times or measuring ingredients for cooking.
2. Nonetheless, only half of UK adults (fifty-two percent) say that they enjoy using numbers, compared to two-thirds who enjoy reading (sixty-six percent). Twenty-three percent of UK adults feel overwhelmed or anxious when handling numbers or doing calculations and the only activity that made more people feel anxious was public speaking.
3. Competence with numbers is too low: only around forty percent of adults scored highly for numerical competence, and a majority of UK adults overestimate their own ability to use numbers, with a gap of almost twenty percent between reported competence and actual competence. The cohorts needing most support include younger women, and women in lower socio-economic groups. Women were fourteen percentage points more likely than their male counterparts to be classed “low confidence, low competence” in our analysis.
4. This can change: two-thirds of the public (sixty-five percent) are interested in improving their number skills. The desire to improve number skills peaks for those aged 25-34 and remains relatively high before gradually declining from the age of 45 onwards. Amongst those with low confidence and a high desire to improve were low-income mothers, sixty-three percent of whom reported a desire to improve their number skills.
5. Ninety percent of parents are interested in improving their child’s skills at using numbers, and seventy-eight percent are interested in improving their own skills. But one in five would not feel confident helping with maths homework. Mothers were significantly less confident than fathers in supporting their children with maths homework: sixty-nine percent confident compared to eighty-three percent. The most common reason for a lack of confidence was concern that methods taught today were different from what parents learned in school.

This report uses data from two polls – one of adults in the UK and one of children in the UK.

The poll of adults had a sample of 8,021 adults in the UK, from 3rd to 16th October 2025. You can download results tables for this poll here.

The poll of children had a sample of 2,008 children aged between 4 and 18 in the UK, from 3rd to 16th October 2025. You can download the results tables from children aged 4-8 here, and results tables from children aged 9-18 here.

All results are weighted using Iterative Proportional Fitting or ‘Raking’. Results of the poll are weighted by interlocking age & gender, region and social grade to Nationally Representative Proportions.

You can download the report here.