Whatever your career, a good understanding of everyday maths is an essential life skill. We know that a lot of people are intimidated by numbers, especially if they struggled with maths at school, and dread having to handle numbers throughout their adult lives as a result.

Research from the latest Skills for Life survey (2011) reveal 49% of adults have the maths skills level expected at primary school and that’s something that needs to be addressed. National Numeracy want to tackle this issue head on, challenge negative attitudes towards maths and show that anyone can improve with effort.

To make a difference, we need to start with people going about their everyday business right now, the colleague next to you at work, the neighbour you chatted to this morning, you and me. We can all help to support a shift attitudes and improve our own everyday maths skills in the process.

Everyday maths and numeracy skills are key to solving many everyday problems that we often don’t think of as maths-related. Whether you need to work out which bus to catch in the morning, effectively perform tasks at work, manage your household budget or help your children with their homework, being numerate and able to handle numbers is at the heart of what we all do every day.

Low numeracy can seriously affect how people live their lives. They may struggle managing their personal finances and their work or even their health could suffer as a result. What’s more, it’s estimated that low level numeracy is costing the UK economy £20billion each year.

The National Numeracy Challenge Online is here to help everyone improve their everyday maths skills. It supports you to develop your numeracy ability and confidence in handling numbers. It is a confidential, friendly, interactive website, designed to assess and help you learn in manageable steps, setting you achievable targets and providing you with the best available online learning resources.  Have you done it yet? If so let us know how you got on, tell your colleagues about it, and log back in to use it when you want to brush up. If you haven’t used it yet then join our growing community of over 50,000 people who have.

You can also start spreading the word by making numeracy a key focus of your workplace learning during this year’s Festival of Learning, Learning at Work Week and Adult Learner’s Week. USDAW are focussing on numeracy during this year’s Adult Learner’s Week and are using the Challenge in their events.

Project Worker Denise Gordon says:

"It’s fantastic. Our ULRs find it really easy to navigate and doing the Challenge gave them the confidence to tackle low numeracy in the workplace. Feedback from learners so far is that they love it too. The Challenge definitively gives them confidence; they find their weakness and then they can go on to do structured learning. This is definitely the best numeracy resource we’ve had in a long time. Give it a try I’m sure you will agree!”

National Numeracy have an array of fun activities to get everyone at your workplace thinking about everyday maths, from numeracy clinics to cake sales. Take a look at our ideas (pdf) or email us [email protected] about becoming a Challenge partner.