London Seventeen million adults — nearly half the working population — have the maths skills of a child at primary school, a report revealed Friday.

Their grasp of numbers is so poor that they struggle to work out deductions on their pay slips or calculate change.

The number who struggle with basic numeracy has grown by two million over the past decade, even though billions of pounds has been poured into schemes to improve standards.

The scale of poor numeracy far exceeds the equivalent figure for poor literacy, which is now five million.

Charity: National Numeracy

The report, released by a new charity, National Numeracy, found that 49 per cent of working-age adults in England are so bad at maths that they have no more than the skills expected of a nine to 11-year-old and would struggle with graphs and charts.

About half of these adults — a quarter of the working population — have only the abilities expected of a seven to nine-year-old and might struggle to pay household bills.

Attitude problem

Launching the report, National Numeracy said school-leavers who have failed to master basic maths are more likely to end up jobless, in prison or pregnant at a young age.

The charity said Britain's low numeracy levels, which place us 17th in a global league of 30 nations, are partly due to decades of neglect of maths in schools. But it also blamed a prevalent attitude that it is a "badge of honour" to be bad at the subject and to have a "can't do it" attitude.

Chris Humphries, chairman of National Numeracy and former chief executive of the UK Commission for Employment and Skills (UKCES), said: "Official a figures quote that 17 million people have maths capabilities, at best, of the age of an 11-year-old.

'Level of a nine-year-old'

"And actually half of that group's capacity tends to operate down around the level of a nine-year-old.

"That's a scary figure, because it means that they often can't understand deductions on their payslip.

"They have problems with timetables, they are certainly going to have problems with tax and even with interpreting graphs and charts that are necessary for their jobs. "The truth is that numeracy has been hidden behind literacy.

"We've made excellent progress in literacy. The investment in basic skills has demonstrated that good quality programmes, good quality teachers, proper PR and publicity and a real attention to drawing adults in can make a big improvement." Humphries lamented that maths had been "downgraded" in the UK, particularly from the 1970s onwards.