Businesses across the country are to be encouraged to contribute up to £12,000 a year each, over three years, to help children in schools in their community overcome numeracy problems. It is part of a new major £6m campaign by the Every Child a Chance Trust, an educational charity, which was set up in 2007 to help socially disadvantaged children.
The new initiative will help Government measures to stem the soaring long term costs to the nation of 33,000 children (6% of 11 year olds) leaving primary schools each year with very poor numeracy skills, which in turn leads to an estimated 7 million innumerate adults with mathematical skills at or below those of a nine-year-old.
It follows the publication of a report by KPMG estimating for the first time that the long term costs of so many children leaving our schools innumerate could be as high as £44,000 per individual up to the age of 37. This makes a total bill to the nation’s taxpayers of £2.4 Billion every year.
John Griffith-Jones, Chairman of KPMG and Chairman of the Every Child a Chance Trust, said: “We should be deeply concerned about the high costs of innumeracy described in the report. As a business whose people are highly numerate, it seems only right that we should help to do something about the 30,000 children who leave primary schools each year barely able to do the simplest calculations.”
www.kpmg.co.uk
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