The cost of poor math skills

The National Centre for Excellence in the Teaching of Mathematics (UK) presents the news of a new report about "The long term cost of numeracy difficulties". The report concludes that poor skills in mathematics ends up costing the society an enormous amount of money. BBC reports:

Children who are bad at maths at school end up costing the taxpayer up to £2.4bn a year, a report suggests.

Head of distrubution and product at Barclays, Mike Amato said to BBC:

We are very conscious that every child needs basic numeracy skills for survival.

This is also discussed in The Times and other sources. A key message is that spending money on mathematics education will save us a lot of money in the future.

If you have more information on this, links to other sources, similar studies in other countries, etc., feel free to leave a comment!

TIMSS 2007

The results from TIMSS 2007 were released today, and the media appears to be full of reports about how the students in each of our countries are doing. Overall, countries from Asia are on top as usual. If you want to learn more, there is a webcast to watch (.rm and .mov formats), international reports to read as well as a Technical Report and a very interesting set of Encyclopedias, which offer a nice overview of the mathematics (and science) teaching in each of the participating countries. That means: lots of interesting reading to do!