The Importance of Mathematics - Leahy highlights 'failures in education system
Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco, will today warn Gordon Brown that the government's vision of Britain as a high-skills powerhouse challenging India and China in global markets is being jeopardised by lack of basuc skills that is harming competitiveness, leaving firms hungry gor qualified workers and causing deep-seated social problems.
The Tesco chief executive will say that business needs employees with ocial skills - the ability to work in teams and communicate - and highlight figures from the government - comimissioned Leitch review that showed 5 million British adults lacked basic numeracy skills, 17 million had problems with numbers and one in six were eaving school unable to read, write or add up properly.
"Those figures certainly mean that business has problems in finding people with the skills they need to carry out jobs in a technologically more challenging age. But on a human level they represent a terrible waste of potential, limiting social mobility and reducing opportunity. And they lead to some of the social problems which we hear about all too often at the moment."
The above article was taken from The Guardian, Wednesday September 12 2007.