Examination of witnesses
Neil Morrison and Mark Homans.
Q47 The Chair: Good morning to our witnesses. Thank you both for joining us today. I am particularly pleased to have two large employers to talk to us, because my own instinct is that this problem with numeracy is a drag on productivity, but I am interested to hear from you both today. We all have some questions to ask, and I will open the batting. I ask you to be relatively brief in your answers, but I ask each of you to answer each question so we get your both your perspectives. My question is: what do you think the impact of low numeracy is on productivity , economic growth and employee development? Do you see a key skills gap in numeracy for people who you are either hiring or trying to hire?
Neil Morrison: By way of context, Severn Trent operates in the Midlands, and the stat for the Midlands is that 53% of people come out with less than a grade 4 in maths. That presents itself in the workplace. Of our apprenticeship intake, about 20% join without any qualification and 10% are considered to have low numeracy skills, so that of a 11 year-old. What that means in reality is that telling the time is problematic, which is a problem when it comes to shift patterns and working shifts; doing basic calculations and struggling with percentages and deductions for things like pay slips, tax and national insurance; and then job-related calculations, understanding flow and basic measures, and calculating duration. We lean into that challenge in supporting those young people to gain those skills because, without the work that we do, that would absolutely have an impact on their productivity and their ability to contribute to the workplace and fulfil their potential and their career opportunities.
The Chair: That is a fairly bleak picture.
Neil Morrison: Without the interventions that we put in place, it would be very bleak. Obviously we can touch only a small percentage of the population of the Midlands in terms of employment, so one has to assume that those people who are not working with us are represented in the wider community but therefore not getting the support that we offer directly.
Mark Homans: Before I begin, it might be helpful for the committee if I take a moment to frame my role. While I sit within a large employer, my primary responsibility for Santander is as head of social impact. My focus is not just on our workforce but on how we as a bank support millions of customers and communities, particularly adults, to build financial health, confidence and capability. From that perspective, I encourage the committee to think about numeracy not just as a foundational skill taught in schools or the workplace but as something that is applied in real life—in decisions that people make every day about budgeting, borrowing, saving and planning for the future.
We consistently see a gap not simply in ability but in confidence and application. For example, many people believe they understand financial concepts but, when asked a simple question about inflation, only around one-third of people can answer it correctly. At the same time, only one in five adults has ever engaged in any form of financial education, despite there being very strong demand for the subject. So, from our perspective, the issue is less about motivation and more about access, relevance and delivery at scale. That is why our focus is on meeting people where they are through simple practical tools, supporting people at key life moments and partnerships that reach people beyond the formal education setting. I am happy to speak about our role as an employer, but I also hope I can bring a broader perspective on how we support adults across society to apply numeracy in the real world and why lifelong learning pathways are critical but currently missing.
To answer the question directly, low numeracy should be best understood as a gap between confidence, understanding and application rather than just a simple lack of basic skills. In December 2025, Santander published a report called The Currency of Learning. I have mentioned this stat but it is really important: 61% of people believe they are financially equipped and capable, whereas only one-third of those people can answer that simple question on inflation. There is a real disconnect between declared capability and confidence and the ability to apply numeracy in a vocational setting. That gap matters because it leads to poor financial decisions, whether with borrowing, saving or investing, and we have seen reduced resilience financially, increased individual stress disengagement and lower participation in economic activity as a result.
It is well known that financial illiteracy increases a person’s chance of getting into debt, and they often end up incurring higher fees and using higher-cost borrowing. A recent study in the US shows that adults self-reported losing nearly $2,000 per year due to a lack of financial knowledge. At the macro level, improving financial literacy could add just shy of £7 billion per year to the UK economy, according to research from the CBI and GoHenry, and that figure is equivalent to just over £200 billion by 2050, so it is significant economically. For employers, the impact is less about basic numeracy deficits and more about confidence in decision-making—the ability to engage with financial benefits including pensions, savings and other propositions—and progression into roles that require financial judgment.
The Chair: There is a lot to get our heads around there. We ought to get a copy of that report, The Currency of Learning, which you have only recently published.
Mark Homans: Yes, in December 2025. It was nationally representative of, I believe, 2,000 to 3,000 UK adults. Interestingly, it was a global piece of research in Santander’s core markets; 20,000 people were surveyed globally, so there is some really deep, rich insight. I am happy to submit that following today.
Q48 Lord Hannett of Everton: We are particularly interested in employer responsibility or actions when it comes to supporting people in the workplace. You have touched on some of that, but what steps have you taken as an employer to address low numeracy skills and what in-house training, if any, do you provide? Do you signpost individuals to external resources if they require that support, whether in college courses or in informal training?
Neil Morrison: Severn Trent is an apprenticeship provider as well as an employer. We have a purpose-built academy in Coventry where we provide training that includes functional skills, so we train in literacy and numeracy. Our experience is that one size does not fit all, and that each individual comes to us with an individual experience of the education system that we need to challenge and support them with, so personalisation is key to supporting them with numeracy. We see that a multifaceted approach works really well—skills alongside work experience and the application of numeracy skills—and the delivery quality really matters as well.
My tutors are all life experienced. They have come from very similar backgrounds to the people that they are trying to support. How does that present itself? Across the 650 courses that we offer, we have numeracy skills embedded in all of those for all the learners. We have diagnostics that we use with learners to help them to understand the way in which they learn best, whether that is in person, online or in a small group, to try to take away some of the stigma that they might have had in the education system. We offer one-to-one support as well. So we offer that to all our employees, and anyone can come to it. We do not signpost externally because we provide it internally, and we can deliver training up to GCSE level for them.
Lord Hannett of Everton: Do you see a demand for it?
Neil Morrison: We do. We offer that to all our apprentices who come through. Obviously functional skills requirements are not required for some apprentices but we still offer it to them, and we offer it to the wider workforce as well to help them with retraining or moving into different areas. In terms of demand, it is about creating a culture of psychological safety, particularly for people later on in their careers who maybe have struggled with the education system and do not want to be seen to be going back to the classroom, so where and how we train is really important as well as what we are training in.
Mark Homans: Internally, Santander provides a range of numeracy-related training and courses through digital learning platforms predominantly. We have a platform called Dojo, and there is also an external platform that we developed as the bank that is called Santander Open Academy. It is a global platform that is used by over 10 million people across the world, and in the UK just over 1 million people use it. It is for our employees and for customers and communities more broadly. Within that proposition, there is lots in there that ranges from simple numeracy skills right through to more advanced accounting courses and some of the more advanced financial concepts.
With that said, it is important to recognise that, as we are a bank, our employees tend to be relatively numerate. We have a significant focus on making sure that our colleagues can communicate clearly with our customers, we equip them to explain financial concepts simply and confidently and we work tirelessly to embed financial well-being and capability into their broader development, as well as our product suite and the ways in which customers engage with the bank through digital and in-person channels.
Lord Hampton: Just for clarification, you mentioned Dojo and something else that I am afraid I missed. Dojo is the software that kids use as well, but your other one is bespoke. Is that correct? What is it called?
Mark Homans: Santander Open Academy. Exactly to your point, Dojo is off-the-shelf software that we purchased and Open Academy is Santander’s proprietary platform.
Baroness Bull: You said that your employees tend to be numerate. Do you have a percentage of employees who are not in number-type jobs—for instance, cleaning staff—and, if so, would they also be encouraged to use the numeracy tools?
Mark Homans: That is a great question. I do not have the stats available, but we can submit them. Generally, when we look at how we support people right across the UK, whether that is our customers, the communities that we serve, employed colleagues or colleagues at subcontractors as part of a supply chain, we take a uniform view that we are all about helping people to build skills for a brighter future. Financial education and financial health are two strategic pillars for us under our social strategy, and we strongly believe that the skills growth part of that is really important.
The Open Academy platform was a critical vehicle to be able to deliver that type of support at scale. For research, we use Public First, which you may be familiar with. It conducted an extensive nationally representative survey to understand adult learning behaviours, which established that people are time poor and cash poor and they do not know what they need to learn and therefore do not learn. When they do learn, they want curated learning journeys, they want the learning to be bite-sized, digital, consumable and just in time. They wanted to be able to fit learning in around life—kids, family life, work and all the normal things that people do. We have tried to be thoughtful about how that platform fits and meets people where they are at with their learning needs. A subset of education is numeracy, that strategy is underpinned by numeracy, and some of the content drives some of that personal professional growth.
Lord Massey of Hampstead: You mentioned that you do a lot digitally. Is that teacher led or just online courses? To the extent that you do teaching for your employees, is it classroom-based, is it one on one, or is it simple online courses that people take? Which do you think work best?
Neil Morrison: We offer a combination of all of the above because it depends on the individual learner’s needs. We will do one-to-one coaching where there are particular barriers to learning. We tend to avoid classrooms. Lots of people’s experience of the classroom is not necessarily a positive one, so the way in which the building is set up is designed not to feel like a school classroom. We also have a whole suite of digital training that employees can access as and when they want. So it depends on the individual learner and their level of confidence and competence.
Baroness Hamwee: In my head, people who want extra learning tend to be quite early entrants into a job, fairly young, but you have indicated that your people cover quite a wide age range. Can you flesh that out slightly?
Mark Homans: That is an interesting point. As we move into the digital AI age, there is an increasing realisation in all sectors that there is a need for growth. I go back to the earlier point that many adults struggle to understand what they need to learn in order to be relevant and to be able to contribute, whether for their company or in the community that they serve or whatever setting they are in.
From a numeracy perspective, the average person does not wake up thinking about numeracy; they wake up thinking, “I’ve got a job to do”, or, “There’s a challenge that I’ve got”, a real-world problem. They tend to be motivated to learn in a just-in-time sense—“There is something that I need to know now. Let me learn it”—which is why people want to do this kind of bite-size, just-in-time-type learning.
As always with these things, though, the issue is understanding where to go. Interestingly, we are seeing more and more people go to social media as the place to go and understand what they need to do. Around one in five adults now goes to social media for financial numeracy and literacy-type learning. That is a potential problem, depending on the quality of what they are finding and whether it is robust. We are really seeing a different segmented need from young people. We know that we have circa a million young people not in education, employment and training in the country at the moment, which is a big problem. The challenges for that group are probably very different from someone at my point in my career who is thinking about relevance, reskilling and upskilling to ensure that the next 15 years of career are well executed.
Q49 Lord Blackwell: You have both spoken about the problem of numeracy in the wider community, which means your customers. Could you give us some specific examples of where numeracy is a problem in dealing with bills or financial products and what you do about that in terms of communication and helping them to understand?
Mark Homans: We have a section on our website called the financial support hub. Within that there is a function called, “If finances are a struggle”, where, as you would expect, there are various tools that people can use, such as financial health checks and budget planners, and they support customers with their finances at the point of need. We have internal and external support on benefit maximisation and financial planning and advice. As a firm, as you would expect, we also adhere to the FCA’s consumer duty rules; I am sure you are well versed in those so I will not labour that.
In a general sense, we are very proactive in understanding when customers start to face financial difficulty. We have a financial support team who are there to help customers at whatever stage that they are at. We work hard to ensure that we as a bank are there to help people at the point of need.
Lord Blackwell: I could interpret that as helping them to get to the right answer despite their lack of numeracy skills, rather than helping them to understand themselves and improve their numeracy skills. Is that fair?
Mark Homans: That is a fantastic point. We are looking carefully at how we deliver the educational part. You are completely correct in that if a problem happens then the bank is there to support, but actually there is a step in between, which is education and numeracy, and that builds resilience and capability over time. Our social strategy is focused on inclusion, resilience building, financial health and capability. Later this year, we will be launching a suite of financial education content that will be at different levels for different target audiences dependent upon need. My personal view is that there is a lot of work to do to make sure that it is understood that it is there as a resource, because these things are great but if people do not know they are there, do not access them and do not use them then invariably nothing changes.
It becomes a marketing and communications job to be done. Assets are great and we know people have need, but how do we surface the assets, raise awareness, start to get people using these propositions and then start to use the data to understand the value of that interaction and, in the longer term, what that means from an outcome and impact point of view, which then goes into theory-of-change-type models and understanding longer-term longitudinal outcomes? It is a complex system to get right.
Lord Blackwell: So when you send people information about mortgages, payback periods or whatever, have you discovered ways of communicating that are easier for people to understand?
Mark Homans: This is not massively my area. We are straying into marketing and communications territory now, so I would be happy to speak to our team and get them to submit our approach. My generalist view on it is that the bank works incredibly hard within the consumer duty and other frameworks, particularly around the language we use, and the simplicity with which we explain what could be quite complex financial topics. To go back to the earlier point, there is a real desire to make sure that all our people are able to communicate confidently, clearly and simply with customers at the point of need, which is quite important.
Lord Blackwell: I would be interested in your team’s view on whether the regulatory constraints on giving advice mean that you end up with liability if you give advice and whether that complicates trying to help people.
Mark Homans: I will take that away, thank you.
Neil Morrison: There are two buckets of activity that we do. The first is around bills. For 80% of our customers, the only interaction that they have with us as a company is via their bill, which comes twice a year. Assuming low levels of numeracy, talking about cubic metres and usage is not going to be particularly helpful, so we do a lot of work to create visualisation, using diagrams and pictures to help customers who may have lower numeracy skills to understand their bill and understand exactly what they are paying for and why. That connects both to our contact centres and the training that we give our advisers to be able to help people, and to our digital assets. We have a whole range of tools on our website where customers can find different ways to explore what their bill is and why it is what it is.
The second bucket is that we aim to help 100,000 people in our community out of poverty through skills and employability. We have a number of different channels to do that. For example, we do a particular piece of work with those with experience of the care system. As part of that, we do targeted financial training and financial awareness training for them so that, as well as work experience and the skills, they get real-life skills that might be transferable to other contexts. We have a range of online training that is available to anyone within our community on a range of topics, from confidence building to CV writing, but that also has 11 modules on numeracy itself—everything from a basic understanding of data through to understanding different types of graphs and charts—that is free at the point of access.
Lord Blackwell: Given that people need to understand their bill, does that create a motive that you can use to help them improve their generic numeracy skills?
Neil Morrison: I think it does. For the vast majority of people who receive a bill, their immediate thought is affordability and cost of living, so a lot of our work is signposting them to the support that we can give them in order to do that, and then there is a segue on to how we can help with numeracy more generally. But the initial contact, if I am honest, is normally about the cost and understanding whether it is accurate or not, rather than about broadening their skills.
Q50 Baroness Spielman: It is clear, as both of you have touched on, that the demands of numeracy in personal finances have consistently increased in recent decades. Against that, there is a trend in modern business technology and processes to engineer out points of failure, error rates and so on, and in many cases that reduces the opportunities that individuals, especially in relatively routine jobs, ever have to use many aspects of numeracy. For bank clerks, the demands of cashing up are not what they were; individual clerks at Severn Trent do not have to work out what refund or additional money is due when somebody moves house part way through a billing period. Many of the places to apply it are gone. I would like to understand how you balance that. How do you think about not accidentally engineering out through business processes all the things that are critical to people developing the quantitative capability that you have described—for example, being able to explain things to customers or in doing various kinds of business tasks that are still very relevant?
Mark Homans: That is a fantastic question. I have mentioned the pace of change, and digital and AI being an accelerant of that; I suspect they will just become even more challenging in the future. Engineering of processes is a natural area where businesses always seek to be more efficient and to reduce risks and errors. I guess it becomes a wider workforce question. What does it ultimately mean for the workforce generally, whether in the bank or in the UK more broadly? For me, there is a general point around numeracy and application into the real world and what that looks like in the future, because it probably looks different from today. My view is that it has to be conscious in an employer’s mindset. Our HR people and culture teams look at future workforce needs, the skills required in those workforces and how we provision for investment in people in skills growth, linking numeracy to the vocational aspects of the job. With my social impact head on, when I think about the customers and communities that we serve, I guess that is going to be true of many businesses across the UK, so I start to think about the role that we could take as a bank that cares deeply about skills and UK productivity in how we might start to help businesses to think about some of those challenges.
The simple answer to the question is that things will change. That is the only constant here. We need to be conscious of leadership and how businesses lead, considering the workforce need from a numeracy perspective and how it applies vocationally. What does that look like in the future economy?
Neil Morrison: I argue that both people and technology are really important. For us, a large proportion of our workforce is operational, working out in the field or on sites, and they are dealing with a lot of data, dials and telemetry, making sense of what is going on and making sure that we protect the environment. Humans are the protection against failure in that system, so they are the ones who need to be able to look at the flow readings, the dials, and to understand, “Is that showing me the picture that I would expect to see in this situation or at this site?” And they need the numeracy skills to be able to do that. Yes, they can work alongside technology, and 95% to 99% of times things are running well, but the humans are there to make sure that technology is giving us the picture that we need to see.
Baroness Spielman: My question was trying to get at how, when you have removed a lot of the routine applications of numeracy through automation, you preserve the ability to develop precisely the kind of situational judgment that you are talking about.
Neil Morrison: That is very much in the training that we do. We train the employees who come to us to understand the data that the technology is showing them and how to use it. To give an example, we have 90,000 kilometres of pipes under the ground across the Midlands. If you are looking at pressure, you triangulate that from various points in the system, and the operative needs to run a calculation on those different points to make sure that the system is running as it should. Technology cannot do that at the moment, so we need to train our employees to be able to do it and to make the most of it.
Q51 Baroness Garden of Frognal: We are aware that until recently apprentices had to complete GCSE maths and English, and for many of them this was a sort of no-go area, so they had the reinforced failure of being required to resit, knowing that they were going to fail again. They are now thinking of removing the requirements for adult apprentices to complete a level 2 maths qualification. What implications is that going to have for the productivity and progress in the workforce of your apprentices?
Mark Homans: The removal of the requirement has supported greater participation among adult learners, and we have not observed any decline in quality or completions as a result of the change.
Baroness Garden of Frognal: Great.
Mark Homans: Across our apprenticeship programmes, our training providers continue to assess prior learning. Where learners have not achieved level 2 maths or English, they are offered the opportunity to work towards that as part of their ongoing development.
Neil Morrison: We waived the requirement for employees joining us to have maths or English because we have a functional skills facility where we can train people, and we think that widens participation in the apprenticeship schemes that we offer. We have not removed the requirement for adult learners, so we still offer them the opportunity to go through to be able to get to English and maths, if they have not, and we have a 100% pass rate on our functional skills training. For people who have joined us, at whatever age, who have not managed to get that qualification at school, we have a very good track record of getting them through. So at this stage we do not see an impact. We are still offering that to every learner who comes to us, and we see a very high take-up rate and, as I say, a very high success rate.
Q52 Viscount Stansgate: I want to ask about your use of what you might call champions—numeracy champions or intermediaries. For example, Mr Morrison spoke earlier about a multifaceted approach, and Mr Homans spoke about Santander Open Access. Do you make use of what we might call role models to inspire people to undertake the type of training and assistance that you offer?
Neil Morrison: We do not specifically call them champions, but there are four groups of employees that I would flag who do this work. The first are our functional skills tutors. They get people up to GCSE level in English and maths, and they will go out and talk about the work they are doing and encourage people to come forward if they want additional support or help.
Viscount Stansgate: They go round to where your offices are or other physical locations?
Neil Morrison: Absolutely. The second group who work alongside them are our technical trainers, the people who will teach you how to fix a leak under pressure or how to do all the operational work. They build numeracy into the work that they do as well, so they go out around sites championing the work. Thirdly, we have line managers and mentors who support employees, and the fourth group are our trade unions, who we work closely with to make sure that we are supporting employees who need support to get it. To give an example, an employee coming to us would learn in a safe environment in the academy. They will be doing it with the technical trainers and the functional skills tutors. They will then go into work with their line manager and a mentor who will support them in applying that learning into the workplace. They then get pastoral support from my HR team and from the trade unions to make sure that they feel safe in doing so.
Mark Homans: We do not have that role per se in the bank so I cannot comment on numeracy champions specifically, although conceptually I agree a lot with what Neil has have said. We have many of those line management and people structures in place to make sure that people are supported and helped with need.
Directly to your question on the Santander Open Academy, when we researched, it was interesting that adults wanted to learn from experts in their field and very much wanted it to be industry led. They did not want to feel like they were being taught something that was very academic in its nature, or that felt like school or a classroom.
There is an adjacent point around the idea of a champion being someone who is further ahead than you are and maybe something that you are aspiring to be like in the future. From a numeracy perspective, there are some very good social media influencers out there who do wonderful work, who are credible and can be that person for people who wish to build numeracy. What they do incredibly well is linking it back to a real-world application of numeracy. That is something that I keep saying a lot, but we see it really work when people can understand how it applies to something that is relevant in their day-to-day life.
Viscount Stansgate: Do you monitor these social influencers and decide which ones are best suited for the workforce that you have?
Mark Homans: I would not say that we monitor them. We have the capability to assess the performance of influencers and determine who we might want to work with if we wanted to engage. Influencers can be a really powerful marketing tool, as I am sure you are aware, particularly when you are trying to drive top-end awareness at the top of the marketing funnel. We would do lots of due diligence on influencers before working with any. The reason why I can offer a small amount of insight is that we have done influencer-led campaigns where influencers were in the content as well as part of the marketing campaign. Sometimes that worked incredibly well; other times not so much. I am thinking of people like Hannah Fry, who is wonderful, and a nice example of what I am quoting here.
Viscount Stansgate: By the same token, do you identify social influencers who could be harmful and you might be worried that they might unduly and wrongly influence the people you are employing?
Mark Homans: As I say, we do not actively look at influencers, good or bad. It is more anecdotal; we tend to see things that happen and have a view on them. From the research that we have done historically, it is evident that there is a big, disparate variation in the quality of what is out there. Take a topic like crypto; lots of young people are currently really into crypto, but a large number of influencers out there are pushing messages that are, frankly, probably quite damaging and harmful. You do not need to analyse that too much to recognise that that is probably not great, but then there are some brilliant people doing wonderful work. If you have a proposition and you want to get that proposition to mass market, meeting people where they are at, on TikTok or Instagram or whichever social media platform it is, thoughtful engagement with influencers can be a powerful way to reach your target audiences with some of your messages.
Q53 Baroness Bull: My question is about the drivers behind employees seeking support with numeracy and the balance of the push/pull between employee interest and employer need. You have spoken about that already, and I will invite you to say some more, but I am also interested in the challenges that might prevent people from coming forward. In the 2025 White Paper on post-16 education and skills, the Government noted that employers felt the skills system was too complex to engage with, which made me think, “If it is too complex for employers, how does it seem for employees?” I counted in our briefing paper 14 initiatives—Fair4All finance, tailored learning, skills bootcamps; the list goes on and on—and if you are nervous already and lacking confidence, as you said, that is a lot. How much do you know about why people are coming forward and what puts people off? If you have done anything to address the latter, we would be interested to hear about it.
Mark Homans: We have touched on this, but the biggest barriers to people engaging are confidence, stigma and perceived irrelevance. When we have researched this, the evidence shows that people are more motivated to be financially literate. In fact 95% of people said they were keen to be better and make progress, but only 20% of people actually take a course or do anything about it.
Your point about provision is really important. In the UK there is no shortage of material out there, whether it is from the Government, business or academia. However—this goes to the point I made earlier that adults need to clearly understand what they need to do and how to do it, and almost to be given this curated approach—when you are met with this wall of opportunity, that can be quite overwhelming, and that is a challenge.
Meeting people where they are is important. A key driver for engagement is clear relevance. When people are thinking about managing bills or debt and saving, immediate usefulness and low friction to access numeracy is really important. Employers can help by embedding that into everyday work, signposting support and creating a culture of continuous development, which is also key. People need to want to keep growing and learning.
Neil Morrison: The biggest barrier that we see is a poor experience of the education system, leading to low confidence. Talking to an employee about getting a maths or English qualification suddenly puts them back in a situation where they may have failed previously, and reminds them of the stigma of not achieving it, particularly later in life, which affects their confidence when going back into an educational setting. To tackle that, we try to create individual learning experiences based on the employee themselves, taking it out of classroom learning, as I mentioned earlier, and making it more situational. We put the work they are doing in the context of their work and their employment, so that it feels like it has real-life benefit, and generally create psychological safety within the organisation so that people feel they can speak out about the challenges that they face.
An additional issue that we see is the number of employees who join us who are dyslexic but have not received a statement on their dyslexia. Again, we support them to go through that process so that they get extra time and support in getting their functional skills training.
Baroness Bull: Do you have experience of people coming in with a diagnosis of dyscalculia?
Neil Morrison: Absolutely we do, and we have supported them through our functional skills training because it allows additional support and time in terms of passing the qualifications. There are not as many as we see with dyslexia.
Baroness Bull: There is not as much diagnosis in the system.
Neil Morrison: Exactly. But then we see that across a number of neurodiverse conditions.
I will say that this is not just a young person’s opportunity. We see people at all stages of life coming forward and saying that they need support, often because they have gone through a life change—it might be that they have had a child, or they have had a grandchild, or their child is going into primary school and they want to be able to support them with that, or they are looking after their grandchildren and they want to be able to help them with their literacy and numeracy. We had an incredibly heartwarming story, which was about literacy rather than numeracy, of an employee who was able to write a birthday card to his son for the first time after going through one of our programmes. So the motivation is often different for individuals, but creating that psychological safety in the organisation is really important.
Baroness Bull: You have pre-empted my follow-up. We have heard from National Numeracy, which did some specific work with Barclays on the impact of people wanting to help their kids. That was a real driver for people improving numeracy. I do not know, Mark, whether that is resonant for you.
Mark Homans: We have worked for the last five years with Twinkl on the Santander Numbers Game, which has helped 2.5 million children. About 8,300 schools have now used the materials, and the proposition has been amazing for young people. We are currently thinking about how, post the government announcement on numeracy becoming statutory in primary schools from 2028, in the run-up to that we start to understand the complexity of delivering it, because, as we all know, that is not an easy task to achieve. So we are currently working with Twinkl on how to use 2026 to understand the needs of teachers, of school leaders who need to create CPD space for teachers, of parents who need support in the home and of the children themselves, particularly when we are talking about parents who have come from a school system where maybe they have not been able to apply numeracy to financial health. That is an interesting challenge and requires much deeper understanding of the problem. The hope is that, having done that, we will be able to co-create solutions with Twinkl for schools. We will be more focused on teachers and helping teachers to teach and parents to support children at home with numeracy.
Q54 Baroness Hamwee: You have talked a lot about your own organisations. Can we move to employers more widely? People say that employers should invest more in training, and perhaps you could comment on that. Then there is the question of the size of the employer. I come from a small business background—a legal background, actually—and I do not know how my firm would have coped with this, so I am interested in a wider view.
Mark Homans: That is a great question. My general sense is that investment in skills generally has dropped right across the board in the past five years or so as businesses have leaned into lots of different economic headwinds and challenges. It is particularly hard in SMEs, where you are a smaller business and you are thinking carefully about how to grow your workforce but maybe resources or time are constrained, and you do not have access to some of the platforms that some of the larger corporates would have access to for people growth, so it is probably quite a different challenge for SMEs from large corporates. In a general sense, everyone is thinking about future state capability. I am sure you hear lots about AI in this committee. Future digital skills, with AI sitting alongside numeracy, are going to be important to a future workforce.
From Santander’s point of view, we have taken a strategic approach to how we use our apprenticeship levy. What is interesting is that a lot of our levy ultimately does not get spent on Santander apprentices. We work really closely with 70 universities across the UK, and we are one of the largest global donors to higher education in the world. By virtue of that fact, we have been able to work closely with the apprenticeship levy teams in universities. Two years ago we started transferring a large chunk of our levy to one of the local universities, which was then able to promote that to local SME businesses, which could access Santander’s levy to upskill their workforce. We try to be really thoughtful about how the levy can be leveraged for value—this was a Milton Keynes-specific test—and we saw lots of SMEs coming forward and saying that would be really helpful.
I would not say that the levy system itself was the easiest to navigate. Some of that was quite challenging for businesses to understand how to plug into it. Once it was well understood, though, they were getting lots of value—their employees in particular. It was great for the local university because it was levy consumption, and from a Milton Keynes point of view it was a productivity growth gain. We try to be thoughtful on some of these things and work out how we can be useful back to the society that we serve by virtue of that fact.
Neil Morrison: More work could be done in getting employers together for regional support. We have something called the Midlands Employer Alliance, which we founded, bringing together large and small employers along with the DWP and the West Midlands Combined Authority to look at some of the underlying skills challenges and unemployment challenges in the region. That is where large employers can shoulder some of the weight for smaller employers in order to create means to do so. We ourselves spend about £2 million on the levy. We draw down the entirety of it, and most of it goes on level 2 and 3 apprenticeships, but we fund an additional £3 million in training over and above that. That is not easy for every organisation to do; we have touched on the fact that lots of organisations have seen economic headwinds.
On the levy itself, there is a bit of a chicken-and-egg debate about whether you need levy reform in order to create opportunities or whether you should create opportunities in order to maximise the levy, but I realise that that is something that lots of organisations struggle with. Still, coalitions bringing people together in a regional or place-based approach is the way to help to support SMEs particularly to deliver some of these things.
Baroness Hamwee: I doubt that there is anyone around the horseshoe who has not said, in a political context, “Don’t you understand that if you invest in whatever it is then you will get the benefit in a very few years’ time?” Is that a message that should be transferred to the employer sector?
Neil Morrison: I believe so, but I also recognise that it is hard when you are dealing with economic pressures right here, right now. We talk about time to competency as a measure. We know when someone who joins us will be fully competent in role. If you combine that with workforce planning, you can understand when you need to be investing in order to mitigate skills gaps that you are going to have in the future, but that takes a lot of work, planning and co-ordination. Investment is definitely the right answer for the economy and for companies, but I understand why it does not always feel as easy.
Q55 Lord Hampton: You touched on this before when you said there was no shortage of material from Government. We need to create a culture of continued learning but there is a lack of statements on dyslexia and dyscalculia. Then there is the complexity of creating the financial literacy curriculum. Neil, you were talking about the alliances that you have worked with. You have talked about the role the Government can play in prioritising numeracy but, now that Skills England is over a year old, while perhaps you could touch on what more the Government could do, I would be interested to know what you are doing with Skills England and what Skills England could do to prioritise numeracy.
Mark Homans: We have touched on this, but the key issue is co-ordination and scale. Evidence shows a strong demand for financial education but, at the risk of repeating myself, we see inconsistent provision and limited access. The focus for the Government and Skills England should be on making adult numeracy and financial capability a national priority, and we should enable delivery through employers, schools and community organisations and think carefully about how to reduce barriers. Again, I am repeating myself, but cost, time and accessibility are important to people, and we should think about those carefully.
We should support practical real-world learning models. It is clear to me that adults do not want an academic experience; they want it to feel real-world applicable. They want to be able to consume it there and then and on the go. From a strategic perspective, it is about nailing that strategy and being clear on what it is and thinking carefully about the propositions that sit within it. Then we have to think about the enabling layer—marketing, comms networks, stakeholders and partnerships—wrapped around that impact. If we get that right and execute it well, what do we expect to see in three or five years from now? Once that is defined, we have to be flexible and agile enough to recognise that the best-laid plans may need to change, so we should retain a build, measure, learn, test and learn approach to execution.
At the national level, it is complex because there is so much variation when you get down into the regional levels. What we have seen work incredibly well are place-based strategies, when you deeply understand the needs of a community, so that strategic propositional enablement layer can be really tailored. That is a real challenge for a Government when you are trying to effect a national agenda so I do not know the answer, but I recognise the complexity in that system that needs to change over time.
Lord Hampton: It is a challenge for the Government, but hopefully that is what Skills England does. That is what it is supposed to be doing, is it not?
Mark Homans: The regional lens is important. We were talking about this outside in terms of the place-based piece.
Neil Morrison: I should mention that I sat on the board of IfATE, the predecessor to Skills England, until Skills England was created.
Lord Hampton: Ah. Sorry about that.
Neil Morrison: I am delighted that Skills England has moved into DWP, which is a sensible place for it to sit. We work with it a lot on the creation and quality of standards. There is a real opportunity for it to look at numeracy and how it sits within the standards, rather than as a separate piece itself, but is built into all the standards and qualifications that it approves. There is a real opportunity to do that because, as I have mentioned, we see that when numeracy is contextualised for learners then it becomes much easier for them to take that on board. That is what I would like Skills England to be focused on, as well as focusing on those jobs that are areas of growth, which are not necessarily the ones that are always talked about. Lots of traditional occupations are growth industries, and my sector is very much one of them, that are perhaps not looked at, where learners can get long-term good-quality jobs and education alongside them.
In terms of government more generally, we need flexibility of funding, and I do not mean the apprenticeship levy. We know that outcomes are better when education, training and work experience all come together, and we should look at how we provide opportunities do that. We have been running some trials in the Midlands on this with the DWP, with some brilliant outcomes for people who are long-term unemployed. So we should think more about how to do that, and there are some steps towards that with the youth guarantee and other initiatives that could be really beneficial.
Lord Hampton: Could we see some evidence of that?
Neil Morrison: Absolutely. I can provide the evidence on the trials.
Q56 Lord Hannett of Everton: Thinking particularly how you measure the success of your training and how you communicate with your employees—Neil mentioned that there is a third party, and I assume you say that third party adds value—how do you consult your workforce about the training and give feedback to them?
Neil Morrison: We do that with our joint trade unions. We have a company forum, attended by management and our trade unions, that has learning representatives on there who represent the workforce. We also do qualitative and quantitative research across the employee base, and we look at the stats in terms of uptake and success.
For everything that we train, we will have an assessment of competence at the end of it. That will manifest in many different ways depending on the training; it could be a one-to-one conversation or an online assessment. The quality is really important to us because, when we are making the level of investment that we are, we want to see outcomes in productivity and performance.
Mark Homans: At the risk of repeating myself, I concur with all that. The one aspect that I would add is the Santander Open Academy platform, which, as I mentioned earlier, has 1.2 million adult UK users now. We also measure NPS, its net promoter score, which is a key metric to understand if people would advocate and promote the content and the materials to friends, family and colleagues. We tend to see that high-advocacy programmes are used more and shared more. In the challenge around how to get people participating, a recommendation can be a powerful way for someone to want to participate.
I mentioned earlier that we are going to launch a financial education curriculum later this year. Some of the stigma attached to low numeracy can be resolved in part if friendship groups and people who are trusted are consuming it and then recommending it to people in their peer groups, or people who they think would get some value from it. That is still to be tested, so I cannot prove it yet, but my hypothesis is that, for low numeracy, applicable content at the right level, executed well from a user-experience point of view, will lead to advocacy, positive NPS and advocacy and recommendation. We can report back on whether that actually plays out in the future.
Q57 Lord Stevenson of Balmacara: This is a general question. Both of you have been in the game for a number of years, and you have spoken about that experience. Give us a steer. Are things getting better or worse? Just give us some hope.
Mark Homans: I would not say things were getting better or worse. They are a bit samey; that would be my read of it. In the research that we have looked at, the feedback tends to be very similar each time. We do not see any big swings one way or another in differences of opinion or how people consume. I guess we are seeing big user changes in how they consume learning, and there is lots of material available about how they do that. We need to understand that and meet people where they are at.
There are definitely trends around social media influencers and more people consuming that type of content than maybe some of the more academic basis that we have seen historically, but I do not know that that necessarily shifts the dial in terms of outcome and impact longer term. It would be interesting to study that. So there are changing behaviours and changes in where people find things and consume, but I am not so sure that outcomes and impact have materially changed.
Neil Morrison: The headline data suggests that things are getting better, but a lot of my work is with some of the most disadvantaged in society—those who have multiple barriers to work and employment—and unfortunately the gap that they experience is getting worse. So it becomes more important to target our focus on those who are getting lower attainment at school because the schools have lower provision, resource and staffing. We need somehow to break the loop that they get themselves into, and that is very much where our work is focused.
Q58 Lord Massey of Hampstead: This is the final question, one that summarises this very helpful discussion. From your perspective as employers, and given our collective desire to improve numeracy levels within society, is there a single recommendation that you want to make to us for how the Government, perhaps in partnership with employers, can get numeracy up?
Neil Morrison: I have talked about low confidence and how experience in the education system can damage people’s confidence as learners. I would like to see the Government integrate numeracy into sector-based training and apprenticeships, as I talked about earlier, rather than as a separate stand-alone piece, but being fully integrated into that training in a real-life, pragmatic, contextualised and applicable way.
The Youth Futures Foundation has done some research into the most effective means of getting people into employment, and its view is that numeracy needs to be applied. Single numeracy programmes do not work but, where it is contextualised and applied into work, it is much more effective. That is where the opportunity is: to weave it into subjects, rather than having it stand alone.
Mark Homans: Different words, same point: I very much concur. We believe in working with employers to develop a strategy that really aligns with the direct application of numeracy to the real world. The question you asked earlier was really insightful. As the workforce changes, and as the needs of workers and business change, business being in lockstep with Government around how to solve that is going to become critical in the years to come. I concur entirely with the point made.
The Chair: Thank you both. We have run out of time but I am sure we could have spent a lot longer. This has been illuminating. We do not have time for you to answer this now, but I would be interested to know—so maybe you could write to us—whether you offer your packages to your supply chain, to Baroness Hamwee’s point about SMEs. You have battle-tested products. Neil mentioned that you were getting a 100% pass rate in your functional skills courses, which is tremendous, while you, Mark, are reaching a million people through your academy. You mentioned that you are a bit worried about social media; it is the place where everyone is going, but it is an unregulated Wild West so you do not know how good the training is that people are picking up. Are there other ways of getting your academy to a wider audience? I am a huge believer that, if things work, I want them to be made more widely available. I would be grateful if you could have a think about that and drop us a line.
Thank you both so much, and we look forward to incorporating a lot of your thoughts into our report.