Building Greater Confidence with Numeracy

At Capital One, we’re one of the UK’s top credit card providers, with values strongly rooted in social responsibility and commitment to promoting better social mobility from school-aged children to struggling adults. 

National Numeracy (NN) – a charity whose mission is to support Money Management, Numeracy for Work and Children’s Numeracy – conducted eye-opening research which showed almost half the working-age population have the expected numeracy level of a primary school child, which can negatively impact individuals, workplaces and society as a whole.

Recognising this challenge, and its alignment to both of our missions and values, we formed a partnership, which aimed to: 

• Significantly increase numeracy skills/confidence.
• Ensure brighter futures for children.
• Serve those in greatest need.

 This included:

• Boosting national campaigns - National Numeracy Day and Number Confidence Week were crucial for the charity's success.
• Kickstarting NN's Corporate Volunteering Programme, which targeted primary school students/parents, to help them to grow confidence/skills in mathematics.
• Harnessing expert insight from our CEO Lucy-Marie Hague, who sits on NN’s leadership council. 
• Developing/publishing industry-wide research on numeracy and launching creative/informative events.

With an enormous task and modest budget, it was the strength of this partnership that aided our successes, including an 80% increase in action-taken to improve innumeracy across over 100,000 event participants. Nearly 100 classroom sessions/assemblies took place nationwide, while broader content reached an audience upwards of 40.5million people. 

As a result, the 2023 campaigns became NN’s most successful to date, with more actions taken than in all the previous years put together!