I AM rubbish at maths and I don’t give a damn. It has not held me back in life and it is unlikely to do so in the future.

A report from the recently-founded charity National Numeracy reveals an increasing number of work-aged UK residents have the numeracy skills of an 11-year-old, leaving them unable to perform basic, everyday activities such as reading train timetables or understanding domestic bills.

What’s more, according to National Numeracy’s chief executive Mike Ellicock, those, like me, who don’t know our axioms from our algebraic surfaces, wear our lack of numeracy skills like a “badge of honour”.

Another survey revealed 80 per cent of adults would feel embarrassed to tell someone they were bad at reading and writing, but only 40 per cent had the same embarrassment over poor numeracy.

I suggest this is because if you struggle at maths, you will always find someone to sympathise and understand your plight. Whereas if, for example, you send in a job application full of grammatical howlers and spelling mistakes, you are looked at, whether fair or not, as a bit of an idiot and your application will go straight into the circular filing cabinet under the desk.

While I appreciate everyone needs the basic mathematical skills and numerical confidence to get them through their day-to-day lives, I would ask if most of us need to know any more than that?

The reasons I am poor at maths are many (not least my old maths teacher at Lowfield, who thought that if you didn’t understand something straight away, it would help if he repeated it, only louder and more angrily while banging his fist on his desk as he uttered each syllable), but the main reason, I suspect, is that my brain is just not wired up that way. I’m much more of a creative person, and I appreciate there can be beauty and creativity within maths, but I believe you either have the ability or you don’t. Most people can grasp the basics but that’s really all we need. Since leaving school I can honestly say I have never had cause to use Pi to calculate the area of a circle (or whatever it is you use Pi for).

Pupils who show a natural leaning towards arithmetic and science, should, of course, be encouraged and nurtured, for they are the inventors, scientists and doctors of the future. But the rest of the class, who just get by with a working understanding of maths, might produce a great artist, musician or the bloke who comes round to your house and stops your leaking shower from flooding your hallway.

I know we can’t have a nation of adults who don’t even possess the ability to understand their own shoe size, but what are schools doing to relate horror subjects like algebra to the real world?

At school I studied both English language and English literature. but when it came to maths there was just one option... maths.

Why can’t there be a branch of maths taught in secondary schools which deals with everyday numeracy such as deciphering your wage slip or understanding how the council tax works or scaling up a food recipe or realising the crippling rates of interest you are signing up to with your store card? The list goes on.

Those identified with an ability for the purer and advanced forms of the subject could take a different path in smaller classes taken by the dwindling, but talented and dedicated, number of maths teachers.

And what is so wrong with using a calculator? The calculator is the perfect illustration of my argument. From its beginnings as a desk-sized contraption in late 1950s Japan, to the powerful pocket-sized devices most of us have in a drawer somewhere, the calculator was developed by people who were very very good at maths – so the rest of us don’t have to be – because we never can be.