Best Beginnings Episode 16: Lizzie Gaisman on the anxiety we hand down and how to interrupt it

There is a moment, probably in a school classroom, probably at some point in secondary school, when a lot of people decide they are not a maths person. It is not usually a dramatic decision. It arrives quietly, consolidated by a test result, a confused look from a teacher, or a well-meaning adult who says: don't worry, you won't need this after your GCSEs. The decision sticks. And it travels.

Lizzie Gaisman is CEO of the Richmond Project, a numeracy charity founded in 2025 by Rishi and Akshata Sunak with a mission that is simple to state and enormously difficult to achieve: to change the way an entire country feels about numbers. In its first year, the charity produced the largest ever survey of how the UK relates to numeracy — more than 10,000 respondents — and what it found was a nation not just under-skilled, but deeply under-confident. And the gap in confidence is bigger than the gap in ability.

The confidence that becomes a skill gap

The Richmond Project's survey measured something that most numeracy research doesn't: it placed confidence and competence side by side. People were asked how they felt about numbers, and then asked to do some maths. What emerged was a picture in which anxiety about maths leads directly to avoidance, and avoidance leads to real decline in ability.

"The skills are like a muscle," Lizzie says. "If you don't practice, you genuinely will find it harder. It's not just that you don't like it — it will also show up in your competence."

The group most affected, across both confidence and ability, is low-income mothers. This is not incidental. Most primary caregivers are women. Most early years educators are women. If the confidence gap falls hardest on women, and women are the people most consistently in the room when children are forming their first relationship with numbers, then the cycle is not just personal. It is structural.

The data on financial literacy underlines the stakes. The Richmond Project's second phase found that 4 in 10 adults lack the financial literacy to manage day-to-day decisions. Those with strong financial literacy are around 80% likely to have passed maths GCSE. Those with poor financial literacy, just over half. The link to early numeracy experience is, as Lizzie puts it, unarguable.

Where the gap opens

The anxiety is not new. The Richmond Project's data goes back more than a decade on trend. But two things have changed. The first is that numeracy has historically been underfunded as a cause compared to literacy: fewer volunteers, less investment, less public conversation. The second is that awareness is finally building.

There is growing recognition that early numeracy is as predictive of life outcomes as early language. School readiness conversations are starting to include number concepts alongside phonics. And the Richmond Project's research reaches people where they are: through the sport they like, the baking they already do, the books they read at bedtime.

"If you like sports, there are loads of ways to have an accessible conversation about numbers through that," Lizzie says. "If you like baking. If you like art. The tip I'd give is: don't view this as some big other thing you have to do in a vacuum. Think about what you already enjoy and weave it in."

This approach shapes BabyZone's Everyday Maths programme, which the Richmond Project now funds for families with children aged 0 to 5. The programme is built around the insight that children arrive in early years settings without the cultural baggage adults carry about maths. They don't yet know it is supposed to be hard. A parent who turns up to an Everyday Maths session is changing their own story, and in doing so, changing their child's.

The open door

One of the most important findings in the Richmond Project's research is the one that goes least reported: the group with the biggest confidence deficit is also the most eager to improve. Low-income mothers, the data shows, are disproportionately motivated to build these skills. The problem is not willingness. It is access.

"You're pushing against a very open door," Lizzie says. The challenge is showing up to push it.

That is what early years infrastructure is for. Not just the formal programme, but the moment in a family hub, the class with a child on your lap, the conversation with a practitioner who makes numbers feel like something that belongs to you. A fifth of parents in the UK is currently too nervous to help their child with primary school maths homework. Most of them were told, at some point, that they wouldn't need it. Most of them were wrong.

The best piece of maths advice Lizzie has heard, she says, is that getting it wrong is valuable. That the process is the point. That a mistake is not evidence of who you are but of what you are learning.

And the worst? "Any version of: I was terrible at it too, and you won't need it. Don't worry about it."

Number confidence does not start in a classroom. It starts in the games, the counting at the supermarket till, the pattern-making on a rainy afternoon, the moment a parent sits down and makes something feel safe. The anxiety we hand down can be interrupted. But the earlier we start, the more chance we have of doing it before it takes hold.