How citizens read the charts in front of them

Participants were shown charts of the kind a person meets in a local paper, a workplace bulletin, or a public-health notice. Many could describe the picture. Far fewer could say what had been left out: a chopped axis, a missing year, a percentage with no denominator, a mean dragged by one enormous value.

School mathematics had often stopped at calculation. The workplace, and the public square, were asking for something else: the nerve to say “this figure does not yet support that sentence.” We wrote that distinction into the Data Foundations certificate, where it remains.

The study also changed our charity work with young people. A pathway into a data-related role does not have to begin with a university place. It can begin with a candidate who will not pass a number along until they know what it is a number of.

We still use one exercise from that paper in examiner training. If the candidate sounds more certain than the table, the mark scheme does not reward the certainty.