Not adding up

AS statistics released on February 26th revealed that net migration to Britain in the year to September 2014 was again at a higher level than when David Cameron, the Conservative prime minister, came to power in 2010, new research claims that Britain has suffered a net loss of numeracy as a result of all this immigration. John Jerrim of the Institute of Education at University College London, has produced what he calls the first quantitative look at the skills of people who move into and out of Britain.

Mr Jerrim analysed the OECD’s Programme for International Assessment of Adult Competencies, which covers two dozen countries and assesses the skills of adult populations. He measured the quality of education of migrants from those countries who came to Britain between 1964 to 2011. Focusing on the numeracy scores that are divided into quartiles, Britain lost 684,000 highly skilled people in those years, but this was cancelled out by an equal number of highly skilled immigrants coming in. In addition though, Britain also took in a large number of immigrants with lower numerical skills. The result was that almost four times more immigrants came from the lowest quartile compared with the highest. The study determined that Britain added 2.4 million people with numeracy skills in the lower three quartiles during that time.