Essential skills – including literacy, numeracy and digital skills – are crucial to supporting adults’ opportunities throughout life. These are skills as fundamental as understanding the dosage instructions on an aspirin packet, estimating the cost of a weekly shop, or filling out forms to access welfare support. Having good skills lead to a range of positive economic, personal and social outcomes.

In the context of an ageing population, longer working lives and increasing digitilisation in society, it has never been more important to ensure that older people are not excluded from support with essential skills.

Age UK commissioned Learning and Work Institute to explore the prevalence and impact of low essential skills among people aged 50+ and identify recommendations for policy and practice to support more older people to improve their skills.

The research draws on existing data to highlight that an estimated 6 million adult aged 50 and over have difficulties with maths, and the same number have difficulties with literacy. The evidence also shows there is an economic cost to low essential skills, risking disadvantage later in life. Someone who left school at 18 with ‘very poor’ literacy skills will have earned around £33,000 less by state pension age.

The report highlights the ways in which older people’s experiences of low essential skills often intersect with other age-related challenges they may face, such as managing health conditions and experiences of bereavement and impact on their daily lives.

The recommendations call for targeted support to help engage older people in learning to improve their essential skills. This means, for example, employers offering older workers support with training, adult learning providers offering inclusive and appealing provision, GPs prescribing literacy support to help people understand health information, and JobCentre Plus supporting signposting to provision which supports with budgeting, form filling or digital skills.