Spot the Maths/Stats Mistake #1

This is the first in a series of posts I intend to make to flag up some of the very poor interpretations of facts which occur routinely in the mainstream media.

First up is one from the BBC, in an article entitled "Why do white working class pupils fail in school?".  Aside from pointing out the underachievement of white working class British children from coastal towns (much like myself, then), the correspondent claims:

"The Office for National Statistics showed that people without any qualifications were twice as likely to be unemployed as those with a qualification. That one single piece of paper, passing a single exam, halved the likelihood of unemployment."

This is not obviously false in itself, but to anyone who reads publications of this nature, it seemed an odd thing for the Office for National Statistics to report.  The correspondent also unfortunately failed to give any further details on which Office for National Statistics report he had read, but a bit of googling on my part led me to find another journalistic piece which much better reported the same claim. Indeed, what the correspondent should have said is that people without any qualifications were twice as likely to be unemployed as those with at least one qualification.  As such, his claim that a single piece of paper halved the likelihood of unemployment is false, as the comparison is with all of those who have any number of qualifications, and most of those have more than a single exam pass.