The Learning Age: Towards a Europe of Knowledge

Workshop C

Workshop A | Workshop B | Workshop C | Workshop D

Workshop C - Session 3

Title: Promoting Social Inclusion and Active Citizenship - Overcoming Barriers

Chair: Tom Schuller, Edinburgh University, UK

Alan Wells,
Basic Skills Agency, UK

The Basic Skills Agency is concerned with the people who have problems with reading, writing or basic number work, that is, with people who have got literacy or numeracy problems. It is a government funded agency and we work from birth to the grave. We concern ourselves with schools and pre-school and after the age of initial education with, of course, lifelong learning. One of our aims is to try and break the cycle from generation to generation for people who have problems with reading, writing and basic mathematics.

I wanted to say what I think the issues are, the issues that we struggle with still, and how we are trying to overcome them. The issues are:

How do you motivate people to join programmes?

What are the opportunities available for them when they join?

What is the effectiveness of the programmes?

Not everybody who has got problems with literacy and numeracy think of themselves as socially excluded. Many do not see themselves as socially excluded at all, but it does have a fairly dramatic affect. UK research The latest research shows that between the ages of 21 and 36 where people could have worked for 15 years in total, people with the very poorest basic skills, worked on average for 4 years less.

I wanted to show another result which seems to me also instrumental, and this is the effect of what has been called the inter-generational transfer of poor basic skills. If you look at children at age 10 with low literacy skills this is a very good predictor that they will have poor literacy at age 21. 60% of them have parents also with poor literacy skills; only 2% of them have parents whose literacy skills were high. So there is an inter-generational transfer affect.

Getting Worse

One of the other pieces of as yet unpublished evidence which we are just analysing is the pattern of those with poor basic skills when they leave school. Their skills tend to get worse as they get older, whereas people who have good basic skills, their skills tend to improve as they get older. If you have poor basic skills you marginally get worse, almost despite any of your circumstances.

This is, perhaps, the most useful statistic in terms of motivation. In the UK, we have extensive programmes for people who have poor basic skills, and this shows the increase from last year to this year in terms of the number of people joining programmes. This is very encouraging until you look at the figures which shows the growing level of need. Basically the number of people who join programmes is a very small percentage of need. Many people with basic skills problems do not think it is important; they do not think it will get them a job. How do we overcome the barriers that are often in people's heads, rather than necessarily the physical or financial barriers? One of the ways is to say that at least if you have good basic skills you are in the job market even if it is no guarantee of a job. One of the other biggest motivational factors is for parents of young children who want to help their own children, however poor their own basic skills. They want to make sure that they can help their own children.

The second area I have picked is to look at opportunities available. There is, of course, or will be the University for Industry for instance. There is the new Adult and Community Learning fund which will open up resources to people in community organisations interested in helping people improve their basic skills. We have to move away from an adult education model of one or two hours a week for 26 weeks of the year. This often has no effectiveness at all.

Effective

Thirdly and lastly it is important to get people to participate in programmes, but it is also important that the programmes are effective and that people come out of those programmes having learnt something. I was struck at a conference in the United States recently with the analysis of the money spent over the last 15 years on improving adults' basic skills in California, the 12th biggest economy in the world,. This showed in fact very little progress in equipping adults with literacy and numeracy skills, despite vast expenditure. We are currently looking at funding research to look at progress in terms of programme effectiveness.

The current issues for us are then:

how do you motivate people - how do encourage people to want to take part in programmes?
what kind of opportunities will make them be motivated - do they need to be new and different from the opportunities that have existed in the past?
how do you make sure that, if you encourage them to join, you give them exciting and interesting opportunities developed with them, and that those are effective in terms of them improving their skills?

Back

Home