The Learners 5. The Government White Paper Learning to Succeed, 1999 shows that people with disabilities are more than twice as likely as their peers without disabilities to be unqualified or unemployed. Many learners told us that as the result of underachievement or the need to re-learn skills, they lacked self-confidence and self-esteem and that this was a major barrier to learning. Some adults find that due to onset of illness or accident their basic skills have deteriorated. People with acquired brain injury, for example, may need to relearn skills using a number of new strategies. People with mental health difficulties may find that they are unable to learn in environments and at speeds which they were previously comfortable with. Others need to work hard to maintain the skills they have already learnt. 6. Learners with disabilities need to learn basic skills at all levels. Learners of basic skills with learning difficulties and disabilities which affect learning, range from people who need to acquire the basic skills to enable them to lead more independent lives to those who need to improve their literacy or numeracy to gain employment or enter further education. Some people with disabilities will be able to access the basic skills curriculum and progress through the basic skills standards as long as they have the support they need. 7. As with other learners, people with disabilities may wish to improve their basic skills for a number of reasons. Learners told us that they wanted to learn in order to: help their own children at school; be able to read the Bible; be able to read what was available in the shops; read the instructions at work; be able to recognise the tool bar on the computer; recognise the coins they needed for the laundrette. For others, their motivation to improve basic skills is because they did not learn these skills during their time at school. Some adults want to learn with others who are also disabled; some do not. 8. The remit of this group was to look at the basic skills as defined in A Fresh Start. However, for some learners, literacy and numeracy are just two of the many areas which are important to them. Teachers and learners made it clear that in their view the learning of skills such as self-advocacy, independent travel and working alongside others are just as important. Indeed they may be more important for some people. A number of students with learning difficulties need to develop essential pre-requisite skills such as spatial awareness, concentration and hand-eye co-ordination to enable them to progress to the basic skills curriculum.

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