Reforming Adult Literacy Education Transforming Local Programs Into National Systems
In Canada, the United Kingdom & the United States

Recent policy oriented reports in Canada1, the United Kingdom2, and the United States(3) have outlined reform movements in each nation based on the growing recognition of the multiple returns to investments in adult literacy education, particularly those concerned with workforce development, discussed in Part 1 of this report. The reform movements in each of these three nations have included the establishment of national government offices to provide leadership, coordination, and funding for five major activities:

1. Scale of Need: determining how many adults are in need of adult literacy, including numeracy (i.e., basic skills), education.

A major effort for determining the scale of need for adult literacy education took place in the mid-1990s when Canada, the United Kingdom and the United States joined with what was eventually nineteen other member nations of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) to take part in the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS).4 Using door-to-door sampling methods, the IALS developed performance tasks for prose, document and quantitative scales that were used to assign adults to five literacy levels (Level 1-low to Level 5-high literacy). Additionally, the IALS developed a scale for the adult's self-assessment of their literacy ability including rating categories of poor, moderate, good, excellent (and no response).

Using the document performance tasks, 23.7 percent of United States adults ages 16-65 were assigned to literacy level 1, the lowest level of literacy, while in Canada the percentage assigned to document literacy Level 1 was 18.2, and in the United Kingdom 23.3 percent of adults were assigned to document literacy Level 1. Similar percentages, with a little variation, held for the prose and quantitative literacy scales and the assignment of adults to Literacy Level 1 on those scales.

Using the performance scales then, about one fifth of adults aged 16-65 in these three countries were considered to be "at risk" for social inclusiveness due to poor literacy. This would come to about 32 million adults in the US, 3.3 million in Canada, and 7 million in the UK.