Paid educational leave - Literacy crisis must be a priority

LITERACY is not only the key to education, it also empowers those on the margins of society to break out of the poverty trap, can open the door to better employment prospects and is a large plank of a buoyant economy.

Unfortunately, in Ireland there is a widening gap in literacy levels between children from marginal areas of society compared with their middle-class peers. This stems directly from a chronic systems failure that for decades has militated against young people hoping to climb the educational ladder.

This scenario was largely due to the State’s failure to join up various literacy improvement schemes designed to tackle educational disadvantage. Instead of being streamlined, the schemes were characterised by wasteful duplicity and lack of co-ordination.