Disparity is evident in education
With two colleges in the top 200 of the Times Higher Education table last week, he told the Dáil we are seventh in proportion to our population of all countries represented inside that magic figure. For the proportions of people with third-level qualifications, he further boasted that Ireland is first in the EU and in the top five of developed countries.
But the director of the National Adult Literacy Agency, Inez Bailey, says that, welcome as such statistics may be, there has been insufficient policy or funding focus on the attainment of lower-skilled adults. Hours earlier, Ireland’s below-average ranking internationally in such skills had been revealed by the OECD.
“We’re on target on all middle and higher levels of educational attainment, but one area we’re unsteady around is at the lower level,” she told the Irish Examiner.
“We got a wake-up call when the last survey came out in 1997 and there was initial reaction by setting targets for participation in adult literacy courses.”
Mr Quinn has been rolling out a national literacy and numeracy strategy for children since 2011 but there has been no equivalent for adults since a 2000 government white paper on adult education. It followed the shock revelation in 1997 that 22% of Irish adults surveyed three years earlier lacked the basic literacy to read instructions on an aspirin bottle.
A review of adult literacy provision that Mr Quinn published last week found wide variations between services of different vocational education committees, the predecessors of education and training boards which have now taken over that responsibility.
Ms Bailey said the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies’ survey shows a high concentration of people who are unemployed in the lower levels of literacy. She said there is no doubt that they are going to be at a greater disadvantage.
So when it comes to long-term unemployment, how much acknowledgement is given to the educational and basic literacy or numeracy skills of the recipients of state supports when consideration is reportedly being given to reducing those supports?
“They should get more assistance from the State, as opposed to assisting those with high levels of education and better organised to find employment or suitable courses,” said Ms Bailey.
The point is emphasised in the OECD report, which says Ireland — along with Canada, England and Northern Ireland, Italy, Spain, and the US — has significant proportions of adults at the lowest levels of the literacy and numeracy scales.
“Low-skilled adults risk getting trapped in a situation in which they rarely benefit from adult learning, and their skills remain weak or deteriorate over time — which makes it even harder for these individuals to participate in learning activities. Helping low-skilled adults to break this vicious cycle is crucial,” the report states.
There should be particular concern for policymakers, it continues, about low skills among workers in “elementary occupations”, as it may hamper new technologies or organisational structures that can improve productivity.
“Poor literacy and numeracy skills may also place workers at considerable risk in the event that they lose their jobs or have to assume new or different duties when new technologies, processes, and forms of work organisation are introduced.”
But there are risks beyond employability and earnings potential, with direct links emerging from the OECD study between poor health and low skills in the areas assessed. These life and social implications should be considered when any new national strategy is finally being devised, something which will now be a statutory requirement for Solas.
This new further education and training authority, when it is formally established in the coming months by Mr Quinn, will oversee the work of the education and training boards. They, in turn, will be taking over the training functions of Fás at the same time.
The importance of their work in the adult literacy and numeracy field was further highlighted by the Government’s expert group on future skills needs.
Its chairwoman, Una Halligan, said: “Our improving literacy skills are to be warmly welcomed, however, Ireland needs to build on these improvements and further concentrate on our weaker numeracy skills which are so vital for employability.”
A recent report from her group pointed to the 33,000 — one in six — people working in manufacturing with no more than the Junior Certificate or equivalent, and just over one in five food and drink sector staff with low educational qualifications.
The European Commission said the OECD study finds that Ireland is not making the best economic use of its skilled workforce.
“In Ireland, around one in four adults with high levels of proficiency in literacy and numeracy is outside the workforce, compared to less than one in five in the US.
“There is also a bigger earnings gap in Ireland between the low-skilled and the highly skilled than in a number of other countries in the study.”
Teachers’ Union of Ireland general secretary John MacGabhann said it would be grossly unfair if the upcoming budget created further distance between Ireland and countries like Finland and New Zealand, which have embraced lifelong learning. He is worried the budget will further damage education programmes that benefit students who pursue education later in life or those previously unable to complete second level.
Rather than being illiterate, the one-in-six Irish adults at the lowest levels of literacy are poor at tasks other than simply reading. Many even have strong reading skills.
Those who rank in this lowest level generally answer two thirds of relatively simple tasks correctly. Some tasks required the participants to find a single piece of information from a short text on a computer or printed page, others asked them to enter personal information on a document. Knowledge and skills in recognising basic vocabulary, evaluating the meaning of sentences, and reading of paragraph text were also expected to achieve the Level 1 of literacy, with Level 3 being the category of the most able at literacy.
In the measure of problem-solving in technology-rich environments, Irish adults were about average but more were at the lowest level, and fewer in the top category, when compared with other countries. This is a measure of ability to solve problems — either from information accessed through technology or assisted by, or requiring the use of, technology.
An example of the task needed to reach Level 1 was the sorting of emails into pre-existing folders, in this instance responses to a party invitation, requiring a relatively small number of steps and not needing a significant amount of monitoring. This or a lower skill level was the upper range of ability of 42% of Irish adults, around average across the 24 countries.
However, only one-in-four — compared with one-in-three internationally — were sufficiently skilled to complete a task such as managing requests to reserve a meeting room on a particular date using a reservation system. In this task, participants had to take account of constraints like available number of rooms and existing reservations, and complete the job based on emails and an online reservation tool to assign rooms to meetings at certain times.
The CSO surveyed almost 6,000 people aged 16 to 65, on behalf of the Department of Education, between Aug 2011 and Mar 2012. The 72% response rate was the third-highest of all countries and everyone who completed the survey received a €30 gift voucher.
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