Literacy and lifeskills in Australia: implications for policy activism

This paper explores data collected for the Adult Literacy and Lifeskills Survey (ALLS) – the Australian component of which was released in late 2007. Our interest is in exploring the opportunities for policy and practice that arise as a result of comparing two substantial data sets spanning the decade 1996– 2007. We begin by (briefly) outlining the background to the larger survey proje ct coordinated by the OECD/Statistics Canada, which provided the framewor k and verification processes for Australian data collection. Then we provide so me analysis of Australian data with the intention of relating literacy and numeracy to a range of demographic and socioeconomic variables. Rather than a description of wh at was measured and what was found, our primary focus is to engage in critical d ialogue with aspects of the findings and lay a framework for some comparative exercises. We hope this will provide VET practitioners and researchers with a preliminary fr amework for making better use of the findings within organisations, professional and political networks and local communities. Some background to measuring literacy Since the end of World War 2 the United Nations Edu cational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) has aimed to quantify, explai n nd remedy the problem of ‘illiteracy’. Initially seen as 'developmental', th e early UNESCO and World Bank literacy programs were based on the premise that a liter te population would increase productivity and hence the economic development of the country. UNESCO campaigns were shaped by an ‘autonomous’ model of literacy (S treet, 1984) that is, a narrow, culture specific literacy practice which assumes un i-dimensional and linear progress towards ‘civilised society’ and more recently for ‘ economic take-off’. This view of literacy presumes that the skills of reading, writi ng and enumerating are context free, universal in and across time and space, and shape i ndividual and social progress—in other words they are generic skills. In the last 35 years or so, substantial changes have taken place in world economies, so much so that the education-economic productivity dynamic takes precedence in most education and trai ning documents as the best, indeed the only, way in which progress can be imagined. F rom this basis correlations are made between national productivity and skills strengths and deficits. Literacy and numeracy are central to these claims. Two surveys, the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) (reported in Australia as the Survey of Aspects of Literacy (SAL) Australian Bureau of Statistics, 1997) and t he Adult Literacy and Lifeskills Survey (ALLS) have gained some visibility in recent times as governments wrestle with an emerging culture of national markets nested in global economies. For those in the language and literacy f ield the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) provides support for these economic arguments via long term projects which develop comparative in dicators on education and training (OECD & Human Resources Development Canada, 1997; O ECD & Statistics Canada, 1995, 2000; Statistics Canada & OECD, 2005). These surveys extend the economic take-off model and seek to test the operational mer it of the education-economic