What is curious is that the United Nations Development Programme gave Britain an adult literacy rating of 99 per cent in its 1999 Human Development Report, a document respected around the world for its poverty reporting and statistics. According to David Stewart, a statistics research analyst with the UNDP, this is because developed countries do not necessarily provide estimates of their adult literacy rates. He said that it would be inappropriate to rank other developed countries in the index lower than the Eastern European ones. And this is where Britain falls down flat, ranking 15 out of 44 countries of High Human Development in the 1999 list. The link between human development and functional illiteracy is close.
Experts say it is very difficult for people who lack basic skills to move up in the world.
They are restricted to badly paid jobs and are more likely to be unemployed. Men without qualifications are four times more likely to be unemployed than those with a university degree. Twenty per cent of people who earn less than 4,600 a year have low literacy levels compared with only seven per cent of those earning over 19,200 a year. The OECD literacy report notes that while job training is common, it is those with high literacy skills who participate most. Finally, it points to links between poor skills and poor health.