Adult Literacy and Numeracy

Brian Binley Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Julie Elliott (Sunderland Central) (Lab)]

I congratulate the hon. Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage) on securing this important debate. She has worked tirelessly and done a huge amount on adult literacy. As colleagues have said, this is not a party political issue—it affects all our constituencies and all who live in our country. I have always passionately believed that education is a lifelong journey and not one that stops at A-level, university or apprenticeship level. Improving standards of adult literacy and numeracy is fundamental both to our economy and to the well-being of every man and woman who struggles with those crucial skills.

I should like to talk about an under-reported but hugely important project helping and training thousands of people at all levels to improve their skills through learning. Unionlearn, in collaboration with the TUC, trains thousands of union learning reps and has helped hundreds of thousands to train and learn through their union every year. Before entering the House, I had the opportunity to see first hand the difference the scheme makes to real people in the real workplace, and the brilliant results.

[Mr Brian Binley (Northampton South) (Con)]

I apologise for being late, Mr Speaker.

When I was a relatively young man, I took great advantage of, and was very well served by, the Workers Education Association. I was a secondary modern schoolboy who left at 15, and the WEA had the important effect of broadening my horizons. Will the hon. Lady help us by telling us whether that organisation is still doing that good work? If so, are we helping it as we should?

[Julie Elliott]

The WEA is very active, and certainly in my area. It often uses the skills of people who have retired from full-time careers in education—they do a little bit of work here and there to help to train people. It is an active but undervalued organisation.

Union learning dates back to the 19th century, with the establishment of colleges for working people. More recently, the union learning fund, set up in 1998, distributed £150 million towards training and education, which helped to recruit many union learning reps and expand the number of people in training and education. The fund, which has supported more than 50 unions in more than 700 workplaces, has several key goals: to embed learning and skills so that they become a core strategic objective of all unions; to help unions form active partnerships with employers, which I will mention later; and to raise demand for learning among the low skilled and other disadvantaged groups. Colleagues have mentioned people using their peers to access learning. When people are vulnerable and find themselves in adult life without the ability to read and write properly, peer groups are a crucial tool to making that first step into learning.

Unionlearn exists because of a fierce belief that access to learning is fundamental to every person’s life chances, and that such opportunities should be available to everyone—the entire work force—regardless of background. The access to opportunity, and the ability to reach people who may not have been reached by others, makes Unionlearn and union-led education so crucial to the well-being of hundreds of thousands of people.

Approximately 20% of the adult population cannot read to a level that allows them to do their job effectively or gain a promotion, and more than 5 million lack a good GCSE or equivalent in English. In my experience, I have seen examples of incredibly gifted people who cannot read and write much more than their own name, but who have tremendous other skills that have enabled them to get through a workplace and end up at a senior level. One of the most alarming and surprising things I learned when I was involved with Unionlearn was that some incredibly senior managers could do little more than write their own names. Obviously, they have huge skills to have the ability to work around that and get to that point.

Substandard reading skills are strongly linked to poor writing skills, so many adults are prevented from helping their children with homework, which exacerbates the problem, because it is extended to the next generation. As I have said, some people are barred from career advancement because they are unable to fill out job applications. The hon. Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans) mentioned online learning and the internet. People need a basic understanding of English and writing to access the help available.

A Government-backed study found that nearly 50% of working-age adults in England struggle with maths. Innumeracy does not just affect people’s ability in the workplace, but follows them everywhere, from looking at price comparison websites to reading bus timetables. Alex Smiles Ltd is a great example of union-led training in my constituency of Sunderland Central. The firm employs more than 100 people. Its core activity is the gathering, processing and recycling of waste materials produced by the construction and manufacturing industries. It is a non-unionised workplace, and represents an increasing number of employers that Unionlearn and the TUC regularly work with through partnership working initiatives.

More than 16% of the Alex Smiles Ltd workforce have completed a numeracy qualification and 15% completed a literacy qualification at either level 1 or 2. Becky Smiles, the training and development manager at Alex Smiles, has said of Unionlearn:

“Every interaction has been positive and business-led, driven by making us a better, higher-performing workplace in every respect. The learning activity is making inroads to upskilling our people and addressing front-line business goals that have bottom-line benefits, too.”

Adult literacy and numeracy skills are fundamental to our economy, and to the life chances and well-being of every individual in the country. Unionlearn and other union-led projects give all people the chance to improve their skills, and I am delighted to have had the opportunity to sing their praises and raise awareness of that excellent scheme.

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[Kelvin Hopkins]

I was teaching in Britain, where of course 1,000 million makes 1 billion—let us get that straight from the beginning.

I met Lord Moser recently at a reception in the House of Lords. He is an elderly man now, but he still despairs of the problem of adult innumeracy. Adults are bamboozled by politicians because we throw numbers about all the time—all parties do it. A Front Bench spokesperson can say, “We are going to spend £20 million extra on the national health service.” Twenty million pounds is absolutely nothing in the scheme of things in public expenditure, but £20 billion is a significant amount. Politicians constantly bamboozle the electorate, knowing that they can be not very sophisticated at handling such numbers.

I used to teach elementary statistics to A-level students studying sociology. I used to do simple sums with square numbers to find the square root. For example, the square root of 100 is 10—that is quite easy. When one of my students said that nine times nine was 89 and 10 times 10 was 110, I realised there was a problem. I have another anecdote. The daughter of a good friend of mine wanted to be a nurse. She had various O-levels, so I said, “Why can’t you be a nurse?” She said, “I can’t pass O-level maths.” I asked her why not. She said that she could not do multiplication because she had never been taught it—imagine that.

We have to go back to a philosophy of education and teaching that was utterly misguided. My wife and my brother are both primary school teachers. In the 1960s, 1970s and, to a certain extent, the 1980s, rote learning of tables was regarded as anathema—absolutely forbidden. Complete and total nonsense. Of course, I angered many of my good friends on the left who thought I was some sort of authoritarian, because I thought that learning tables was a good idea so that people knew that 12 times 12 was 144—elementary stuff.

When I first entered the House in 1997, I raised this issue with the then Schools Minister, Stephen Byers. I said that we had to look at teaching methods and the interface between teachers and pupils, particularly in primary schools so that pupils learn numeracy properly at the beginning. He said, “Oh no, that would be too prescriptive.” Sometimes we have to be prescriptive. We have to say that some things work and some things do not work. Let us look at other countries where numeracy is better.

The international comparison table published in The Independent yesterday showed that we are slipping down the table, and that 16 to 24-year-olds are actually worse than the previous generation. We are now quite low down the table, which is very worrying. If we are to produce the engineers and the skills we need for the future, we have to address numeracy problems. Governments have to look at what works and try to ensure that that is what is applied in schools. It is not enough to reorganise institutions—creating academies and free schools and so on. We have to look at what is happening in the classroom at every state school, because we have a problem.

[Mr Binley]

I am grateful to the hon. Gentleman, who I will refer to as my hon. Friend, because he is a friend. I am delighted that he is speaking so passionately from such an informed background—it is very helpful. I wonder whether we have enough of a joined-up approach to adult illiteracy and innumeracy. I also wonder whether we use our libraries enough, and whether the Minister ought to be thinking about using such facilities and giving them a new lease of life.

[Kelvin Hopkins]

I thank the hon. Gentleman for his helpful intervention.

We should try to have one-to-one teaching for adults with numeracy problems. I have done some coaching and have found that it is often the simple things that fox people. Not everybody is gifted at mathematics, but sometimes people are puzzled because they do not realise that a division sum can be expressed in different ways: by having one number over another, or by having two dots on either side of a line. People get confused, but it all means the same thing. How many times does 10 go into 100? Whichever way we write it down, it will always be 10. We have to have one-to-one tuition. During my coaching and teaching I have seen the light that appears in people’s eyes when they understand something that has mystified them all their lives.

We have to look at what happens in the classroom between the teacher and the pupil. We have to ensure that teachers in primary schools are comfortable with mathematics, can handle numbers and feel at ease with them. A deeply worrying statistic from 40 or 50 years ago was that 60% of primary school teachers had failed O-level maths. I am not saying that O-level maths is the acme of success, but it showed that they were uncomfortable with the subject. If teachers are uncomfortable with the subject, having them introduce children to mathematics is not a sensible way to proceed.

It is clear from the statistics published yesterday, and from the Moser report some time ago, that we still have a problem. We are slipping down the league table and Lord Moser still has concerns. I hope that the Government, whoever is in office, address this problem by looking at teaching methods and finding out what works. We need to ensure that the next generation of children do not become innumerate like so many adults today.

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[Christopher Pincher (Tamworth) (Con)]

I will obey Mr Speaker’s admonition to be brief, not least because I do not think I could hope to match the expertise already shown by other hon. Members.

I should like to say a few words about my own constituency experience, but let me first congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage) on securing this debate and pay tribute to the hon. Member for Huddersfield (Mr Sheerman), who made a very thoughtful speech. I agree with him that this issue should not be party political. I agree with him that Governments of every shade have failed to get to grips with dealing with adult education, illiteracy and innumeracy. I hope he will agree with me that the failures of the past must not be the yardstick for the future. When my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans) asks, “When do we deal with this issue?”, I hope we will all say “Now” and I hope the Minister will say “Now”, too, when he replies shortly to the debate.

I am pleased to say that unemployment is falling in my constituency and is now lower than at any time since before the recession. The biggest barrier to entry to employment for young people in my constituency, however, is illiteracy and innumeracy. When I talk to local employers—small and medium-sized enterprises such as light engineering firms and chemicals or plastics firms—they tell me “Yes, we can find new 40 and 50-year-olds to replace the people who retire, but we do not have younger people with the right level of numeracy or literacy to replace our employees.” That presents SMEs in my constituency, and in the country, with a ticking time-bomb, as they will struggle to find the right people with the right skills to replace their employees. Unless we are able to educate young adults and the kids at school now, we will not succeed in the global race about which the Prime Minister and the Chancellor rightly talk.

We also face a challenge with communication. We all deal every day with constituents who raise problems with us via e-mail or letter. All too many of my constituents who write or e-mail me are older people. My office gets lots of phone calls from younger people with housing, immigration or tax issues, but when my office says, “Can you send us an e-mail or write to us to provide more detail so that we can fully understand your problem”, all too many respond by saying, “Actually, we would rather not e-mail and rather not write because we are not comfortable about doing that.” How can we hope to help our constituents when they cannot communicate effectively with us about their problems and concerns?

[Mr Binley]

I believe that our libraries can offer much more training than they are at present. I urge the Minister to look at the connection between education and libraries, particularly with regard to technology. I am one of the people who are bemused by it. It is right to point out that this is a generational issue, but I think we could do much more in our localities through our libraries if only there were more of a joined-up approach to the problem.

[Christopher Pincher]

Mystic Binley demonstrates once again his crystal-ball-gazing skills, as I was just about to come on to the issue of libraries. The local library in my constituency, provided by Staffordshire county council, offers free books to help adult readers. A local volunteer organisation, DIGIT—the dyslexia information group in Tamworth—provides support to those adult learners by providing them with reading buddies. DIGIT does even more by providing help for Tamworth’s young children falling within the scope of the dyslexia spectrum to improve their reading, writing and arithmetic skills. Academisation has also helped. My local head teachers now have more scope to decide what to teach, how to teach it and whom to employ. GCSE results at the Rawlett School, for instance, have improved significantly this year. However, more still desperately needs to be done.

We have the adult and community learning fund—to which I am sure the Minister will refer—the skills for life fund and the traineeship programme, all of them underpinned by Government and supported by money so that young adults can be helped to learn, but I must ask the Minister to consider two other issues. The first is the teaching and knowledge of dyslexia in our schools, which is at best uneven. Tamworth has some good dyslexia teaching schools, such as Wilnecote high school, but others are less good. That is because there are not enough teachers with the right skills, and not enough head teachers who know enough about the scope of the dyslexia spectrum to deal with young people who suffer from the condition. We also need to ensure that there is as much dyslexia teaching in primary schools as in secondary schools, so that dyslexia can be recognised and dealt with as early as possible.

The second issue, which I hope the Minister will consider during his discussions with his colleagues in the Department for Education, is the need for more vertical integration between primary and secondary schools. All too many students in my constituency go to secondary school at the age of 11 with a reading age of seven. They are doomed to failure at GCSE the moment they walk through the door of their secondary school. We need secondary schools to know as early as possible which kids face challenges so that they can help the primary schools to help those children, and the children can go to secondary school with a higher reading age and improve their chances of obtaining better GCSEs. We must ensure that children do not walk into a cliff face at the age of 11 because their secondary schools did not know who they were.

I think that if we do what so many Members today have suggested we do—and if the Minister at least takes on board the two points that I have raised—we shall be able to improve literacy and numeracy, and improve the life chances of so many of our constituents who, for so long, have been disregarded and have not been helped.

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[Matthew Hancock]

I could not agree more with almost everything the hon. Gentleman has said in this debate. He made a remarkable contribution and I was coming on to respond in more detail to it. I entirely agree that getting teaching methods that work matters, but what also matters is that the teachers believe in the methods they are using—that is what the evidence shows—and move away from what he called an “utterly misguided” philosophy of learning. I like him more the more I listen; thank goodness there are people on both sides of this House who think that it is utterly misguided not to stretch pupils and not to have rigorous and evidence-based methods of teaching.

We are also tackling levels of illiteracy among benefit claimants, introducing new conditionality to require the learning of English and looking towards introducing a concept for younger benefit claimants of “earn or learn”, so that we incentivise people into training rather than pay them so long as they do not train for more than 16 hours a week.

Apprenticeships and traineeships are, of course, close to my heart, and they increasingly require English and maths. Some people say, “If you go into an apprenticeship, you should not have to do English and maths because apprenticeships are for people who are going into jobs that do not require those things.” But there is almost no job that does not require a basic standard of English and maths. In this modern workplace—by that I mean around the country, not necessarily in this building, as it is not the most modern of workplaces—the level of English and maths required is vital.

[Mr Binley]

The Minister knows I am keen on using community assets in a much more imaginative way. How might we do that in this context, particularly with libraries, which are very underfunded, as the shadow Minister stated? How might we improve that situation and have a more involved local community push in this respect?

[Matthew Hancock]

I was coming on to deal with the role of community facilities, where I understand my hon. Friend is driving forward the argument. Academies and free schools are one way to help, because giving more autonomy to head teachers allows them to use their buildings as they wish. On libraries, managing community facilities more imaginatively is important, and a lot of that is down to the individual managers of individual institutions. I strongly support what he said about that.

Of course, good teaching of English and maths requires good English and maths teachers, so we are today announcing new Department for Education support for the national centre for excellence in the teaching of maths to develop a maths enhancement programme to upskill existing teachers of maths in further education. The programme will be delivered by professional development leads associated with the centres for excellence in teaching and training. We need more maths teachers, and we are on track this year to have trained more than 600 FE teachers. So we are constantly working to drive up the number of English and maths teachers, as well as the English and maths taught.

Above all, this comes down to school reform, because without excellent schools we will not solve this generational problem. I hope that the OECD report will have helped to build a stronger consensus behind our school reforms, which remain opposed—inexplicably—by some people who otherwise describe themselves as “progressive”. As the shadow Minister said, the OECD showed the problem of the link between deprivation and education being greater in England and Northern Ireland than elsewhere, but the problem is that poor education entrenches deprivation. Education needs to be the foundation of social mobility, and in the UK that is not happening nearly enough now. The hon. Gentleman did not mention the collapse that the OECD study showed in the results among 16 to 24-year-olds, where this country has gone from the top to very near the bottom. We are driving forward on making sure that we reform our schools system, bring in free schools, give head teachers powers under academisation and improve the standards of teachers. However, we have opposition, and I do not understand why people who otherwise call themselves “progressive” say that they are opposed to these things. I wonder whether we are going to get a change of heart from the Opposition Front-Bench team on so-called “unqualified teachers”, not least because the new shadow Education Secretary once was an unqualified teacher.