Adult Literacy and Numeracy

Robin Walker Excerpts

Thursday 10th October 2013 Commons Chamber

[Mr Barry Sheerman (Huddersfield) (Lab/Co-op)]

I will not report you to the ageism commission for that remark, Mr Speaker. I congratulate the hon. Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage), who has been a strong campaigner—the best I have known—on adult literacy and numeracy. She has corresponded with me on the issue many times and I am delighted to be a co-sponsor of this debate along with Members from the other two main parties.

I have tremendous guilt about this issue, because I chaired the Education Committee, which has had various names, for 10 years. We thought we were doing a reasonable job, but I do not think we focused as much as we could have on literacy and numeracy. It is never too late, however, to look at the issue again.

One of the most important things to recognise about this debate is that there are no easy solutions. The answer has evaded all Governments and all political parties over a very long period. During my 10 years as Committee Chair I learned that evidence-based policy is not always the total answer, but it is not a bad place to start. We should ask, “What is the evidence?” I have discussed adult literacy and numeracy with a number of people and there is a great danger that some think they know the answer intuitively. They will immediately say, “The reason is this”, and then give a simplistic explanation that is not based on anything. Only this morning I spoke to a colleague who said, “Well, the reason is the high level of migration in Britain”, but that is not true if we compare ourselves with other countries.

The recent report on adult literacy by the OECD—it was published only this week—is convenient and substantiates everything the hon. Lady said in her very good speech. We are ranked 19th out of 22 nations on the literacy of people aged 16 to 24, and 14th out of 22 on adult literacy. That is a chilling comment on our society.

A fundamental problem in this country is that our social and economic structure has changed dramatically over a short period. As you have said, Mr Speaker, I have been an MP for 34 years, but during my young days as a university teacher—one of the undergraduates I taught at Swansea university is sitting on the Government Benches—the world was very different, in that there were a lot of low-skilled and unskilled jobs in our economy. I remember cycling to Hampton grammar school and seeing a sign outside a factory I passed that said, “Hands wanted”. There was no mention of brains. That was the society in which we lived, with 50% or 60% of people working in manufacturing industry. It was a very different society.

When I speak at universities today and ask people about the social and economic structure of our country, they reply that 30% or 40% of people work in manufacturing, but the real figure is 9.5%, while 30% work in education, health and local authorities—what are sometimes called public services—and 60% work in private sector services. People who work in the early-years and later-years sectors are on the minimum wage or minimum wage-plus. People who work in retail and distribution are on minimum wage-plus. We live in a very different society today. The onus is on people who are seeking employment to have high skills and high literacy and numeracy.

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

Will the hon. Gentleman give way?

[Mr Sheerman]

May I just finish this point? In many ways, we have responded to that challenge. We have more graduates and more talented young people coming through with the advantages of higher education. That is indisputable. However, at the same time, we have failed to deliver basic education to a significant percentage of the population. Those people are very unlikely ever to get anything other than the most menial work on the lowest wages.

[Mr Walker]

I wanted to intervene not to disagree with the hon. Gentleman, but to strengthen his argument. He said that roughly 9% of people work in manufacturing industry. I am sure that he would recognise that the nature of that industry has changed enormously. The skills that are required for people to enter that industry are probably greater than they have ever been in the past 100 years. Even in that industry, it is not just hands that are wanted, but brains. The modern manufacturing world wants people who are literate and numerate, and who can work with computers.

[Mr Sheerman]

That is absolutely right. A lot of manufacturing is coming back to this country because things can be manufactured anywhere in the world with highly sophisticated equipment, such as 3D printers, and only a small number of highly skilled people.

We have the problem that about 25% of the young people coming out of our schools have only one bare GCSE. Something is going dramatically wrong that we have not been able to put right. We must do something about it. I want to make a strong case for looking at the evidence. We need more research into why that is happening.

When I became the Chair of the Select Committee, I had all sorts of assumptions about which parts of our country were underperforming educationally, but that was absolute prejudice. The evidence shows that the coastal parts of the country are among the lowest performing areas. People on the street would say that the north-west performs very badly, but that is not true. It is coastal areas and the east of England, which contains Cambridge university and the Open university, that are the lowest performing areas.

We must look at the facts. Where is the underachievement? What is it in the structure of certain communities that means that people do not value education, do not stimulate their children to be interested in education and do not support them in the school process? We know that the early years are essential. It is important for children at a very young age to sit on somebody’s lap and have those little cloth books read to them. We must get children into reading very early on. We know that that works.

There are many fashions and fads. If there is one thing that we must not do in this debate, it is to be party political. We must not get carried away by enthusiasms. The research on teaching children to read shows that if teachers are trained to use a system and that system is used, it works. It is fashionable to say that only synthetic phonics works. We know that that is not true. If we have a system and train people to use it, we will get good results.

We must carry out research and have systems in place, but we must also have people who inspire us. Mr Speaker, you know that I am obsessed with the English poet, John Clare. When he lived, he had only 100 poems in print. We have since discovered a lost archive of 1,000 poems. He was one of our greatest poets on the environment. He left school at 12, the peasant son of a thresher and a farm labourer. All his life, the only jobs that he got were through standing in the village and being hired. He was only 5 feet tall, so he did not get much work. However, he learned to read at the parish school and was liberated to be an amazing poet. He lived a full life in so many ways.

Only this weekend, I was reading Caitlin Moran in The Times. I am an unashamed devotee of Caitlin Moran—in fact, I got some strange comments when I was in Spain with all our great-grandchildren and I was reading “How to Be a Woman” by the side of the pool. I tweeted that I was getting some strange comments, and Caitlin Moran immediately tweeted back:

“You carry on being righteous, dude”,

which I thought was rather good. Caitlin Moran is a young woman from a family of seven who lived in social housing, and there were a lot of barriers to her succeeding, but she learned to read and could not stop reading. What a fantastic talent she is. From John Clare 200 years ago to Caitlin Moran today; that is how to get kids to be liberated and become full citizens.

When I go into schools and universities I talk about the importance of education and of liberating talent, and I call it “the spark”. The spark is in all of us, if only we can reach it. If a child does not have early stimulation and the support of a network, it is quite difficult for them to find that spark later in life, liberate it and let it blossom. The earlier the better, but it can still be done later on. Further education colleges are good at parts of that and provide basic skills, but there are other ways. Mentors are crucial, and I say to the Minister that they are cheap. I find that business people, professionals and university teachers want to give back, and they will be mentors.

When I talk to university and other students, I say that if they liberate themselves, they will liberate themselves for a good life. The best debate we can have with young people is by telling them that it is difficult to have a good life on the minimum wage. That is true, and we have to liberate young people so that they are not only talented and great providers in our economy but great citizens. We can do that only by tackling the problem as early as we can, and let us do it on a cross-party basis.

--- Later in debate ---

[Mr Robin Walker (Worcester) (Con)]

I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport (Caroline Dinenage) on securing this important debate.

I have found myself heartily in agreement with every Member who has spoken. What the hon. Member for Luton North (Kelvin Hopkins) said about basic standards in education chimes with the e-mails I receive from constituents and the feedback I hear frequently from businesses in my constituency. As a member of the Select Committee on Business, Innovation and Skills, this is a matter of concern. It is raised with me by businesses in Worcester on a regular basis. On a national level, the CBI is concerned about the literacy and numeracy of school leavers, and how that feeds through to the challenge of Britain competing in the 21st century. We also face the specific challenge of improving the English language skills of first generation immigrants and ensuring that women, particularly those at risk of isolation, are able to access adult education—an important point we should not overlook.

I recently took part in an excellent inquiry run by the all-party group on literacy into how business, schools and government can work more closely together to improve reading and communication skills, and basic business literacy for young people. We have heard about best practice and I commend the report to colleagues, but we clearly need to go further if we want to eradicate the problems of illiteracy and innumeracy among the adult population.

As the motion suggests, low adult numeracy and literacy is a substantial cost to our country in opportunities missed and earnings limited. Helping people to reach a higher level of literacy, numeracy and work literacy will help to restore a culture where work always pays and where opportunity is open to all.

According to the National Numeracy campaign, 17 million adults are at only “entry level” in numeracy and, as my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport said, 5 million are at the same level in literacy, which means that they reach only the standard expected of a primary school leaver. After over a decade in which education spending rose sharply, that is a shocking statistic. The latest CBI employment trends survey showed that 35% of employers were dissatisfied with levels of literacy among school leavers—higher than it was in 2003, at the beginning of that period of investment.

This week’s report from the OECD should act as a wake-up call to anyone who is complacent about this issue. In particular, the worrying figures for 16 to 24-year-olds suggest that the problem has been getting worse in this country rather than better over the last decade and that the UK is falling further behind its competitors. For England to come 21st out of 24 industrialised countries for adult numeracy when we are the greatest financial centre of the lot is something that really should concern every Member.

Britain has at times been parodied as a nation of shopkeepers, and the retail trade is still one of the most significant employers in the UK economy. Our Select Committee is currently conducting an inquiry into the future of retail, so we have heard a great deal of evidence about the changing skill-set required by the industry, but basic numeracy and literacy are absolutely non-negotiable.

KPMG research shows that adults with at least basic numeracy—level 1 or above—earn on average 26% more than adults with skills below that level. When controlling for education level, social class and type of school attended, there is still a 10% earnings premium for basic numeracy. These figures show how, if people were earning more money, we could reduce the deficit, help to raise tax revenue and help pay for public services. The research also showed that over two thirds of prisoners at the start of their custodial sentences had numeracy levels below level 1.

According to the National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy, adults with poor numeracy are two and a half times more likely to report having a long-standing illness or disability and are roughly twice as likely to report several symptoms of depression. Adults with poor numeracy are more than twice as likely to have had their first child while still in their teens. Dealing with low levels of numeracy can therefore help to reduce welfare dependency, crime and mental health costs.

So what can we do about it? We need to empower employers to work more closely with target groups in the adult population, as well as with school-age children to show the relevance of numeracy and literacy skills in the workplace and the opportunities they can bring. Local economic partnerships can play a key role in that, bringing the private sector together with some of the public sector organisations involved.

The Government are rightly enthusiastic, after the great campaign of my hon. Friend the Member for North Swindon (Justin Tomlinson), about putting financial education into the national curriculum—a key step in making numeracy relevant to many people who want a practical rather than an academic understanding of its importance. It will also equip people better to deal with the sort of problems people face with payday loans, mentioned by my hon. Friend the Member for Ribble Valley (Mr Evans).

We need to reject the lazy assumption that some people are just not mathematically minded and we need to target better support to those who suffer from confusion about numbers, just as we have over the years to sufferers of dyslexia in the literacy space. We need to make sure that numeracy is made relevant and literacy exciting—not just in schools, but at every level of education and skills. Campaigns such as the Reading Champions campaign, bringing sports personalities into primary schools to talk about the value of reading, do great work on this already, but there is much more scope for using role models at every level of the adult population to promote literacy and numeracy alike. We need to keep a vigorous focus on raising standards in education, which the current Secretary of State has done a lot to foster, while recognising that the school system alone can never deliver the solution for everyone.

As my hon. Friend the Member for Ceredigion (Mr Williams) pointed out earlier, we need to support parents who want to read and do maths with their children but who may lack the confidence to do so or feel there is a stigma in admitting they need help. As the motion mentioned, not all the people we need to reach are going to access help through the further education sector, which means we need to make sure that community libraries, Sure Start centres and other community facilities play their part in providing help. I greatly agreed with the point made earlier about getting schools to do more in the evenings with parents and to reach out and provide help on these problems.

As National Numeracy has suggested, we need to achieve a broad cultural shift whereby everyone realises that, with effort and support, they can improve their numeracy. We must avoid creating greater stigma and focus instead on raising aspirations and seeking pathways to help.

We need to focus particularly on helping the most vulnerable, supporting innovative approaches in probation and through homelessness charities via the troubled families initiatives and early intervention services in order to get help to those who need it most. We also need to work on improving the transition to adulthood, as vulnerable people often find a sharp drop-off in the level of attention and support they receive on reaching adult age.

All those things are challenging to achieve but need to be delivered through a combination of innovation, Government activity and private and voluntary sector good will. I shall not detain the House further, as demand to contribute to the debate is high. I congratulate my hon. Friend the Member for Gosport on securing this debate. The motion is right to highlight the importance of this issue for our country; by addressing it, we will create greater opportunity for all.