LITERACY SKILLS are vital to allow adults to cope with the many challenges of modern life and to secure worthwhile employment. For children, inadequate literacy skills create major difficulties and the deficiency has been found to be greatest among those from disadvantaged areas. The scale of the challenge is highlighted again in one of the findings of a draft report from the National Economic and Social Forum (NESF).
Almost one third of children in these disadvantaged areas have severe literacy problems. Nationally, one-tenth of all children face serious literacy difficulties. This continuing failure to tackle such a long-standing problem comes at a significant social and economic cost for the individual and the State. It hinders personal development. The job prospects of those without numeracy and literacy skills remain poor. And a high level of illiteracy has a negative impact on broader economic progress.
A failure to learn to read or write at primary level means that children are more likely to leave school early and either find work in low-skilled jobs or become unemployed. As research studies have shown, early school-leavers are far more likely to be jobless than those who complete their education. The grim prospect may be either poverty or prison.
NESF chairwoman Maureen Gaffney states that for those without literacy skills, “there are serious consequences for their life chances”. Despite 25 years of various programmes designed to tackle this problem, the results have been disappointing.
The NESF draft prescribes no easy or simple solution. It advises that a medium to long approach is required. And it favours a cross-departmental “national literacy policy framework” under the control of the Department of Education and Science to ensure greater policy coherence in this area.
The defects in the current approach are clear. An initiative designed to help schools in disadvantaged areas – the Deis scheme – is clearly inadequate. That scheme covers one-fifth of primary schools, and as the draft report says: “ . . . the majority of children experiencing disadvantage may not be attending a Deis school, and so may not be receiving any supports for literacy”.
Investment in education should also be an investment in literacy. And the aim should be to help those in most need of educational assistance: the disadvantaged early school-leaver without the literacy skills required to meet life’s challenges and to fulfil their potential.