‘To the uneducated an A is just three sticks.’
A.A. Milne, The World of Winnie-the-Pooh
It's a quarter of a century since Tony Blair pronounced that ‘Education, Education, Education’ were his first priorities, and recent research has shown that literacy has indeed improved significantly over the past fifteen years. However, while HMRC, now intent on introducing digital taxation (please see the ‘This is Money’ episode this week) and some other Government departments seem to assume that everyone can read and write in English, this is clearly not the case for those from disadvantaged and low-income backgrounds.
It may be one of the reasons why very significant numbers of young adults with HMRC-allocated Child Trust Funds are not aware of their accounts, and therefore not claiming them; if this is the case, the Treasury's intention to write to 21-year olds to encourage them to voluntarily seek out their funds may have limited success.
Andy Burnham's new administration has recently announced a reduction in the emphasis on academic learning and placing more emphasis on technical development. It will be interesting to see if this can retain the progress which has been made in youth literacy over the past fifteen years.
However, the decision to dispense with ID verification for all may be a discrete acknowledgement of the complications of dealing with Government procedures which can take hours to fathom out, even for the literate. Anyone who has undertaken this ID verification process for directors at Companies House will appreciate what a very unwieldy process it is.
Literacy is not just challenged by academic shortcomings, but also by the languages spoken by young people at home. In 2018, the BBC reported the findings of the journal Cognition, and the Office for National Statistics has carried out some rather complex research in this area.
However, the ethnic mix of younger generations is significantly more varied than for older generations, and this reflects the fact that English is not always the first language spoken at home.
Meanwhile, the huge expansion in time spent on social media and gaming is significantly undermining reading skills, to the extent that there is almost a sub-language of acronyms and emojis which is taking the place of normal speech. The Economist reported on this challenge in an article published in December ‘24, reporting on the OECD’s ‘Survey of Adult Skills’.
Unless these issues are addressed within Government communications, the increasingly complex language used therein will drive a still deeper wedge between those who can, and those who cannot, read English. This will not only make the voluntary re-unification of young adults with their HMRC- allocated Child Trust Funds difficult to achieve, but it will also stand in the way of achieving any significant reduction in the NEET rates for young adults.
The progress which The Share Foundation has achieved with incentivised learning for financial awareness would provide a significant opportunity to improve literacy rates, if adopted by Government. The ability for a young person to ‘earn as they learn’ achieves an attitudinal transformation, and this can apply not just to financial education.
This is a major challenge for young people in care; by the end of primary school stage, about 37% have reached the expected standard in combined reading writing and mathematics compared to 65% of non-looked-after children. Only c. 13.7% of young people in care achieve a grade 5 or higher in GCSE English and Maths, compared to c. 45.4% of the overall student population.
We hope that the Department for Education will also open conversations about literacy with their colleagues in other areas of Government, and that it will encourage those departments to treat illiteracy as a serious handicap.
One of its key features is that people really don't like admitting to an inability to read and write as they get older: it gradually grows from being a handicap to becoming an embarrassment. It's therefore important to treat it with sympathy, rather than criticism.
According to the Ministry of Justice, 57% of adult prisoners have literacy levels below the standard expected of an 11-year-old, with up to 50% being considered functionally illiterate: about 20-25% struggle significantly with very basic words or letters. This results in re-offending, limited employment opportunities, and real difficulties with filling out forms and family communications.
So, let's not ignore the need to communicate with disadvantaged young people in ways that they can understand. Let's continue to rate literacy as a priority as we move to a more technical focus in education.
Gavin Oldham OBE
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