Millions for adult literacy

A multi-million pound package to tackle adult illiteracy and innumeracy is expected to be announced as part of the Government's Comprehensive Spending Review.

A multi-million pound package to tackle adult illiteracy and innumeracy is expected to be announced as part of the Government's Comprehensive Spending Review.

The review, scheduled for next month, is to plough larger sums than ever into adult learning in an attempt to give a second chance to people who missed out on a formal education in childhood, thereby improving their employment prospects in later life.

According to the latest figures, one in five adults has low literacy skills, and numeracy difficulties are even more widespread with one in four adults lacking the number skills to check they have the correct change in a shop.

Ministers are understood to have been struck by figures showing that illiteracy and innumeracy in adults in Britain is very high.

The Government's Skills Task Force has found that Britain has one of the worst records in Europe for illiteracy and innumeracy in adults. Compared with people in Germany, those in the UK are twice as likely to have difficulty reading and adding up.

More than 30 per cent of employees in Britain do not have a single qualification and about a third of this group has fundamental literacy and numeracy problems with skills lower than the average 11-year-old. Observers believe such people will be forced out of the labour market in the next 20 years, and that if skills are not improved Britain will continue to suffer a competitive disadvantage compared with other countries.

The drive to promote basic skills is expected to include further support for projects like "Brookie Basics", an initiative launched by Channel 4 and Mersey TV, and sponsored by Collins, the publisher, and the Department for Education. This literacy scheme, offering a free help pack, was brought to life by a storyline in the TV soap, Brookside, about a woman facing up to her reading difficulties when they stood in the way of job promotion.

A Whitehall source told the Independent on Sunday: "This is about opening up opportunity to those who have been left behind. These are the people whom the Tories never did anything about ... they want to get on in life and may have failed at school, but they deserve the chance to improve their skills, get better jobs and get on in life like everybody else.

"We are going to help [through] the spending review. Britain has always worked well for the top 10 per cent, for the rest of us there are times when it doesn't work so well. We want to ensure we are running a government that is changing Britain so that it works well for the 90 per cent as well."

The extra funding to help adults improve basic skills is an example of the "opportunity for all" theme which will colour the Comprehensive Spending Review. "It will look at ways of eliminating barriers to employment and opportunity."