A Review of the British Government’s Policy “Back to Basics”: What Effect Has This Policy Had on Students Key Skills?

n recent years the government has uncovered a worrying trend in falling levels of basic skills in adults. To combat this trend they brought out their ‘Back to Basics’ campaign which refocused attention on the teaching of basic skills in schools, further education and the work place. Evidence uncovered by The Basic Skills Agency show that poor levels of basic skills can contribute too many social and economic problems. It is believed that this problem costs Welsh industry £588 million every year. Adults with poor literacy and numeracy skills are four times more likely to have experienced long term unemployment, they generally have poorly paid, unsecured, unskilled jobs with little prospect of promotion or training. The Basic Skills Agency has highlighted a connection between poor basic skills and criminal behaviour; six out of ten men in prison are illiterate or innumerate.

There is also a connection between poor levels of skills in families, there is signs of intergenerational problems, parents are ashamed of their lack of ability to read and count, this leads to them being unable to help their children leading to their children having poor skills, seven out of ten children with literacy problems have got parents with literacy problems. The government has realised that it costs more to retrain people who have slipped through the traditional educational system than it does to ensure people leave compulsory education with the necessary skills to allow them to become active members of society. However they also recognise the importance of helping those adults that have already left education to improve their skills, to help them lead more productive members of society, adults with poor basic skills are less likely to vote or be involved in the local community. Many factors point to poor basic skills stemming from a poverty of aspiration, expectation, culture and economic poverty. The government has highlighted the skills they deem necessary for a person to be successful in life and employment, the back to basics policy was designed to focus education on these areas.

The basic skills that the government talk about are literacy and numeracy, there was some debate as to whether I.C.T. should also be included as a basic skill, the reasoning being that in today’s society being computer literate is essential for leading a fulfilling life. It was decided to concentrate on literacy and numeracy the concept being that computer skills can be developed after the basics are covered. The aim was to get adults up to Level one in these key skills. Level one in Literacy is the ability to ‘understand short straightforward texts of varying length on a variety of topics accurately and independently. To obtain information from different sources’ and for numeracy the level one standard is ‘Understands straightforward mathematical information used for different purposes and can independently select relevant information from given graphical, numerical and written material’. There are 780,000 adults between the age of sixteen and sixty-five years old in Wales who fail to meet this criteria in 2001, 46% of sixteen year olds fail to gain A to C grade in English and 57% fail to achieve A to C grade in mathematics. To address this problem and the problem of adults in society with low level skills the government has come up with their educational drives. For England the policy was the ‘Skills for Life’, in Wales the situation was slightly worse less adults aged sixteen to sixty-five years of age had good levels of Literacy and Numeracy, in 2004 twenty five percent of the adult population had literacy skills below level one and fifty –three percent of adults had numeracy skills below Level one (Words Talk – Numbers Count). The Welsh Assembly Government working in conjunction with the schools, further education providers and employers have developed a strategy to attack this problem. The Welsh Assembly Government’s aim is to have 100% of the adult population in Wales with at least Level one skill in numeracy and literacy. Their strategy to achieve this is laid out in the Welsh Assembly Government’s policy document The Learning Country, this was to last five years until 2005, when it was superseded by the second phase document, Words Talk – Numbers Count, and this policy will last until 2010. I will be concentrating on the post sixteen groups however the policy sets out strategies for all age groups starting at home before school age.