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

There is some more conflict concerning the successfulness of the basic skills policies in Wales, some documents claim that there has been significant improvements in the level of basic skills however this is contradicted by other sources. The basic skills agency has produced a document called, the national basic skills Strategy for Wales. This recognised that 780,000 working age people have problems with literacy and numeracy in Wales. This document claims there have been significant improvements in the basic skills of primary school age children. They do provide the statistics of how many children are below the appropriate level, how ever they do not provide any data from past years to support their claim. They do provide comparisons in the same year to other age groups where their statistics are more favourable, this does partially support their claim and they do not make any claims regarding the other age groups.

This document claims that the standards are raising, that better planning is having a positive effect on the level of basic skills in the post sixteen communities. They do not provide any statistics to support this claim; they just make the claim that there has been a significant reduction in the levels of people who struggle with basic skills. This claim is contradicted by the National literacy Trust in their document, Overview of Welsh Policy in Wales. This document shows the failure of one of the Welsh Assembly Government concepts, the individual learner accounts; they provide statistics to support their claim that this strategy was a abysmal failure. They provided statistics to show how many adults between the age of sixteen and sixty five years of age had literacy and numeracy skills below the level one standard. Their figures were supported by the Surrey by British Market Research Bureau – Literacy and Numeracy. These figures did not provide a comparison for the figures at another point in time, so it is difficult to judge any improvement in the level of basic skills. However the National Survey of Adults Basic Skills in Wales showed statistics that the level of basic skills in 2004 were approximately the same as the literacy trust had them in 2007. This statistical data would suggest that there has been little improvement in the levels of basic skills in Wales.

There are problems with both these sets of data. The Survey British Market Research Bureau only surveyed two thousand five hundred people. This is to small a survey to accurately extrapolate the whole population’s statistics from. The survey does give good breakdown of the figures to allow for accurate comparisons. The same problem exists for the National Survey Of Adults Basic Skills in Wales, they only used two thousand five hundred and fifty four people in their survey. Extrapolating the data for the whole population from this size survey will lead to inaccuracies. This document did give a good break down of the actual literacy and numeracy levels within the survey which allows good comparisons to be made. However even limited statistics are better than having no statistics to support your opinion. The available information would not seem to support the Welsh Assembly’s claim that significant improvements have been made. This information was used to answer my second and forth objectives.

To address my third objective I discussed the changing levels of basic skills with three further education lecturers who specialise in teach basic skills. There was some conflict between them about whether the levels of basic skills have improved, the lecturers teaching students just entering the college seemed to believe that there had been little change, however in contrast the lecturer who taught people who had already attended a course in college did believe he had seen an improvement. This would appear to suggest that the government’s policies have had partial success.

The Welsh Assembly Government has commissioned a review of the basic skills policy, ‘Words talk- numbers count’, by Miller Research (U.K.) Ltd., this is to subject the strategy to independent, vigorous review. They are planning to take a multi layered approach to measure both the actual changes in basic skills and any unquantifiable improvement in their social, economic existence. When this review is released it should clarify what if any improvement has been made in basic skills levels in Wales. This will provide the independent, consistent evidence of how effective the basic skills strategies have been.