Raising reading skills pays off

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Former rugby players and musicians are helping to teach literacy and numeracy skills to adults struggling to do their jobs.

According to the Adult Literacy in New Zealand survey, just 20 per cent of the adult working population has an "effective level of literacy". While a fair proportion of the rest can get by, almost half of people in work have trouble reading even basic material, such as forms and simple memos.

According to the report, three-quarters of all unemployed people are in the two lowest literacy levels - typically Pacific Islanders, Maori and people in ethnic minority groups.

Literacy skills are measured across five levels by the Ministry of Education. People in levels one and two are those who have real difficulty reading (45 per cent of the working population). Level three is the minimum requirement to meet the "complex demands of everyday life and work" in the emerging "knowledge society" (35 per cent). And people with a high level of literacy are placed in levels four and five.

As more jobs require people to be able to read, the report's authors say remedial education programmes "will be critical to improving the extent to which these groups come to fully participate in social and economic activity". It also says employers have a responsibility to train their staff if they want to harness the full potential of their employees.

Firms that have introduced programmes to teach staff literacy and numeracy include construction firm Downer EDI, mining firm OceanaGold, Tritec Manufacturing and NZ Bus.

Working with these firms is Martyn McKessar, a director at training company The Learning Wave. He says some organisations are not achieving the productivity levels they want because their staff have low literacy skills and that companies that do invest in their staff to raise their numeracy and literacy levels are getting a $3 return for every dollar spent. "People have slipped through the [education] system and have left school without the core reading, writing and numeracy skills they need," says McKessar. "And this situation has nothing to do with immigration issues and non-English speakers moving here. For companies, and as a country, to lift productivity we need to lift literacy levels."

For Downer EDI the benefits of improving the literacy skills of almost 1000 members of staff since 2008 have included higher productivity and profits and lower staff turnover and absenteeism. The firm has also seen a steady decline in accidents and insurance claims as a result of its literacy and numeracy scheme and a safety-training programme.

When it comes to recruiting trainers, McKessar says he prefers to hire former sports professionals, musicians and church leaders rather than trained teachers.

Among his staff are Duane Mann, former New Zealand rugby league captain and Auckland Warriors hooker; Frano Botica, former Auckland Warriors fullback; singer and entertainer David Curtis; and musician Trevor King.

"We have taken people who are good with a crowd and taught them to be literacy tutors," says McKessar. "I'm not knocking the schoolteacher model because it has its place, but we have found it more effective to have people who can get a group of people on board first and be teachers second."

McKessar says he cannot fill all the gaps in people's knowledge, but can teach people enough to get by.

"It is like going to France _ you don't need to be able to fluently read French to go there," he says. "But you might want to be able to read a menu and a bus timetable. So we teach people what I would call survival skills.

"A lot of our work in workplace literacy and covers what people need to know to do their job better. We focus on the skills they need right now. And that might be the skills to read common company forms, such as being able to complete an accident report or timesheet.

"If they work in a call centre and need to read sections from a screen, then we teach them how to read the screen and other workplace documentation. That does narrow the field down quite a bit when it comes to what we need to teach them."

McKessar says an improvement in one area of a person's skill base, such as being able to read a company memo, can help boost another.

"Learning to read, even a little bit, can really lift a person's self-confidence," he says. "Suddenly they can do things they couldn't do before.

"Very often people have been labelled as not being able to do certain things, but with a little support they can. And if we get them started on learning then they become a much more valuable employee."

One of the biggest barriers McKessar and others in adult workplace training face is having adults feel comfortable about attending training classes and admitting that they are having difficulty.

"It is not unusual for people to just not turn up to training days or call in sick when training is scheduled," says McKessar. "There are some big face-saving issues to overcome and it can take a long time to win their confidence."

To help break down the barriers, McKessar avoids using words that can appear negative to adult learners. During training sessions, he uses language such as training being a "fitness assessment", rather than a literacy assessment.

"It is because we are helping people get fit for the job they are doing," he says. "We try and tie it in to the analogy of the gym and sport, and then go through a range of training modules to make people fit for the job."

A lack of numeric skills can be a big issue too, says McKessar. And while he agrees almost anyone can use a calculator, some people wouldn't know a right answer from a wrong one.

"On a building project, construction workers could order the wrong amount of cement for example," he says. "The consequences of getting that wrong can be pretty big.

"Some people have got by with describing distance as the length of a rugby field because they don't know the number of metres they are looking at."

McKessar says it could be argued that employers should simply let staff go who cannot perform as expected. But he says investing in people motivates them, increases loyalty and that, ultimately, the problem of low levels of literacy is so wide that if an employer has a good member of staff, it is worth training them up.

* Steve Hart is a freelance journalist. Contact him via his website at www.SteveHart.co.nz