Jay Doubleyou: low literacy levels in britain
Britain has one of highest rates of university participation - yet literacy remains low
RICHARD GARNER EDUCATION EDITOR
Wednesday 10 September 2014
The drive to send more British people to university has failed to produce a rise in literacy and numeracy skills, a major international study has revealed.
Britain now has one of the highest rates of university participation in the world – yet only one in four of those students reach the highest levels of literacy, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). Many students fail to improve their key skills at all during their degrees.
The findings immediately threw a question mark over the target of 50 per cent participation in higher education advocated by Tony Blair when he was Prime Minister.
“I think the massive expansion – more particularly in response to the Blair target declared in 1999 – led to a climate where it was good to go to university and it was important to get a degree irrespective of what it was in and where it was taken,” said Professor Alan Smithers, director of the Centre for Education and Employment research at Buckingham University.
“That message needs to be changed by the intervention of employers saying ‘study this and you’ll get a really good highly rewarding job and we will ensure that’s the case’.”
The one in four figure for UK students with the highest standards in literacy compared to 37 per cent in Finland and Japan, 36 per cent in the Netherlands, 34 per cent in Sweden and 32 per cent in Australia.
“On the one hand in the UK you can say qualification levels have risen enormously. lots more people are getting tertiary qualifications, university degrees, but actually not all of that is visible in better skills,” said the OECD’s director general of education and skills Andreas Schleicher.
“In the UK’s global knowledge-based economy, where 80 per cent of new jobs are in high-skilled areas, employers are demanding more from their graduates, requiring them to be forward-thinking, problem-solving and entrepreneurial,” he added.
Mr Schleicher said that he would have expected the UK to perform better at the highest levels of literacy. “UK universities have a very strong reputation – you would have expected this stronger prevalence among the most highly skilled people.”
Professor Steve West, chairman of the University Alliance – made up of universities specialising in science, technology, design and the professions, said that it “shared the report’s concerns that the increase in university education had not led to better-skilled graduates”.
The report went on to reveal that one in two women in the UK now have university degrees. The latest figure for participation amongst 25 to 34-year-olds show 41 per cent going into higher education – with only 37 per cent quitting education at the end of secondary schooling. “This is a historic high [of young people attending university] for the UK,” the report adds.
Responding to the OECD report, the Education Secretary Nicky Morgan said more students were now studying subjects at school which would “open doors for them in the future”. She said she was “committed to going further faster” towards creating an education system where all young people regardless of background could flourish.
Britain has one of highest rates of university participation - yet literacy remains low - News - Student - The Independent
The puzzle of UK graduates and their low-level literacy
11 SEPTEMBER 2014 | BY JOHN MORGAN
UK adults with tertiary education ranked 12th among the OECD despite the reputation of its universities
SOURCE: ALAMY
Not as simple as ABC: the weak literacy skills of UK graduates is mystifying
The UK is ranked relatively low among the most developed nations for the literacy skills of graduates, with its performance described as “a puzzle” given the elevated reputation of its universities.
The Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development’s annual Education at a Glance report, released on 9 September, this year includes a new feature: a measurement of how adults with tertiary education perform on literacy skills in each OECD nation.
Andreas Schleicher, the OECD’s director for education and skills, described the measure – in which Japan, the Netherlands and Finland perform best – as offering “an important new dimension” and suggesting that “similar degrees may have a different skills value”.
Education at a Glance also reveals that the percentage of GDP spent on higher education in the UK fell – from 1.3 per cent in 2010 to 1.2 per cent in 2011, below the OECD average of 1.6 per cent. Canada overtook the US as the biggest spender on higher education, increasing its GDP spend from 2.6 per cent in 2009 to 2.8 per cent in 2010 – the latest years for which figures are available – compared with its neighbour’s static 2.7 per cent in 2011.
In terms of the report’s figures on the literacy skill levels of 25- to 64-year-olds with tertiary, secondary or below secondary education, data are drawn from the OECD’s Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, a new survey launched last year.
Mr Schleicher said that while the OECD was still developing “a Pisa for higher education” – the organisation’s Programme for International Student Assessment that looks at national performance on learning outcomes in schools – the PIAAC figures used in Education at a Glance“give us an initial approximation on quality of learning outcomes” for tertiary education.
On mean literacy scores, UK adults with tertiary education are ranked 12th out of 23 nations by the OECD (although the data cover just England and Northern Ireland).
On a separate measure of the proportion of adults with tertiary education achieving the highest levels of literacy, the UK was ranked eighth, with 25 per cent reaching the highest proficiency levels of 4 or 5. In Japan, the highest scoring nation, 37 per cent of adults with tertiary education reached those levels.
Mr Schleicher suggested that the UK’s low performance on mean literacy scores could be explained by the fact that there is “a lot of further education that’s called higher education in the UK”.
But the relatively low level of UK adults with tertiary education reaching the highest skill levels was less simple to explain, he said.
“If you asked if I would send my children to a Japanese or a UK university, I would always choose the UK. In fact, my son is going to a UK university.
“But it’s a puzzle. I must say I would have expected the UK to do better on the top end of the skills distribution than what we have here,” Mr Schleicher said.
He went on to say that Pisa scores showed high attainment in literacy and numeracy in Japanese schools. “And [Japanese] universities can build on that. That’s not true for the UK. If you look at the Pisa scores the UK is doing so-so,” he continued.
UK universities might “assume those skills are there, but they might not be”, he added.
The puzzle of UK graduates and their low-level literacy | News | Times Higher Education
Which brings us back to the earlier posting:
Jay Doubleyou: low literacy levels in britain
This is an ongoing problem...
See last year's international tables - and a comparison with the likes of South Korea and Finland.
Watch the video interviews:
BBC News - England's young adults trail world in literacy and maths
British education in crisis? - YouTube
And from a couple of years ago:
Age of Illiteracy: Shocking 20% UK youths struggle to read - YouTube
It's also a problem in the States:
BBC News - Downward mobility haunts US education
One In Four Americans Thinks The Sun Orbits The Earth
What can be done about it?
> Improve literacy levels in the young:
New Britain Early Literacy Campaign 9/14/10 on Vimeo
Children must learn to love reading, not just learn to read | @guardianletters | Education | The Guardian
> Provide free kindergarten schooling:
Nursery places for deprived children? Sadly the political will doesn’t exist | Lola Okolosie | Comment is free | theguardian.com
> Reduce the emphasis on university education:
BBC NEWS | Education | 'Education, education, education'
But should 'the West' follow 'the Far East'?
Jay Doubleyou: rote learning
Jay Doubleyou: panic in the west over educational achievements in the far east
Great Divergence - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
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