'Literacy in the Workplace'

Ms D'Ath, ladies and gentlemen, tena koutou.

Thank you for your welcome and your invitation to be here with you today. I happily accepted the request that I officially launch this publication, "Literacy in the Workplace," and in doing so, that I say something about that topic , this, simply because of the immense importance to this country and its future, of increasing our literacy skills. I don't think it's an over-statement to say that our future depends on our doing so.

It's probably reasonably accurate to say that while few New Zealanders are completely unable to read or write, there are many whose functional literacy is limited , people for whom filling in forms, preparing even a simple budget or a personal financial statement, or following instructions in a manual, is a struggle. Literacy is more than just the basic, essential skills of reading and writing competently. It involves speaking as well, listening, problem solving, creative thinking and numeracy.

On this basis, there are many more strugglers among us than is obvious, for this is a sensitive area; especially where everyday activities are involved, people do not want their difficulties to become public knowledge. They will conceal them.

Yet if we do not always know who the particular individuals are who are having such difficulties, we know approximately how many there are in total. Last year, the OECD published the results of a comparative literacy survey , an investigation of the literacy and numeracy attainments of 13 countries: the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand and seven others. The survey measured three different kinds of literacy, which were termed 'prose', 'document' and 'quantitative' literacy. Prose literacy was defined as the set of skills required to understand and apply information from sources such as news stories and fiction. New Zealand was just above the middle of the table , we ranked fifth. For document literacy , the sort of skills you need to fill in a job application , we placed ninth. In quantitative literacy , the skills you need to balance a chequebook for example , we slipped further, to tenth.

In each of the categories, around 20 per cent of New Zealanders , one in five of us , were in the lowest of the five levels of literacy used by the survey. That is a sad statistic, and also an immensely worrying one.

It is sad because so very many of the people who have low reading and writing skills are inevitably going to be less employable, command only low incomes for their labour, cut themselves off from so very, very much of what life has to offer.

And it's an immensely worrying figure, because people unable to follow a rewarding career may very well be tempted to turn to unhappy alternatives, to fill their lives not with hope for a better future, but to activities which are self-destructive, or destructive of those around them. And it means that the rest of us are deprived of the contribution to our national well-being that they have the potential to make.

So everyone has a stake in lifting New Zealand's average literacy levels. As one of the contributors writes: " our hopes of a prosperous future rest heavily on applying smart minds in a wide range of workplace settings; in raising skill levels." And since people are this country's chief resource , not land, not minerals, not forests, not fish, not hydroelectric dams, not our flocks or herds , since people are this country's chief resource, then our levels of literacy can be absolutely crucial in allowing New Zealanders to thrive in an increasingly global economy. Resources of all kinds can be found elsewhere, or can be moved. But our collective knowledge, our skills, our experience, our other related characteristics and attributes, are this country's real wealth and if fully utilised, will give us our competitive advantage.

But with one in five of us unable to participate fully in modern life and in the contemporary workplace, New Zealand has an urgent need to promote higher levels of literacy, and so to promote greater social and economic well-being. Many ways towards achieving these goals are suggested by those who were interviewed for this book, "Literacy in the Workplace."

For instance, Marilyn Davies, the New Zealand Employers' Federation Education and Training Adviser, sees the needed skill and literacy requirements being met in two ways: in the workplace, where employers need to assess skill shortfalls and to arrange appropriate training to make them up, and in education, where educators and businesses should establish closer working relationships.

Angela Foulkes, Secretary of the New Zealand Council of Trade Unions, emphasises the continuing importance of on-going adult education.

For its part, Skill New Zealand has identified a range of solutions. The tactic has been to purchase a variety of literacy programmes, each tailored to meeting the needs of different groups. Several of these programmes are profiled in "Literacy in the Workplace": each a first step on a path of continuing self-education. Each programme, though modified to suit those who are taking it, nevertheless has a common theme, which is that the learning has a context, a purpose, and offers everyone the key to a better, even a much better, life.

One of these first-step programmes is the Learning in Small Companies Project, jointly run by Skill New Zealand and Workbase, the National Centre for Workplace Literacy and Language. This project is creating and testing a model for literacy training in small and medium-sized companies. Nine South Auckland companies in three industries , food and beverage, plastics and mixed construction , are involved, first identifying existing skill levels and further training needs, with each company appointing a learning adviser and a literacy tutor. After six months, the project is achieving significant results in, for example, increased confidence, an improvement in motivation, a desire by staff to be more involved in improving the way the company conducts its business.

Then there is Christchurch Polytechnic's 12-week literacy and numeracy course, where many participants have shown themselves to be skilled and accomplished, but adept at concealing their marginal literacy. Their acknowledgement that they have a literacy problem, and their taking action to solve that problem, has in itself been immensely helpful.

Yet another initiative is the Roving Tutor Programme, under which a specialist group of itinerant, I suppose it would be fair to say, tutors provides literacy training on request from either learners or trainers.

Or there is the Whaia Te Ara Tika pilot literacy project based in Gisborne, which aims to identify best practice in literacy provision for Maori learners, the project being jointly run by Skill New Zealand and Te Runanga O Turanginui a Kiwa.

Everyone who is highly literate has little cause to think about the value of their literacy skills. Literacy and numeracy become something about ourselves that we simply take for granted. Their enormous, world-transforming value becomes almost invisible to us, a part of our personal environment that is no longer noticed. But if we do ever take the time to think about our reading, writing and number skills, we quickly realise that an enormous part of who we are, and of whatever we may have achieved, has been influenced and determined by our ease, say, with the written word. These skills are precious gifts; not the sort of gifts either, whose value is diminished by their sharing. Rather, by encouraging their broadest possible distribution we increase their worth, for ourselves as well as for those acquiring them.

So it is in the interest of us all that we work to ensure that this country's general literacy and numeracy attainments increase significantly from their current level. Perhaps the first step to doing that is to learn why so many New Zealanders do not acquire those skills that those who have them come to so blithely take for granted. There is, perhaps, a clue in the words of a young Maori man reported in "Literacy in the Workplace", " we never asked questions at school, we left school at 15, there was no incentive to stay on. The teachers just wrote stuff on the board or read it out, and if you couldn't keep up, that was it there's still a lot of people out there who are too scared to put their hand up and learn more."

But with the right programmes, with genuine resolve, with the will to change the lives of so many New Zealanders for the better, the overall outcome can change.

We are living at the end of one era, and the beginning of another: the Industrial Revolution that commenced in the 19^th century encouraged mass literacy, but the Information Age which we are entering absolutely demands it.

I am therefore pleased to declare the Skill New Zealand publication, "Literacy in the Workplace," officially launched. May it encourage employers, educators and all those who might provide guidance to those who lack literacy skills to acknowledge any problems, and begin to take action to remedy them. Kia ora tatau.