John Lewis and Adult Literacy in the UK | Succeed With Dyslexia

Young people who start work at the UK department store John Lewis lack the basic literacy and numeracy skills that they need to succeed in the role, the department store boss has claimed this week.

Dame Sharon White, speaking In UK newspaper The Times revealed that some staff members lacked skills beyond those expected of a ten year old, and that the firm has had to provide catch-up lessons for some staff going over basic English and maths to help them on the shop floor.

“To have done 10 years, 11, 12 years of education and not having, in many cases, functional literacy and pretty typically not having functional numeracy beyond the age of, I’d say, 10 or 11 means that they may have fabulous people skills and fabulous skills in terms of operating in a team, but that’s almost outwith the education system,” Dame Sharon commented, speaking to a commission set up by The Times to examine the UK education system post-Covid.

John Lewis isn’t alone in having concerns about the skills level of their store employees. The BBC highlights that last November, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) published a fact sheet in which it outlined that a relatively high percentage of the UK’s workforce had poor computer capabilities and poor literacy and numeracy skills. It also concludes that UK employers are providing less training and investing less in their workforces than they were two decades ago.

• According to the National Literacy Trust, 16% of adults in the UK at the moment are ‘functionally illiterate’. That’s 9 million adults. This means that whilst they can understand very short and straightforward texts on familiar topics, they will struggle when information is from unfamiliar sources or is more complex in terms of its writing style.
• Scotland is the country in the UK with the highest levels of functional illiteracy – 1 in 4 people experience challenges due to their lack of literacy skills.
• According to the Department for Education, 1 in 5 children left primary school in 2018 unable to read. It’s thought that this number might be even higher recently, with all the interruptions to learning that the Covid-19 pandemic has necessitated.
• There’s a link between low levels of literacy and shorter life expectancy and mental health problems.
• According to the National Literacy trust, a boy born in Stockton-on-Tees (a place that has some of the lowest literacy levels in the country) has a life expectancy 26.1 years shorter than a boy born in north Oxford. This could be for a number of reasons – low literacy is likely to result in lower paid jobs, which have higher levels of physical stress and lower job security, which means that many people retire much later than their peers, if at all.
• England is the only country in the world where literacy levels are worse in the younger generation than in those approaching retirement.

According to Katy Newell-Jones of the British Association for Literacy in Development, literacy programmes in the past have focused on young school children, and assumed a “trickle-up feeling that if we can educate the next generation of children then literacy problems will be solved”, and that’s proven to be “so wrong”.

Employers like John Lewis could be key to leading the charge when it comes to weak English and maths in the workplace- and catch-up classes are one form of trying to beat that skills gap and help people go on to succeed. Many people support the idea of these classes being made available by employers across the board - but there are a lot of logistical problems with the idea. Questions have been raised on social media surrounding the news story about whether failure to achieve a certain skill level in these classes could be used by unscrupulous employers as grounds for dismissal – and there have been split opinions on whether these lessons should count as paid working hours.

Another part of combatting low literacy is making sure that people with literacy differences like dyslexia have it identified, and get the help they need- whether that means specialist help in lessons or at work, or simply the introduction of assistive technology like ReaderPens into their lives. The Access to Work Grant is also a great resource for working adults, and can offer them support in a number of ways if they struggle with their literacy skills (and we’ve created a helpful myth-busting article all about the grant too – just click here for more).

Another way that we can combat low literacy skills in the adult workforce is by investing in our prison population. Historically a demographic with some of the UK’s lowest literacy levels, identifying low literacy and supplying prisoners with the support and the technology they need to learn to read with confidence and fluency means that it’s much easier to find education and employment on their release. This is also seen to lower the chances of reoffending, and could help people make a positive change, using literacy as a passport to the careers and the lives they want to be a part of.

Read Easy UK are a national charity that provides free, confidential one-to-one reading coaching for adults from trained volunteers, through locally-run affiliated volunteer groups. They aim to help adults to read with confidence, and through this, break the inter-generational cycle of literacy differences by enabling parents and grandparents to interact with their children on a literacy level, with reading together and homework help.

The Reading Agency’s Reading Ahead project also has a lot of helpful resources for getting back into reading. BBC Teach also has a helpful set of videos and downloadable worksheets to help adult learners improve their reading, writing, spelling and grammar skills.