Literacy and Life Chances in the UK

Literacy is great at opening doors – strong reading and writing skills are a foundational element of most educational experiences and further on down the line, many careers. And although having weaker literacy skills doesn’t mean that you’re destined for less, it remains that they can make everything a little easier when it comes to climbing ladders and getting to the places that you want to be.

That’s why looking at the impact that literacy has on the individual life course is so important – it allows us to dive deeper into the power that literacy has when it comes to affecting economic outcomes, and in turn, to better target the support that we can offer people with low literacy at different points in their lives.

One of the more surprising links between literacy and life chances in the UK is the dramatic relationship we can observe between literacy and life expectancy, or the age that somebody gets to before they pass away. There are some large differences in the data:

A boy born in the centre of Stockton, County Durham (a location with some of the most serious literacy challenges in the country) has a life expectancy that’s 26 years and 2 months shorter than a boy born in North Oxford (which has some of the fewest literacy challenges in the country. It’s the same for women, too: a girl born in Queensgate, Burnley (with a very high rate of literacy challenges) has a life expectancy 20 years and 11 months shorter than a girl born in Mayfield and Five Ashes, Sussex (with a relatively low rate of literacy challenges). These figures are likely to do with poverty and overall standards of living, which can be affected by the literacy levels an individual has.

• People with lower levels of literacy tend to enter the workforce much earlier than people with average and high levels of literacy…
• …but by the age of 37, the data splits, and people with low levels of literacy tend to be unemployed far more often than people with average and high levels of literacy.
• They’re the group most at risk of redundancies and long-term unemployment, too.
• People with low literacy who do stay in employment, however, tend to retire much later than people with average and high literacy skills, some working well into their sixties and even seventies.
• Salaries tend to be lower with every step down the literacy scale – although some professions are outside this curve, such as driving-based professions, construction-based professions, and those in the sports and leisure industry.
• People with low and very low literacy are between 30-58% more likely to have never been on a career development or training course
• 63% of men and 75% of women classed as having ‘very low literacy skills’ have never received a promotion or non-essential (i.e. in line with rising minimum wage or government-standardised time-based) pay increase.
• There’s a big link between low literacy and prison time too, with data from the 2000s outlining that 60% of people in prisons are determined to have difficulties in their basic literacy skills, and 25% of young offenders were classed as having reading skills below those of the average seven-year-old.
• And employed people with low literacy are more likely to have been classed as a ‘key worker’ during the coronavirus pandemic, and been unable to work from home.

There appears to be a relationship between literacy and home ownership, too, most likely based off its link with employment and wages. In the late 1990s, 42% of those people in society with the lowest literacy skills own their homes, rising to 78% as literacy skills improve. However it’s argued that these figures are likely to read very differently in the present day due to the ongoing housing and cost of living crisis and the amount of young employed professionals who are struggling to break into the mortgage market, so these figures may not represent an accurate picture of the UK as it stands in 2022.

What hasn't changed is that people with low literacy are far more likely to be classed as living below the poverty line, and in less economically developed communities that offer less opportunities for social mobility, such as populated job markets, good transport links, and a secure amount of council funding.

Relatively poor physical health and mental wellbeing are also associated with poor literacy, and people with poor literacy tend to consume more units of alcohol and have a poorer relationship with recreational drug-taking on average than people with average and good levels of literacy. People with low literacy are also more likely to report that they suffer from a long-standing physical illness and that it limits their daily activities, as well as to report long-term issues with their mental health too. People with low literacy are also the people who wait the longest to seek professional assistance when they’re ill, too, perhaps due to over-subscribed healthcare services in some more economically disadvantaged areas, or the inability to take time off manual jobs quite as freely as somebody with a higher literacy level who works in an office might.

 One trend emerges above the other narratives present in the data above: higher levels of literacy are linked with a better quality of life and a better incidence of choice in terms of education, career and economic well-being. Low literacy often narrows options and puts a person in a much greater risk group for experiencing low wages, low economic stability, and a less developed quality of life when it comes down to the data.

There are, of course, outliers – some people with amazing literacy skills still live in poverty, some people with low literacy skills have a very high quality of life, make large amounts of money, and are very fulfilled in the roles that they’ve chosen. But in a time period where the quality of life for many people on the lowest incomes is predicted to slip further and we’re still recovering from the economic effects of the pandemic in school closures, business loss and financial hardship, understanding the ways that low literacy can change a lived experience- and the transformational power that a better standard of literacy can have- is a vital part of our understanding.

That’s why it’s important we have a holistic, sensitive and agile conceptualisation of the ways that low literacy skills can have an impact on the individual life choices and chances that make up somebody’s lived experience, as well as some facts and figures to put into a presentation – low literacy has an effect on people, and one of the best ways that we can change the narrative and ensure that we’re targeting support correctly as a society is by looking at the ways in which low literacy actually alters the life course from what many of us would consider a standard one, and its relationships with adversity, poverty and offending.

One of the best sources we have in the UK when it comes to exploring the real complexities of the relationships between literacy and life chances is the Literacy Changes Lives report, although it’s several years old at this point- it was commissioned in 2008 and revisited in 2014, and although it doesn’t take into account anything that’s happened post-pandemic or relevant to the cost of living surge, it’s still one of the more in-depth models we have when it comes to looking at a whole-life journey. It’s where a lot of the data that forms the knowledge base of this article has come from, and it’s available for free online.

 As an advocacy resource, it demonstrates the impact that literacy can have on five factors that make up an individual’s lived experience: economic well-being, aspirations, family life, health and civic and cultural engagement. You can access the 2008 findings at The National Literacy Trust, and there are also additional materials created by The National Literacy Trust as part of the Literacy Changes Lives report on The Role of Literacy in Offending Behaviour, which explores further the links between low literacy and an individual’s interactions with the justice system.