Education — Issue No. 4 — Tuesday, April 11, 2006 (HTML)

2006 Legislative Session: Second Session, 38th Parliament
SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION
MINUTES AND HANSARD

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
EDUCATION



CONTENTS

		Page

Presentations		35
B. Le Clair G. Lee D. Twiss D. Dhammi K. Rubenson

Chair:	* John Nuraney (Burnaby-Willingdon L)
Deputy Chair:	* Gregor Robertson (Vancouver-Fairview NDP)
Members:	* Daniel Jarvis (North Vancouver–Seymour L) Richard T. Lee (Burnaby North L) * Lorne Mayencourt (Vancouver-Burrard L) * Mary Polak (Langley L) * John Rustad (Prince George–Omineca L) * John Horgan (Malahat–Juan de Fuca NDP) * Doug Routley (Cowichan-Ladysmith NDP) Diane Thorne (Coquitlam-Maillardville NDP) * denotes member present


Witnesses:	Del Dhammi (Capilano College) Brenda Le Clair (Executive Director, Literacy Now) Dr. Greg Lee (President, Capilano College) Dr. Kjell Rubenson (University of British Columbia) Diana Twiss (Capilano College)

J. Nuraney (Chair): Before we begin, Kate has some housekeeping announcements. So I'll let Kate speak first.

K. Ryan-Lloyd (Clerk Assistant and Committee Clerk): Hello, everyone. I just want to draw your attention to the documents before you that have been distributed this afternoon. We have copies of the agenda for both today's meeting and tomorrow's, which will be held in this room from 9 a.m. to 12 noon. In addition, we have some brief biographies of the presenters for both meetings. It's a double-sided copy, so you may want to save that one for tomorrow.

Josie has also prepared a summary of the submissions that were presented on Wednesday, March 22, when we were back in Victoria. I understand it's our intention to have those ready for you at every next series of meetings, so the ones from today and tomorrow should be ready by about April 26.

If you'd like electronic copies of any of these documents or if you'd like electronic copies of anything that was previously distributed to the committee, we have a number of background notes that we have prepared, including summaries of the Vancouver community meetings that were held and other events that have been attended by research staff.

So if anybody would like any extra documentation, please don't hesitate to let me know.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Today's meeting is a public meeting, which will be recorded and transcribed by Hansard Services. A copy of this transcript, along with the minutes of this meeting, will be printed and will be made available on the committees website at www.leg.bc.ca/cmt.

In addition to the meeting transcript, a live audio webcast of this meeting is also produced and available on the committees website to enable interested listeners to hear the proceedings as they occur. An archived copy of the audio broadcast will also be retained on the committees website.

Let me also, for the benefit of the presenters, read out the mandate that this committee has. The Select Standing Committee on Education was reissued the following terms of reference by the Legislative Assembly on February 20, 2006: that the committee be empowered to examine, inquire into and make recommendations with respect to finding effective strategies to address the specific challenge of adult literacy and, in particular, to conduct consultations to consider successful strategies from other jurisdictions on the promotion of adult literacy and specific strategies to improve literacy rates among aboriginal people, English-as-a-second-language adults, and seniors.

This is the mandate of this committee, and I encourage the presenters to throw as much light as they can on this mandate to help the work of this committee.

Members, we have with us today Brenda Le Clair, who will be making her presentation. Brenda is an executive director of Literacy Now, which is part of the government's 2010 Legacies Now initiative. Based on the advisory panel's recommendations, Literacy Now aims to make British Columbia the most literate province in Canada and a global leader in literacy learning by 2010.

Its initial focus is to stimulate and strengthen new and existing community strategies for supporting literacy from infancy to adulthood in British Columbia. Prior to joining 2010 Literacy Now, Brenda was the deputy superintendent with the Langley school board.

Members, I now give the floor to Brenda to make her presentation. I believe the time factor has been told. It will be a 30-minute presentation followed by questions and answers.

B. Le Clair: It is truly an honour to be here with you today. I have the wonderful privilege of working in literacy throughout the province. Although I thought the school district work was very good, this is wonderful. I've had the chance to be in probably 50 to 60 communities this past year and have been able to dialogue broadly with members of the community around all kinds of issues that touch them throughout the lifespan.

Literacy Now focuses, really, from age zero to the oldest member in the community. It's intended to look at literacy in a broad way and beyond the more traditional forms — of course, reading and writing continue to be of great importance — but it also reaches back to traditional literacies like oral tradition and forward into all the new technologies. It's really how we make meaning of our world. In the broadest way, it's how we care for our health, how we provide for ourselves economically, and it's about our quality of life. Literacy continues to be a major issue for many British Columbians as they struggle in the workforce or sometimes in schooling or in economic issues or health-related issues.

I know your mandate is specifically directed toward adult literacy, but it's very difficult to carve out the adult literacy piece and isolate it from the other pieces because families present as families, and literacy issues are usually intergenerational. These days even the work around supporting literacy tends to have several layers to it. So the children are involved, the adults are involved, and the grandparents are involved.

I will try to address some specific aspects of adult literacy at the end, but I wanted to show you a very short video on Literacy Now and what it is attempting to do in the communities of British Columbia. Here it is, I hope.

B. Le Clair: Now you've had the Literacy Now in a box. I'll try to tell you a little bit about the work that's

been happening in the last 18 months. At this time we have 44 communities across the province, which have been working with a community development planning guide and a set of guiding principles. They have been working with great enthusiasm and with a lot of energy.

The people who are involved in the community tend to be different from the people who would have been involved in literacy work a decade ago or even five years ago. I think what's happening in our world, and certainly in our province, is that more and more people are hearing about literacy from all kinds of sources, and people are recognizing that it is really critical to our future as a province and as people. The people who are now at the planning tables are still the traditional literacy practitioners, but they're also the civic leaders, health care professionals and social workers. The librarians are always there. Seniors are there, the colleges are there, and the school districts are there. Industry is often there, and the business community is there. It's a much richer dialogue than it's been in the past.

Of the 44 communities, about a third of them now have completed community plans. What I've done here — and I'm going to leave them with you — is…. I've brought a couple of the planning guides, so you can actually see the steps that communities are going through. I've brought you their first drafts of community plans. The first plans that are coming in are from the East and West Kootenays, and they were one of the first pilots to begin. Campbell River, I hear, within the next month will have theirs completed. I know Smithers is just about there. I hear that Hazelton is just about finished. They're beginning to come in, and certainly within the next six months or so, I would anticipate that the majority of the 44 communities that are doing the work now will be finished the planning phase.

There are also many communities waiting to begin. We've asked them to complete an expression of interest, and they have done that. So we're hoping to invite about 30 more communities to begin the planning process. Probably in June we will begin.

For the planning process, a community gets $10,000. That's intended to help break down any barriers to full participation. What we want is for as many people as possible to be part of the process. They look at the issues right from the early years through to issues with seniors, and they do a very comprehensive planning process. Some places said: "Well, we've already done planning. Just give us the money, and we'll implement the programs." They've been patient with us.

Actually, with some of the communities that had done a lot of planning, it's taken them 18 months too. So they're planning in a much deeper way than they have in the past. I'm confident, as we support them through the implementation of their ideas, that they've really done good work up front and that the plans are solid. We have said to them: "If you follow the process" — which is a number of steps they have to go through in planning — "and then the implementation plan" — which includes, obviously, the things that they want to do but also some evaluation — "we'll support you through three years."

If I'm permitted to give recommendations to you, what communities always say is: "We get supported for planning. Then the time comes to actually do the things, and the energy kind of runs out. So we get started with things, and then the sources of funding dry up, and it's really hard to maintain." One of the first challenges in communities was convincing them that they wanted to plan again.

It was the fact that we were prepared to walk with them through three years that really made the difference to them in engaging in the process. Because it's three years' funding, we've challenged them to address the more difficult issues in literacy. Usually in the one-year planning cycles, they pick an issue that's easy to solve. You do it for three months, and then you measure it, write your report and apply for the next year's funding. The issues with literacy are much deeper than that. They won't be solved through short-term initiatives.

We've said: "Look deeply at what the issues are in your community, and create plans that are much more systemic, which are really going to address the things that are preventing people from fully participating in literacy." A lot of the work is focused on issues with first nations people, often with ethnic minorities and second-language learners. Issues of poverty and isolation have kept people from fully participating in their communities, so the plans are really touching at those issues. I think it's actually very exciting.

I think that the issues in literacy are complex and that single solutions don't do very well. We also need to create a range of solutions in communities, because if things were so easy to solve, we would have solved them a long time ago. The issues, particularly with adult learners, are that there is still a lot of shame and a lot of stigma that people feel as adult learners if they're struggling with literacy. They have become very good, through school systems and through their work environment, at covering up and finding ways to avoid having to practise their literacy.

Provincially — because there have been many shifts in the way we work, particularly in the rural communities — many adult learners have found that they have to retrain. They have to take on new kinds of work. That requires more learning, and for many adults that is a really traumatic place to be in their life. They thought they had a job that would carry them through, and that they were finished with learning. That's certainly not the case these days.

Other issues are that many of the issues with adults are…. There are several things going on at once, so the person may be struggling indeed with a learning difficulty very often compounded with maybe a mental health issue. Sometimes it's isolation. It's not having someone to mentor you, to work with you, to support you. Sometimes it is poverty. So when we build programs for adults, we need to be sensitive to many of those issues that are often happening simultaneously.

What we know provincially is that there are opportunities in most communities for adults to learn more literacy skills, but adults are not necessarily turning up. Some are, particularly those who are comfortable with institutions, so they may go to the college and take some upgrading. Sometimes a continuing ed department at the school district will reach out. But most adults don't have the confidence — usually it's confidence — to walk into a formal institution and say: "I have needs to learn basic literacy skills."

I think what we're finding is effective as we're looking to plan for the adult learners is to make sure there's a number of opportunities for people — some at a very low-risk level, where you can just come in and be part of a group and talk about things, talk about your ideas. Maybe it's as basic as watching a movie together and talking about it or doing a short-term project. Most adults prefer the informal settings to the formal, particularly when they're just re-entering the world of learning.

Workplace literacy is also…. We're hearing much more about it these days. We don't do it very well. There is very little happening provincially in terms of workplace literacy.

Again, I think it's very hard, as an employee, to turn up at a course and say: "I don't have these skills." First of all, you have to have it in an environment where both the employer and the employee are agreeing that this is a safe place for employees. To nominate yourself as someone who's not very skilled is quite intimidating, you know, in a workplace.

I think that the greatest challenge for us as a province is to create a culture of learning where learning is not just for some people, but it's there for all of us, and we participate in a way that meets our needs. There are the learners and the ones who know, who've already learned. We know learning goes on our whole lives, and the new technologies prove that to us. Most of us are not very good at some parts of learning, at least.

I want to mention one other opportunity. If our province were to realize its goal — and we will — as being the most literate jurisdiction in North America, one of the groups of people who need to be well supported and engaged is our first nations people. What we're finding through Literacy Now is that they are participating, by and large, in the community tables. But the issues with first nations people and literacy are very deep. There are historic issues, there are issues in need of healing, and there's a lot of work to be done.

Through 2010 Legacies Now we're going to be hosting, through Literacy Now, a dialogue with first nations people that will be led by first nations people. So for two days in June we have a number of first nations leaders from the universities, from communities and from elders — a real cross-section of first nations people — who are going to come together for a couple of days and plan the dialogue.

The dialogue is intended to go throughout the province in two stages — first of all, to talk about what the issues are and to have a full, open discussion around first nations learners and literacy. The second piece of that will be to follow it, again, with some solution-finding. Rather than continuing to do, as we have done often, I think, with good will…. We kind of throw programs at people. They last for a little while, and then they disappear, but they aren't really grounded and rooted in culture. Our hope is that coming out of this dialogue will be some strong solutions to support first nations people in their learning.

I know I've left lots of gaps, but hopefully…. One recommendation, please? One minute; one recommendation?

B. Le Clair: If I had one wish, it would be for some long-term commitment to funding, because it is very hard to do hard literacy work in communities off the side of your plate. It needs to be done at a community level, so there needs to be some long-term support for both community leadership and for regional leadership.

I believe that if there was one single thing the government could do, it would be to support some kind of infrastructure for carrying the work forward in a sustained way and for not looking at year-by-year funding. Maybe a wonderful trust or endowment or something that would…. I know that government also hates to look at the same issues every year and to have to go back and fund on a yearly basis. So my hope is that we would be able to find some way to support literacy in a more sustained way.

D. Routley: Thank you, Ms. Le Clair, for the presentation. It was really enlightening.

You spoke about cover-up skills that people employ. I have a few questions. One would be: as people encounter literacy training, do you find that they also encounter people in their lives who they then identify…? A person might be having trouble that they didn't realize they were having before. And more support at work and in families…. You also referred to one of the deterrents to act being the intimidation people feel amongst peers.

B. Le Clair: I think that the more we talk about literacy, the more people say: "I had a problem with reading," or "I've struggled with that." It becomes much more acceptable to acknowledge that we have weaknesses and strengths. I have a very good colleague who's quite high up in provincial libraries. We were having a literacy discussion, and she quietly said: "You know, I guess I was what you call dyslexic." It's not that people don't push through the barriers, but until we start to talk about the issues and we say, as a culture…. This is all about learning. It's not that some of us have arrived and some of us haven't. We are all learning. We need to learn different things in different ways at different times.

British Columbia is a learning province. Our communities are learning communities. I think that tone or

D. Routley: We also witnessed a presentation a couple of weeks ago from Mr. Ron Faris. He superimposed some maps over one another, and one was a literacy map, basically, of where difficulties exist in the province and then some of the social determinants that affect people's lives. He referred to poverty as being one of the compounding issues facing literacy programs and the challenge we face together. Also, our first nations could largely be included in those groups that have poorer health determinants.

Do you adapt your approach to different regions based on those kinds of determinants — other social determinants like housing and income levels and maybe demographic mixes that are quite different?

B. Le Clair: First of all, yes, we do adapt. All that we have in the manual is a defined process and a set of principles which are about collaboration, respect and honouring the past and being open to innovation. So there are some principles about the way people work together, but we encourage them to look broadly at literacy. They also develop a profile of their community. They gather information about their community so that when they look at their literacy needs and their assets, they have a very full view of their community.

I'm thinking about, maybe, Vernon. One of the issues that they were concerned about was homelessness and how that was impacting the city. Every community brings to the planning tables the discussion around the issues that face them as a community. They also look at their strengths.

D. Routley: In the interests of the new tenor in the Legislature, I'll first commend the government before I take a little run at it. I have to say that this expectation on the ground in communities of community groups feeding upward solutions is a really beneficial approach and something we have to give the government credit for having pushed quite effectively. I support that, but I also know that has to go hand in hand with adequate funding to support the choices that communities make. Once we're encouraged to take ownership of the problem, we need to also have the support there to deal with it. That's the end of the run at things.

The long-term support that you referred to and the infrastructure for literacy training as well as the hope that first nations people need, I think, in order to really engage themselves in that process…. At the end of this literacy journey, we have to have some kind of purpose. Political literacy and literacy about our rights is a strong one. Do those other factors figure into your vision of an infrastructure? Could you describe that infrastructure a little bit? You mentioned a legacy fund.

B. Le Clair: When people are empowered in their literacy, they're also empowered in other ways. They're empowered to participate in their community in civic ways. They're empowered to access systems. They're empowered to go out and find work. You can't look at literacy apart from all of the social and economic and health-related connections, because it's all tied together.

I guess my hope would be that we wouldn't just engage in a planning process and some implementation of the plans for a period of time and say, "Well, that was good work," but recognize that sometimes things are generational. You have to have a cycle of planning and work and planning and work.

If communities could rest a little bit easier in not worrying so much about whether they would have the money to do that work, they would be able to much better direct their energies toward actually making the breakthroughs.

M. Polak: I'm going to throw out a few ideas and then ask a question based on them. I'll try not to make it too convoluted.

No question that literacy and literacies are affected by a broad range of different factors in a community. Developing literacy long term is all about community development, which of course is a huge, massive issue and undertaking.

At the same time there is a real need to focus on — without diminishing the other literacies — maybe the most basic of skill needs, which is the need to be able to read functionally in order to get a job, in order to be productive. Regardless of how we feel about the importance of other literacies, the reality on the ground is that someone needs that to get a job.

Nevertheless, here we are faced with the knowledge that, on the one hand, we have a direct and very pressing need to reach out to these adults who are falling behind and who are perhaps even losing their capacity to provide for themselves without those skills, and on the other hand, recognizing that we need to work on a foundation that affects those community factors so that long term we're building literacies.

Now the question. If we're going to then look at a structure for funding and the idea of a trust or an endowment, someone has to make the decisions about where those funds get targeted. Is that something you envision as a provincially based endowment or fund, where people would apply with projects, etc., or is it…? Maybe it's more: in your sense of it, how would we ensure that we're hitting those two areas without sacrificing one for the other?

B. Le Clair: I think one of the important things to do is to give the community some choice in how moneys are spent. I think the process of creating broad planning tables is one way to do that, because part of the challenge to them is to operate around a set of very positive principles and respectful treatment of each other.

What you don't want is to set up a system where people are competing for dollars with each other. We've had lots of that in communities, and it's quite divisive. So whether you have a provincial trust or whether you would apportion it regionally and have communities apply, I think the key is that the community comes as a unified body and says: "We have truly looked at this, discussed this, and we have agreement here."

I would encourage you to support those kinds of structures at the community level. First of all, it leaves the community much healthier and more intact, and it doesn't set up the winners and the losers. What happens when the community comes together and looks at the issues is that they find ways to solve things. They find ways to help each other and sometimes how to shift programs to deal with different needs. There's a real will and, at the bottom line, a love for their community. They don't want to set up systems that leave people out. I think we can trust the communities with some structures to be able to make wise decisions.

M. Polak: Would you see that funding being most useful in a separate literacy kind of focus or as part of an overall community development piece? I ask it because my fear is that the competition you talk about often happens when somebody's got a pot for — I don't know — hot meals, and somebody else has one for after-school care. In many ways, all those kinds of pieces fit.

B. Le Clair: I think what I would do is set it up around some criteria — that it is for these kinds of things. If indeed the community had been really successful and the literacy challenges were not there anymore, then it makes sense for them to use the money where it's needed. I think one of the criteria you'd want to set up is that it needs to address existing literacy needs.

J. Horgan: Thank you very much, Brenda, for your presentation, particularly the multimedia presentation. I look forward to us getting the website later tonight, after I go to my planning session.

I just wanted to know: based on the communities that have reported back or have completed plans, is there an optimum delivery mechanism? What strikes me about the work of the committee — and certainly about your presentation — is the stigma, particularly for adults with literacy challenges. Is there an optimum delivery mechanism?

I appreciate that every community is different — urban, rural, north coast, south, all of those issues. But is there something emerging as an optimum delivery mechanism for the types of programs that we would want to see to meet these challenges?

B. Le Clair: I think it's a combination of needing some formal approaches where adults can have their learning formalized through certification of some sort.

The other piece that is critical is that programs need to go where people are. We constantly set up programs, and we want people to come to them. A much wiser way, I think, is to see where people meet and where they're spending their time, and to embed the literacy programs into those places.

J. Horgan: Just a follow-up on that, then. That speaks to the smaller groups in the workplace, away from institutions. But as legislators, we're grappling with declining enrolment in our public school system. We've got public facilities and infrastructure around the province that are underutilized.

We have an inclination to use that institution to meet these challenges, but it may not be the best delivery mechanism for the programs. The Tim Hortons might be the place to do it or in someone's living room or in a basement, rather than going back to the place where success wasn't realized as a child, perhaps. Is that a fair comment?

B. Le Clair: I think that institutions are a barrier for many people. We just have to recognize that. In some communities they're starting in the laundromats. People are spending three or four hours a week there, so they're doing some things there. Once you've made some friends and you're comfortable being with a group of people, it's not that you wouldn't go to the extra classrooms in the school and put your own shape to them and that kind of thing. But I think many people will not turn up automatically in schools or colleges unless we break down some of those barriers.

You've got about 43 communities that have done this and another 39 coming on. It's roughly ten grand a community, to start with, so that's like 700 grand just to look at where we are today and what we would like to do. Then you've got three years of implementation. So how many communities do you expect to get? And with respect to the sustainability and the three-year commitment stuff, what is that commitment like? Is it $10,000 a year? Is it $3,500? What are communities expecting?

B. Le Clair: If we used every drop of funding…. Of course, we are not for profit, so part of what we need to go out and do is try to generate some more funds. If we didn't do anything else — and we're already sort of committed to the aboriginal learners piece — then we'd be looking at about $30,000 a community. But we're hoping to be able to find additional funding partners so that we can do other work. We've been quite effective in an innovative way at getting things going and having a look at things from a new perspective. We hope that Literacy Now isn't just directed toward

community planning and implementation, but that we could take a lead in a challenge on other things.

At that point, that's our projection. Our hope is that any community in the province that wants to participate in the process — and it takes quite a commitment — will be able to do that. We wouldn't want to exclude a community because of lack of resources.

L. Mayencourt: Maybe what would be helpful is to know what your global budget is for this. If we were to follow on your recommendation of making a commitment to a Literacy Now fund or something like that, what would that look like?

B. Le Clair: I think it would depend on what you wanted to do. If you were to set up a trust or an endowment, then presumably you'd want to put many millions in there so that it wouldn't deplete itself.

If you wanted to say that as a province, we'd like to be able to support communities strongly for a five-year period or something, then I think we'd be looking at…. Between the infrastructure and being able to give some communities money for their projects, I think we'd probably be looking at about $15 million a year.

L. Mayencourt: So you'd need probably $150 million in an endowment in order to pull that off here.

J. Rustad: The presentation was intriguing in the sense of defining just what literacy means. Traditionally, as soon as you start talking about literacy, you start thinking about reading and writing. There's such a wide range. At the core, obviously, would be reading, but it would extend out to the other components.

My questions is: in terms of the plans that have come forward from the communities and then assuming funding goes forward for those plans, what kind of accountability mechanism have you worked in there? What I mean by that is that in terms of meeting an overall strategy…. For example, if some community wanted to be focused on multimedia and technology and that whole side of things, they may be able to achieve that. But is it achieving what the province is looking for in terms of overall literacy within the particular groups — in particular, the mandate that we're looking at?

If a pool of money were to be created — whether it's a legacy fund or yearly funding or whatever the case may be — out to the communities, what is it that you've built in, in terms of accountability within their plans and the monitoring of their plans?

B. Le Clair: Part of the planning process is to put an evaluation component to each of the projects that they would like to do. The other thing we're doing is providing some training for the community facilitators on how to do evaluation. It's not easy to do in the community development world, because some things are not easily counted. When you get into things like quality of life, it's more difficult to assess.

So we're doing a blend of helping them to develop surveys, how to use materials to get information from their schools and their colleges — the formal kinds of assessments — but also how to look at other measures. We're working with the Ministry of Education and the Canadian Council on Learning, and we're looking at a broad evaluation plan that has a number of tools that communities can use, which fit different kinds of projects. We are not expecting them to figure it out themselves. We are prepared to support them through it, and also to work with them and consult with them.

Accountability is really important, and it's important to them too, because communities also don't want to be investing their resources and time in things that are not bearing the results they're hoping for.

They report back to us when we get into the implementation phase. What we're asking is a yearly report that's an update on how their initiatives are going. We also encourage them, if they need to make some shifts, to feel free to do that. At the end of the day, it's their initiatives; it's their plans; it's their hopes and dreams. We want them to be able to guide their initiatives as they see fit.

J. Nuraney (Chair): I've got two questions, Brenda, if I may. We have been hearing and seeing in the last couple of meetings that we've had the ever-enlarging definition of illiteracy. Where do you draw the line?

B. Le Clair: What communities do is talk about it. They go out, bordering on world peace…. They have the long discussions around what it could mean, ultimately, to be a fully literate community. Then what I've observed is that they begin to pick up the main pieces, and always in the plans there's something about working with families in the early years.

What we know provincially in the early years is that children are, for example, coming to school better prepared to begin school, but those who are not are much further behind, so the gap is actually widening. Some children are very, very vulnerable.

Most communities are looking at something in the early years. They're looking at issues within schools and how to make learning more relevant, particularly for teenagers, and they're looking at pieces in adult learning. They're not being frivolous. They're looking at basic literacy needs, but they're also looking at how to make learning something that is valued as a community. So there's a balance.

J. Nuraney (Chair): So you leave it to them to define what they think their needs are.

J. Nuraney (Chair): My second question — and this will be the last one — is…. We've been hearing that there is one in five British Columbians who is illiterate in the traditional meaning of the word "literacy," which

B. Le Clair: Well, it may indeed be higher than that because actually, that's an assessment that's done and may not even catch many people. It's done through the college system. I think the middle level is a grade six reading and writing level, so we know that probably half of the adults in our culture are functioning at or below that. One in five is probably a minimal estimation.

Well, seeing no further questions, Brenda, I want to thank you for taking the time and being with us this morning. It has been most enlightening.

B. Le Clair: It was a pleasure. I'm going to leave you good reading, hopefully.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Members, we'll bring this meeting to order. As usual, my preambles.

Today's meeting is a public meeting, which will be recorded and transcribed by Hansard Services. A copy of this transcript, along with the minutes of this meeting, will be printed and will be available on the committees website at www.leg.bc.ca/cmt.

In addition to the meeting transcript, a live audio webcast of this meeting is produced and is available on the committees website to enable interested listeners to hear the proceedings as they occur. The archived copy of the audio broadcast will also be retained on the committees website.

For the benefit of our presenters, I'll read the mandate of this committee as was given to them by the Legislature: that the committee be empowered to examine, inquire into and make recommendations with respect to finding effective strategies to address the specific challenge of adult literacy and, in particular, to conduct consultations to consider successful strategies from other jurisdictions on the promotion of adult literacy and specific strategies to improve literacy rates among aboriginal people, English-as-a-second-language adults, and seniors. That is the parameter of our mandate, and I encourage the presenters to give us as much information on that as you can.

We have in front of us, members, Dr. Greg Lee. Dr. Greg Lee is the president of Capilano College, which offers a variety of programs to promote literacy and learning, including an innovative workplace education program. Accompanying Dr. Lee are Diana Twiss and Del Dhammi.

Please proceed when you're ready. We have 30 minutes of presentation and then questions after.

G. Lee: Thank you very much for the opportunity to present to you on behalf of not only Capilano College but the B.C. college system. I appreciate it very much.

Might I say that as I go through the presentation — and I'll stand up and do that in a minute — I know the format is 30 and 20, but you might find it more informative to interrupt with questions on specifics, because there are several projects there. Please, if that works for you, it doesn't bother me at all if you have a specific question. These people who really know what is going on will answer the detailed question. I'm floating at the top, giving the overview of what we're doing in the system.

The first point is that the college is one of many institutions, many colleges that do adult work in their community and that what I'm going to show you is, in fact, from Capilano College. It's our experiences, but it is an indication of what is done in our communities by the college system in general.

For many years and with great success, the college system has had a lot of success in adult literacy, and we want to share that with you. The important thing here is, of course — and I'm speaking to the converted here, I know — that literacy goes beyond just reading and writing. It speaks to integrating people into their communities, into the workforce. It's an element in bringing equality to everybody — specifically, reading, writing, listening, speaking, computer, numeracy, critical thinking and all of those things which make productive citizens.

What are our credentials for this? Well, I have to boast about my institution a little bit. Capilano College has been recognized nationally and internationally for many of its literacy endeavours. Probably one of the most famous is The Westcoast Reader, which is an English-as-a-second-language and basic literacy newspaper. Over 20 years it has had many awards, including American awards. Joan Acosta, the editor, has received both international awards and the Order of B.C. for the work on that paper. It is distributed to all colleges, libraries and school districts in British Columbia.

We have a program, speech-assisted reading and writing, which still exists. It won several awards. This is a program that teaches severely handicapped adults to read and write using computer-assisted aids. While that is fairly common now, I can assure you that in 1992, when we were pioneering this stuff, this was quite an innovative breakthrough in terms of literacy.

People at our place, including Robert Wedel, have won awards for workplace training initiatives, and we'll show you some of the work that Robert had done earlier. In fact, we won an award in 2003 from the Association of Canadian Community Colleges — program excellence for the work we do at the Carnegie Learning Centre, where we have done that program for about nine or ten years.

What we found out is that you've got to be adaptable. You've got to have partners. You've got to be flexible when you go into the communities. No two

circumstances are ever quite the same, and the people are often those who are reluctant to become involved. So it's really quite a tricky situation.

Community partnerships. The picture you see here is up in Mount Currie. We have a community partnership with the band in Mount Currie. But it goes beyond that. We have access, for example, to adult basic education in the Lower…

Our partners there are the Douglas First Nation, three first nations communities, centred in Mount Currie…. The closest real centre — the service provider — which we will work with is Mount Currie.

To give you some sense of where we do this, we're down here somewhere. This is Mount Currie, and we come down almost as far the other way along the Lillooet River. These are below the lakes. You can only get in there on a logging road, and you have to have a radiophone with you to make sure that you don't run into the logging truck coming the other way.

We've tried bringing the students out. What seems to be working is that we go in there at least once a week on the logging road and go down below the lakes — the lovely communities below the lakes. The instruction actually takes place at the villages below the lakes.

We have run Carnegie for some nine or ten years now, in partnership with the community association, the city of Vancouver and the Vancouver Public Library — a learning centre on the third floor of Carnegie.

A learning centre is one where the community comes, and in fact, they interact in a whole variety of manners. They bring the things that they need to learn about literacy, and they learn what they need to know to get on with their lives and thereby increase their literacy in a whole variety of ways.

The WISH Learning Centre is programming for active sex trade workers in the downtown east side. This is a program we've run for three years.

A fairly recent one is working with Vancouver Coast Health and the Portland Hotel Community Services Society to look at the local drug user population, learn about their needs and design, pilot and evaluate literacy programming. It's a very early program. I wish I could say it was completely successful, but we're getting there. We certainly have community support.

We also work in a variety of communities around our region. The Community Access to Literacy and Learning, the Sunshine Coast Literacy Advisory Council. It's a tutoring service that has free instruction — reading and writing, mathematics — to adults on the Sunshine Coast.

You can see that this is in fact a tutors' meeting on the Sunshine Coast. The method of instructing here is to get the tutors to actually take the work on in the community.

High/Scope in Squamish, again, is a family literacy program — adult and parent education services that occur with preschool children. What you have there is that you get literacy at several levels of society at the same time. You can see, obviously, from the picture that there is a variety there.

Strathcona Community Centre. We work with Strathcona Community Centre, the Vancouver Public Library, Kiwassa Neighbourhood House and the community association. Again, we use peer mentors in the neighbourhood house to promote the literacy.

Making the Grade. Learning Disabilities Association in Squamish. This is really an interesting one. I find this very interesting. What they do is actually use exercises that involve balancing and passing of balls and a variety of things like that. Everybody up there swears that it actually improves the learning ability of people, particularly those who have some learning disabilities. It's almost like you're reprogramming the brain to have that work.

One of the things they do is stand on balance beams and throw balls to one another in a circle. It looks like it's a fun exercise, but the people who work up there say that when you finish this exercise, they can actually see the improvement in student performance over a very short time period.

We work with adult learners. Again, we have a project with Hastings Community School — the Hastings parent committee. It's parents and caregivers upgrading in support of children. So in fact, we're not only teaching the adults…. We're teaching the adults so that they can work with their children to promote literacy. Of course, when we say literacy, you can appreciate that much of this is English as a second language as well, because often this is one of the challenges they have.

Those are our community projects. In addition, we have some experience with workplace education projects — a variety — some of which are identified here. We've been working with the Pacific National Exhibition and CUPE Local 1004 for workplace education. It happens in the Agrodome. It's open Monday through Friday in the evening. People drop in and do the work that they want to do, at their speed.

In fact, it grew out of where we started, which was the Backstretch Learning Centre at the Hastings racetrack where we were partners with the Horseman's Benevolent society and the Great Canadian Casinos. It's workplace training for the people who work the backstretch, the people who take the horses after they've had their exercise and walk them out or clean out the stables. We have a learning centre that you can see is open at all hours — the view from the track of the centre, and from inside the centre, a view out to the track. It's actually taking education right to the workplace of the people who are involved.

We're currently partnering with the city of North Vancouver and CUPE 389 to envelope another workplace education on site in North Vancouver. We have a part in the B.C. Federation of Labour, CUPE and CUPE nationally — a pilot project to help five CUPE locals through the first steps in developing workplace literacy programs. What happens is that as we go through these programs, as we look at where we've had success, we go out and identify other projects and try and identify other partners to make it happen.

A key element in this is that getting out into the workplace or into the community is often a first step that leads to campus participation. I met the ladies — the women from the WISH program. When they came onto our campus the first time, what they were interested in was just looking around the campus and where the cafeteria is. The same ladies came back a year later, having been in the program, and they were interested in: "Where's the registrar's office? Where's the learning…?" In other words, they get accustomed. They get the idea of learning and that they can do it. One of the things, as you get the community outreach, is they then can take advantage of the programs that are offered at the college.

That's a key element, because of course getting students into more traditional education means you can advance them a lot further in the workplace. We offer a career access centre at our college. This is a centre that actually supports the students who are coming in, who perhaps don't have the confidence or capabilities to take regular adult basic education courses. So we provide access to college services and preparatory programs, orientation skills, the usual introduction to computers and math and so forth. One of the interesting programs under this career access centre is our family focus program, which involves day care and bringing single mothers and their children together so that the mothers can learn and have day care provided in a cooperative manner while that happens through our career access centre.

Of course, once you get them on campus, they can enter our adult basic education programs. We offer from literacy to grade 12 at the college. There's no tuition for any of that. That's a policy of the government — was a policy and is certainly a policy of our college now. They are able to get some support from ABESAP. I can never remember what it stands for, but I think it's ABE student assistance program.

Furthermore, once they're in the college, they get integrated into other programs. There's our adult basic education at our Sechelt campus. Of course, once they get integrated into other programs, they can move beyond literacy so that they are on the same campus as all of the other programs. They understand what's there. They understand what stepping stone is needed to go on beyond their literacy training.

The provincial scope of the adult literacy educators, the B.C. electronic network. The hub is actually run through Capilano College computer services. This is the network that conferences for the literacy providers in the province.

This is backed by research. Not only do we look at how we take our literacy out into the community, but in fact we look at seeing how well we're doing. There are a variety of research papers and programs that have actually been developed from our experiences at the college.

What have we learned about this? Well, the first thing is that — I think I mentioned it earlier — there is no one solution for all. The problems that are identified from a variety of people in our community in getting adult literacy and getting literacy…. You have to be adaptable to the circumstances. Once you can get there, then you can get them into transition programs. They understand they can learn, and they adjust their own goals. They'll say: "Now I know I can do this. I want to do more." It's inevitably what happens.

Support is critical. I hope you can appreciate from some of the projects that support is not just showing up and having a classroom. It is the support for the students in a whole variety of ways, whether it's child care or flexibility in programming or tolerance when they don't show up for class or whatever. Flexibility has to be an important aspect of this. Success requires extended resources for extended periods of time. You can't do this in a matter of weeks or even months. Some of the people at Carnegie have been coming in for years. They move slowly, at their own pace. Some move very quickly; some will move less so. The cornerstone of our philosophy is just commitment to access no matter how we can get there.

Community colleges have been and continue to be access to deliver adult literacy. We are active in our communities around the province, and we use a community development approach. We go into our communities. We do provide a transition to post-secondary education, and I think it's fair to say that community colleges are one of the solutions to the literacy challenge.

I should add, with this picture, that one of field trips that the Carnegie Centre took was to Mount Currie, in our learning centre up there. This is one of the students from our literacy centre in Carnegie and one of the students from our Mount Currie campus who went on that field trip. As I recall, they exchanged some wonderful gifts.

G. Lee: Thank you for your time. It was very quick, but I'm happy to have my experts answer any questions.

One of the things that committee members have been struggling with is how to ensure, as we come to grips with recommendations, that we are able to give recommendations that focus on something tangible. It's a challenge because, as you've pointed out and as many of our other witnesses have pointed out, literacy can mean so many different things and in fact is interconnected with so many different parts of life and community.

How, from your perspective, do we approach the very real need to ensure that adults who are currently in deficit are provided with reading and writing skills in their most basic form — that's what many of these folks are desperately needing in order to get a job or what have you — while at the same time maintaining a recognition that literacy is broader than that and that as a future goal, perhaps, there's an integration of it?

I guess it's a struggle even to tease it out and discuss it, because perhaps it points us to the idea that maybe we do need to sacrifice some areas of literacy in order to focus on the task at hand, so to speak. What are some thoughts you have on that?

G. Lee: I'm going to let Diana, who I know is dying to answer…. Let me just say one thing first.

My experience in managing an institution that's involved with this is that the best thing you can do is find people who are committed and give them the resources to do it. Give them the flexibility. Don't be too rigid in what you want to count. Don't be too rigid in how you set up your parameters of what defines success.

In essence, what you're doing is trusting the people in the field. By all means, you have to look and see what's happening. But we tend — certainly in educational institutions and I think probably in government — to try to put things in boxes that we can count easily, so that we can report on them. This is very difficult to report on. What's success in the Backstretch workers is not necessarily success for the people at Carnegie, is not necessarily success for the people in Sechelt.

It's really a question of providing sufficient funding in a flexible enough format that you can go out and get partners to work. There's no shortage of people who are prepared to work with you in your communities. There are all sorts of good people out there, but they don't have any money either. Our experience is always that we're forever…. We must spend a third of our time writing up proposals rather than actually doing the work.

It really is flexibility and not trying to put too tight a box around what you think of in terms of your accountability. Not that there shouldn't be any, but you have to be really careful that you don't try and pigeonhole things.

D. Twiss: I was going to talk about the issue of flexibility, but I was also going to mention this whole idea of support — providing support for learners. When you were asking the question, you seemed to think that we should focus on reading and writing.

M. Polak: I don't, necessarily. But I'm concerned that there's that question that hangs out there. You wouldn't want to defuse what you're doing to such an extent that you make no real progress for John Smith, who just desperately needs some upgrading of his skills in order to get a job. He might need other things. Where do we make sure that we're being most effective for him?

D. Twiss: Most people come to our programs because they want to upgrade their skills because they want to find work, or they want to find better work. They don't like the job they have. They want to improve. Or they want to be able to support their children. That's a really compelling argument for people wanting to improve their skills. They're finding that their own lack of literacy skills….

They're the role models for their children. They can't get their kid, who is struggling with grade ten, to go to class regularly because: "You never finished high school, and you turned out okay." That's a real motivation we have.

One of things we've looked at in our department, which we've looked carefully at, is: when someone is successful, what is it that makes someone successful? Just think of your own lives. Think of the depth of support that you have had — or maybe not had, but you've managed to get it somewhere in order to reach the level of attainment that you have.

That's what we look at with our learners who come in with that motivation. What support can we provide so that this person can go through the struggles, the challenges and the vulnerability of learning?

I don't know if that answered your question, but I think the real answer to the question is to provide enough flexibility — enough clarity of focus of what you want to do — so the people doing it can find their way around that very difficult thing and aren't spending all their time writing proposals and then reporting out on it and leaving just this much time to actually deliver the project.

J. Horgan: Thank you very much, Greg and associates. It was interesting the way the witnesses have come through today. We had someone from Literacy Now a few moments ago talking about the challenge of getting the illiterate to access institutions where historically they haven't had success. When I saw the inventory of programs…. I'm familiar. I've been to the Carnegie third floor. I've been to the Backstretch.

Minister Shirley Bond introduced us in the Legislature to a man named Nick Prince, who went back to school because his kids were saying: "Well, what do you know, Dad? You never finished." He went through and finished.

It's those success stories that kind of explode the performance measurement mania that we do have. I think I'm speaking to you specifically on that — and to others — in that, quite often, we become so captured with measuring success that we don't realize the success is right there.

The fact that the Backstretch program exists is success in and of itself. If there's just a modest improvement in the lives of some of the individuals who are touched by that program, then it's a huge victory for them and that broader community.

Still, being a product of institutions…. I had success in institutions, so I'm quite happy to sit with college presidents and talk about success rates and performance measurement. But then when I walk on the streets with my friend Lorne in his community, I see that those people are not comfortable there. Literacy Now just told us that quite often it's the laundromat that's the starting point, because people are spending a period of time in their day or their week, and that's where you can make the first connection.

Ultimately, I believe — and this is where the question is coming…. I know my colleagues are always wondering when I'll get to the question. Once you've made that initial connection, whether it be at Carnegie or Mount Currie or these in-the-community programs, the transition from there to the inevitable institution — if you want a certification or some demonstration of success…. What is your success rate like in that sense, without it being a performance measurement?

D. Twiss: I can say we're successful because we get people in the door, and we get them engaged for a certain period of time. They often leave or drop out because their lives are moved by forces much larger than many of ours — poverty, illness, a whole variety of things — and then they generally cycle back. They cycle back for another wave at the process, another wave at learning.

It's like they come into our program because it's a safe environment for them to be in. They're not judged; they're supported. Also, they're not supported so much that it's just cushy. We do provide a certain amount of challenge because we know that people want to be challenged. As an educator you'd know that the lovely tenuous balance between support and challenge is really what helps move someone forward.

But the fact that they'll come in, be with us for a while, and you know that they've reached a certain point and then may have just received what they wanted to receive: "I've figured out that I can do grade ten math…." That's what they wanted; that's what they needed. "I can study for the GED, and I can start working on the book with my tutor here at Carnegie. I have enough confidence that now I'll sign up for the course at VCC, or I'll take it up at Capilano."

That's how I know we're successful — because we get people in the door, and we also get the same people in the door. I know it sounds a bit like a revolving door, but that is the cycle of adult learning.

D. Dhammi: This, to an extent, is also true for the traditional ABE program, where we work from illiteracy round to grade 12. We get people coming in just to explore education, and then their goals change as they come in and find and explore the education. Suddenly their needs are met, for whatever reason. Circumstances change. They do get a job. After a few years they decide, "Okay, I'm better than this," and they come back to us and do a bit more.

We've had some great success stories from ESL students becoming dentists, former students becoming instructors. So the goals change as they acquire pieces of education, and their quality of life changes.

We measure progress by marks or grades, or upgrading, but the students measure progress by what they came in with and what they're leaving with. As Diana says, it sounds like, from the student feedback we've got, we're doing a good job.

J. Horgan: What they came with and what they're leaving with — I really, really like that. I'm repeating it so that it will be in Hansard twice.

The second question would be just a bit of a synopsis on the First Steps program you mentioned. One of the issues that other presenters have talked about is workplace literacy. Is that program working, again, in terms of what they come in with and what they leave with?

D. Twiss: The First Steps program is a way of working with unions and with employers. Mostly working with municipal employers is what we're doing to help them get started on workplace education.

It's a fairly complicated thing to suddenly imagine setting up a workplace education program. You need to talk to the union, get the union on board. Usually you have a couple of union members who are really driven by the literacy issue, but you've got to get the rest of the membership on board and supporting it. Then there's talking to the employer, to get the employer to support it. One of the compelling successful programs that we've run has been offered at the workplace during working hours, so you really have to have buy-in from management, from the employers.

Then we do a literacy needs assessment, where we do a series of focus groups and questionnaires to assess the education needs of everyone in the workplace. We don't just target certain people. We assess the needs of everybody. We write a report, present that to the union and to management, and then make recommendations about a program. Those things are what we consider first steps.

One of our projects this year is funding. We're working with five locals throughout the lower mainland on that. It's slow work. It's like pushing this boulder up a hill. You make progress, you make progress, and then there's a change of government. You're starting all over again. Then you get talking about it, talking about it, and people buy in. Then there's an election within the union, and you lose half of the people that you had originally. But we do get the job done.

D. Jarvis: As you know, I'm a big fan of Greg Lee and the program. We've been hearing a lot about the theory behind literacy and what we're going to do and all the rest of it. He has a hands-on literacy in action program going right now that's probably next to no other at the moment.

I'll go to the nitty-gritty of it and ask you a prying question: do you afford it? What's your balance sheet like, and are you in danger of not being able to continue?

G. Lee: I have to say that the college does support the literacy program, but we also spend a lot of time writing grants for special federal cost-shared programs, provincial programs, workplace training. We work and try to get both unions and companies on side.

The public investment is quite large. I have no idea what the magnitude is, but it's significant. We try to provide the seed dollars, and we do that out of the grant we get from the provincial government. Our contribution is modest compared to the return that we get when we get our partners involved and when we get other grants.

D. Twiss: It's the Community Adult Literacy Program — used to be called Adult Literacy Cost-Shared Program — that the Ministry of Advanced Education gives out. If that program ended, M\, of what you saw today would not be in existence anymore. It's annually funded through that pot of money. We apply for it every year. In fact, we're in cost-shared season right now — going through the proposal-writing process, working with our partners, re-examining our objectives, changing our outcomes. All that sort of community development stuff is happening — just really articulating what we want to do for the next year. We're currently doing that.

The applications are due at the end of April. We're not going to find out till the middle of the summer whether we have work. Half our department is going to get reduction notices.

G. Lee: Yeah. The reality is…. Diana said it. Because of our commitments and our contracts and so forth, we actually have to give…. It happens every year. Half of our department gets reduction notices: "We've got no work for you." The grants come through in the summer, and we rehire them.

D. Routley: My cheeky interjection was: if they're still there to be rehired, once they've been given these reduction notices. We all know there's a skilled labour shortage that extends also to professionals in our educational institutions.

D. Twiss: That's a very good point, Doug. We have lost faculty members who have found work elsewhere.

D. Routley: I like the "clarity of focus" reference, but Mr. Lee referred to finding the pros and supporting them.

My family are educators. I managed to save myself from that fate, but they're still labouring under that description. I really respect them for it. I remember when I was 19 and first met my wife. It was the first time I saw my father-in-law's little round head in the window, marking, when we would get together in the evening. He'd still be there at the end of the evening. That went on for decades, until he retired. I have such respect for them.

The data drive we're on now seems to be out of balance. This is a statement, obviously, that it seems out of balance. If I were to insist that Canadian Olympic athletes in the middle of the 100-metre dash stop at 50 metres and report the progress of their training…. You know, at some point reporting and qualifying interrupts and endangers the…

I wonder where that balance is between professionals and a community arriving at a clarity of focus, a purpose, and adequate measures of accountability and measurement. One-third of the time writing proposals and periods of time ending up being dubbed "cost-share season" really point to an imbalance, in my opinion. Where do you think that balance can be found between clarity of focus and outcome?

D. Twiss: We're working on that right now. There's a project out in the literacy field called From the Ground Up. I think the major partner on it is Literacy B.C., and they've managed to get a core group — I think there are about eight practitioners involved in it — looking at this whole issue of reporting out of outcomes measurement.

A call has come from the Ministry of Advanced Education to…. They need to measure their stuff, so we took the lead. Instead of having something imposed on us, we negotiated with the Ministry of Advanced Education: "Just hold that thought for a year or so while we work within the field to find a way that we can measure." We're interested in measurement too. We want to know when we're hitting the mark and when we're missing the mark. A lot of it is intuitive. You know when someone is learning, but we also have a need to document it.

Also, if you have really good outcomes, you have really good planning. This is going to benefit everybody. We're working in partnership with the ministry, as well, to develop a tool that is meaningful for the literacy field and will also be meaningful for them. It's currently being developed this year. They're just finalizing it. Next year it goes out and is piloted, and then it will be complete.

D. Routley: The measurement issue is obviously important to people attempting to report progress to

funders and what not. I don't know where I'll find a question in this, but it seems to me that we're feeding into a commodification of the service both in public education and in higher education, in particular. Rather than measuring for an evaluation of outcomes, we end up measuring for a value of service. I think it's very dangerous, especially in this area that we're talking about here. Literacy, as we're hearing from our witnesses, is such a broad-ranging concept. How can we have a measurement that puts it in a box, especially one with a price tag on it?

D. Twiss: That's a very good point. Some of the measurements that we do reporting out, like the statistical snapshot we have to do, just ask: "How many people in your program? How many parents involved? How many kids involved? How many tutors have you trained? How many tutors are matched up?" It's just numbers, numbers, numbers. It doesn't talk about who's been trained as a tutor and who wants to continue as a tutor. Who actually found the skill set and the connection with the learner that they want to continue doing it? Of these learners that are in our program, how have their lives changed?

And when we document that change…. As an educator I find some of the changes really compelling, but for funders it's like: "What — $10,000 because they're showing up regularly? Are you kidding me?"

But for some people to organize themselves…. That is such an important first step — that they can organize their lives, that they can make a commitment to be somewhere three days a week at ten o'clock. You can't meet your drug dealer then. You've got to be straight if you're going to be here at ten. There's a whole bunch of stuff that they have to move around in their lives to do that. So in some places, that's an enormous success.

Now, at the college when we're dealing with ABE learners who've reached a different level, we do expect they're going to be there at ten, and we have an attendance policy that supports that. It's a difficult thing to measure, but I think it's really important for the practitioners — people in the field — and government to be working together on this so that we can find ways of measuring what is meaningful for you and what's meaningful for us and for our learners.

D. Routley: I would say we have to trust the professionals. Once we arrive at that clarity of focus as a community and as professionals, trust in….

G. Robertson (Deputy Chair): A couple of questions more specific to your recommendations for the Ministry of Advanced Education. You referred to the cost-shared program and the challenges of the grants process there. In terms of certainty for your programs — the delay — it sounds like there's a very basic design flaw in terms of the time lines. What recommendations, specifically on that program, would you make so that it does work better for your institution and the others who provide these services?

D. Twiss: Well, the delay this year is even longer because the call for proposals didn't go out until the end of February. That's when they're normally due. Even so, we've always had to give these reduction notices. This is even more. We won't be able to undo the reduction notices till much later this year.

One of the things I always thought…. Maybe this was my naivety when I first got into the proposal-writing process. It's a really hard…. Not hard, but they are hard questions that you have to answer. You have to establish a need for your program. You have to have clear objectives. You have to have a concrete plan of action. There are all these little boxes that you have to fill in, and I always felt that if anyone could answer all these questions, they should get it.

You wouldn't believe how many of these proposals we've gone through the process of writing, and then we don't even get it at the end. We used to have a 50-percent rate. That was just heartbreaking, because you've worked with the community, and they're starting to get ideas about: "Okay, once we get the learning centre here, we'll do this. We'll get the child care centre on board, and we'll do this." Then you call them in July: "Sorry. We didn't get funded, but hang in there."

That's what I always felt. If you can answer these questions truthfully, if they can be checked out, you should get the program. That being said, that's not going to happen, I know. But that was my first idea.

The next one is that programs that are currently running and that are successful…. Why do we have to go through the whole writing a proposal all over again? Yes, of course you want to make sure that what we're doing is accurate and that we are meeting our objectives. There's an annual report that we write to you. We give it to you at the end of October.

Why can't we just fill out a one-pager, do another partnership agreement with our community, maybe a re-jig of our objectives or something, and then…? It could be one-tenth of the amount of time that goes into it. There are different things like that, but as long as we're jostling for money, as long as we're competing with limited dollars in the field, that's the process that is being used.

This year the call is just for continued programs. They're not inviting any new programs. That's the first time that's happened, and that's really unfortunate.

G. Robertson (Deputy Chair): It sounds like, from what we've heard so far, the need for new programs is…. There's a huge demand right now, and it's part of the reason this committee was struck. So it's surprising that there aren't any new programs up for being requested, in terms of proposals, this year.

Second question is related more broadly to access. You mentioned briefly in your talk, Greg, ABE and the related student assistance programs. With the change

of government, there have been a lot of changes to affordability and to tuition for adult basic education. Enrolment has dropped for a lot of institutions around the province because of the cost and the lack of support for transportation and a number of the other programs in place.

From my work as the Advanced Education critic, the barriers for people to get into adult basic education — to be supported — are directly related to the drop in enrolment. I'd be interested in all of your perspective on those barriers and that relationship there and the need for programs that do support people who don't normally access the post-secondary system for literacy specifically or for further training, and what you recommend in terms of bringing back programs that will support these people.

G. Lee: Of course, the first thing is that while tuitions are there, in general, the cost of attending college is not the tuition, even when you pay it. It's the living expenses. So the issue is very often the ability of students to actually live while they are attending school. In the case of the adult basic education, at Capilano anyway, there is no tuition, and there is modest support for grants through the ABESAP. The issue is always the ability of students to actually undertake their education — to live, to have a place to sleep and to eat.

We actually have not found a large drop. We've managed to maintain our enrolment for the last two or three years while I know other parts haven't.

D. Dhammi: ABE, until this year, was actually bucking the trend. The enrolment was steadily increasing. I think that was largely down to the administration keeping it tuition-free. It was only this year that we had an easing of the enrolment. We believe that was largely due to the creation of new university and college places which drew out students into the universities rather than coming into the colleges, and especially UBC Okanagan, where the acceptance percentages….

D. Dhammi: …to get higher marks…. Instead of a "C plus," you could go with a "C."

We have three campuses: Sechelt, Squamish and North Vancouver. The North Vancouver campus is a mix of students who are upgrading or who have graduated but need upgrading for higher marks to get into university. A few of those may have been affected. But as I've said, the trend at Cap College has been actually against the trend in B.C. We've had a steady rise until this year.

The tuition-free status has had some dramatic impact on the Squamish campus, especially. Sechelt is approximately the same. I worked at the Squamish campus. I was there when we went from tuition to tuition-free. In the first year we had a hundred wait-listed per class. The demand was there. Like Greg said, the students' cost of living is what is maybe a barrier to becoming full-time educational — taking enough classes to finish in a reasonable time.

At the North Vancouver campus, as I've said, we have a mixture of students — people who have graduated from high school and need upgrading to get into university or students who are already admitted into the university transfer program, but as a prerequisite, they enter our ABE program on a condition to finish various subjects.

The question of access. I think that's where it's important to keep the tuition free, because other colleges have suffered. Their programs have suffered, especially the lower-level ones, because that's where the need is greatest. That is where the students who are most needy usually can come in at, not at the upper levels where they've already got maybe grade 11, maybe 12th grade. The adults, what I call the true adult basic educators — the ones who have been out of education five, six, ten years — will come in and investigate, but if the costs are prohibitive, then maybe that's going to take a long time for them to achieve.

D. Twiss: When I started working at Capilano, we had two training consultants who we were constantly on the phone with. They were part of training consultants with, I think, the Ministry of Social Services. They'd call us up: "We've got a student here who's collecting income assistance. This is her barrier. Can I send her up for an interview?" This person would come up. We'd do a one-to-one interview and assessment, and find out if upgrading was the issue or what sort of thing was needed.

The interesting thing was that these learners continued to receive support through income assistance. They also came into our career access program and were able to make that really critical transition back to education, because many of them — in the early years that I was there — were single mothers with young children. A couple of them dropped out in grade ten, some in grade 11 — one as early as grade nine. We're not only talking about literacy learners; we're talking about children at risk potentially.

The family focus component of the Career Access Centre was really valuable, because we had a counsellor working on staff with these young mothers who were overwhelmed with being back at school. Also, their kids were acting out because everything's changed. Mom's not available anymore as much as she used to be. We were able to support them around parenting issues, around what your toddlers are experiencing and how you can handle that, and how you deal with your own frustration — a whole gamut of really great things we were able to provide.

That program was expensive, but when you look at what those women were able to do in that year…. They didn't even need to finish. They didn't need to get their grade 12 or their high school equivalency. Many of them just needed to do English upgrading and math upgrading. Three of them went on to do the office assistant program and found work. They admitted: "This isn't my life choice, but it's a good and steady job. It's a good resting place right now, while my kids grow up, and then I'll go back."

It all happened at the college in this wonderful adult environment. It's not rocket science. We need the money, and it's a really good investment at this end. Just imagine what would have happened, potentially…. I'm not suggesting that all the kids would have ended up in crisis, but the potential for those children, growing up with those mothers who were very frustrated and at their wit's end trying to make ends meet…. What would the cost have been at that end?

L. Mayencourt: Well, we're eating into the next guy's presentation time, so I'll just leave the questions and contact them later.

J. Rustad: I'll be very, very brief. I just want to make a couple of comments, actually — one about the idea of measuring a race, stopping in the middle and checking their progress. The silly thing is that as you're measuring a race, you're timing them. You can check the progress at any point along there, but you don't interrupt the race. I don't know whether you're suggesting that we don't time races, but in any case….

Two questions I have; one is around your staffing issue, in particular. You mention that you've got to send out layoff notices in spring, and then depending on what funding you get through, you hire them back. Is that because of your particular union contract in terms of the dates and times that you can actually let go of staff if funding were not to go through?

J. Rustad: Is there any flexibility, do you think, to be able to try to correct that problem so that you can have the staff come through until such time as the funding is identified and then be able to make adjustments if done accordingly?

G. Lee: Let me try that, because it's…. We actually have one of the most flexible contracts. We don't have to give out notice until May or the end of May, so it's fairly far on — because, remember, you're only talking two months down the road. Some institutions actually have to give it a year in advance. In those cases, I have no idea how they possibly deal with it.

G. Lee: Yeah. They don't do it. Our collective agreement — and our faculty work quite well with it — is actually quite flexible in our case. Nevertheless, you can appreciate that even from an individual's perspective, if they're not going to get something, giving them notice and working it out in August is not a good solution. May is about as late as you can get it.

One of the alternatives, in terms of some of this stuff in terms of funding, if you don't want to make a longer-term commitment, is to make a two-year commitment. I know there are all sorts of difficulties, particularly about legislative appropriations and all sorts of things having to do with extended commitments. But we do it in a lot of other programs, so there may be some manoeuvrability — keep the thing going. Even if you extended it by a year, it would make that cycle an awful lot easier.

J. Rustad: The last thing — cognizant of time here — in terms of our mandate, in terms of what we're trying to achieve in that…. If you had one or two recommendations — and I recognize the request for funding and the request for stability of funding over time…. Outside of those two issues, do you have a recommendation for us as a committee, in terms of looking at adult literacy?

G. Lee: I think I'll let Diana answer as well, because she's much more closely involved. My top of thought would be: don't reinvent the wheel. A lot of good already exists in the system out there, which we could make use of. Don't try and start all over again in the process. Really use what's out there and build on it, because there's been some good work done.

D. Twiss: There are a variety of institutions that are providing adult literacy. The Ministry of Education does it, Advanced Education does it, and a lot of community groups do it. That's an important thing. Unions do it, and workplaces do it. We need to find ways to support everyone who wants to do it, because the learner…. They're going to find their comfort level and their support within their own environment. It might be at their local library. It might be at their workplace. It might be at the school that they drop their kids off at. It might be at the college. There is a multiplicity of places that this can happen. It is already happening at a multiplicity of places, but I think we should continue to do that and continue to support that.

M. Polak: I would hope that maybe we could have — I don't know — a contact point where we could throw some additional questions. So I'll just ask a real quick one, which is: in terms of your funding, are your programs subject to compliance audits from the province, where they come in and sort of tick…? You were mentioning the ticked boxes, which sort of jogged a memory for me in terms of how K-to-12 does things.

G. Lee: No, I don't think they are. The Ministry of Advanced Ed would look at the reports, but….

M. Polak: But you don't have auditors come out and do spot compliance audits or things like that.

D. Twiss: We have to do a final financial that gets signed off by our VP finance.

G. Lee: And if we get federal involvement, sometimes they will show up. But we haven't had any.

D. Dhammi: Just to add to John's question about what advice we have. One of the things from an ABE point of view and definitely from a…. When designing how to measure performances, I think you have to be flexible with that rather than boxed in — just looking from my ABE experiences where people would like to measure, really, just how many graduates we produce.

If you measured how many people at BCIT, for instance, completed and came from ABE programs, because they met their prerequisites, that might be a better indicator of what our success for ABE is. I've just today written six letters to BCIT — because their transcripts won't be out until April — to say they've completed courses, and they won't be with us anymore.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you, gentlemen, for coming. Diana, thank you for coming.

D. Twiss: Thank you. If you have any further questions, just e-mail me. I can blather on forever.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Members, for the benefit of the presenter, I will just read this out. Today's meeting is a public meeting, which will be recorded and transcribed by Hansard Services. A copy of this transcript, along with the minutes of this meeting, will be printed and will be made available on the committees website at www.leg.bc.ca/cmt.

In addition to the meeting transcript, a live audio webcast of this meeting is also produced and available on the committees website to enable interested listeners to hear the proceedings as they occur. An archive copy of the audio broadcast will also be retained on the committees website.

Members, we have before us Dr. Rubenson. He is the acting department head and professor of the department of educational studies at UBC. He is also co-director of the Centre for Policy Studies in Higher Education and Training. He has conducted research and consultancy for a variety of national and international bodies, including OECD, UNESCO and the European Commission. Dr. Rubenson is one of the founders of the European Society for Research in the Education of Adults.

K. Rubenson: Thank you very much, and thanks for inviting me. I'm looking forward to discussion. As you can hear from my accent, at least I'm expert in one thing. I'll be speaking swinglish. I know English as a second language.

What I will do today is share with you a bit of European experience. Of course, as you are aware, there are so many different European issues that I would actually first just give a little overview of what participation looks like in various parts. Then I would distill two clear models, which both have things in them that might be of interest and can be of interest. I will go through them a little bit more in detail. Then I will wrap up with drawing some more broad conclusions and point to certain things that work, might work, and certain things that may not work when one tries to introduce them.

In Europe we have some of the highest participation that you find in any bloc of countries. This is particularly true of the Nordic countries. When I say it's "close to or exceeding 50 percent," you will find that there are maybe five or six major data sets we can find from OECD, European Union and so on. These are countries that would have adult learners exceeding 50 percent of the population.

We have another one where we find countries like United Kingdom, Netherlands and Switzerland. If you would have inserted Canada, it would probably have been in the second category — somewhere in the middle. Then there were some countries like Germany and others that are a bit lower.

The interesting thing is that those countries that have very high participation rates with adult learners also have very, very high participation rates of low-literate learners. I mean, that is a key point — that not only do we find these are countries with a high general engagement in adult literacy and adult learning, but particularly that the low literate are more engaged, more active.

This is actually what particularly distinguished them from the North American or Canadian case. We would find people with the highest literacy levels in Canada that participate just as much in B.C. as they do in Stockholm or wherever. But we would not find the same number of people who were defined as people with some certain literacy problems.

What I've done here — I won't spend too much time, and you can find it — is look at different countries and look a little bit at what the objectives are to get into adult literacy and adult learning. I've looked at the main actors, and I would speak to that; the forms of adult education, where adult literacy will take place; and the financing.

What we find — and this will become more clear later — is that the objectives might vary. We could say that everyone would have an economic objective. Whatever we think, we also have to put the whole question of adult literacy into the broader notion of the welfare state and the economy. So we will find these things about the needs of the labour market — competence, workplace learning — in all places.

We will also find jurisdictions where there is a heavy emphasis on combining this with equality of opportunity, social integration and activation through learning. Learning is a way of making sure that we don't adopt what could be called a "two-thirds' society," with two-thirds of the population being active and one-third of the population being maintained but not active and not part of it. We can find that in some countries, this is very much on the agenda, and it's driving how they construct their literacy strategies. We're finding broader development of individuals and then, at some point, a strengthening of culture.

What I will talk about a little later is — particularly if we look at the first one, the U.K., where there have been some very, very successful programs — that they're really focusing on the economic side, the skills — and with less of a pressure, for example, on the broadest economics. There is a certain pressure or interest in the whole thing about social cohesion, but I will come to this later. You can see that, depending on how you define this, it will also drive which kinds of institutions and structures you're looking for.

The main actors. One of the issues in many of these places is to what extent this becomes an issue of the ministry of education — or whatever they would have for this — or to what extent it is also situated in ministries of labour and ministries of social affairs. What we can find generally in Europe is the tendency to integrate these efforts across the ministries. It's seldom nowadays that we find, for example, ministries only of labour or of education or of social affairs. This will have consequences in how one organizes committees under the Premier's office — whatever.

The trend, the more clearly this has been focused, has been to a form of integration. Then it varies in forms of adult literacy and adult education. Some include a strong stress on compulsory education for adults, special needs, immigrants, labour markets, IT literacy and national vocational qualifications. In some places we will find that all of these are in play. In some countries we will find the stress on only some of them.

The financing, of course, goes from free tuition, study grants for those with the greatest need — I will speak a bit later to some of these — to co-financing schemes, study-leave stipends, block grants and individual learning accounts. These are all different models that have been used, and I have provided some documentation for your researcher here, if she wants to follow up later, to see what some of these different forms lead to.

Let's get to the U.K. For low literacy in the U.K., there are three forms that have been used and, in some ways, been successful. The first one is a skills for life strategy by which one has set up a numeric target and defined how many numeracy and literacy certificates. In doing this, one has defined specific populations, saying, for example, that so many unemployed should be reached and so many immigrants. The strength with some of this is that it's kind of measurable afterwards.

The danger is that you make yourself very vulnerable by defining targets, but this is something that is defined specifically for people at the lowest level — to get them a certificate

The other thing with a certificate is that if, like in Britain, you're trying to build a national qualification strategy, you can put this literacy certificate within a kind of broader qualification structure for which people can build, and you can have different forms of incentives to move people. This is one point that is very much in the centre of it.

The other one is a question about raising education levels. I'll talk a bit more about this. An important strategy point has to do with if we single out literacy or if we define it as educational levels. The trend across Europe has been particularly, I would say, to go from literacy to educational levels for various reasons. One reason is that it turns out, in looking at outcomes, that the success rates are only focusing on low literacy, and their possibility to get a job is less. The other thing has to do with what perspective we have on the future labour market.

In the U.K. one can see a trend. One starts with illiteracy, going to the more low-skilled population, meaning people with less than the…. They define it as a level two. It's somewhere between our high school and the compulsory school. These people can get a learning grant for 30 weeks, to cover loss of income, to study. One has built up a way of using flexible training supply. There are over 6,000 distance education units that are used too. That has become an important part in this U.K. strategy.

There are various kinds of access and outreach built into it, and I'm not going to talk too much about that just now. Part of this is formed within the national qualification framework that can be useful for skills analysis, developing programs, recognition of formal and informal. The drawback with all of these things, it turned out, is that they are very expensive, and it's difficult to make them relevant — that is to say, to be up to speed with the changes in the labour market. Very often it gives a very fragmented picture. So I would say that the call to their effectiveness in being used in some of these things is doubtful, but their strength is that you can have a different part of the education intervention that you can (a) link to the labour market and (b) get them to hang together.

I would speak to the Nordic a little bit as a form of model. In the Nordic model there are a couple of things that at first glance you would say: "What does this have to do with adult literacy?" I would argue how the strategy is, because why we partly can see the very high participation rates is that the strategy is quite comprehensive.

The first thing is that there is also in the Nordic countries a very strong human capital perspective, meaning the role of the individual for the economy. That is a centre in all policies, which means that there is also an integration between general education and labour market training.

This came to the forefront in the economic crisis or the high unemployment rates of the 1990s, where to actually improve the adult literacy rates or skills, one shifted from a particular emphasis on specific labour market training to regarding general education as labour market training. That meant that one took the funds usually set aside for unemployment issues to fund a special program by which people could get their full secondary education with paid leave from their work.

Behind this was the notion that if we are really serious in believing that the labour market is shifting, it's very difficult to justify offering training programs of ten to 12 weeks. If you really believe that the knowledge economy…. That was an important point in developing that.

I have a feeling that this machine doesn't like…. You have it in front of you. As you can understand, I'm quite illiterate when it comes to technology but have a fantastic secretary. I'm not sure how you would build that into your strategies, but….

The other thing that is important in this strategy in the Nordic context is linked to industrial relations and participation. I mean the notion of strong unions. If you go through the European policies, if there's one thing that comes out, time after time, it's the importance of the social partners in adult literacy. Without this strong kind of note between the social partners, I don't know any country that has been successful in really raising adult literacy levels.

Part of this — and I could corroborate a little bit — is that you will find, and I presume you have seen, that the reason for actually engaging in your own adult literacy is very much linked to how a person sees his or her own work. You would be surprised if you went out in B.C., around some of the data, and you would find low-lit people who have measured low literacy, who are in jobs which make a lot of demands on reading and writing. They are quite engaged in learning opportunities. In fact, they are engaged to the same point as people with a high literacy in jobs that are monotonous. People who are in high-literacy monotonous jobs are not very much engaged in learning, although they might have a higher level of education.

The key point here is that if one can relate industrial relations and that side to the whole question about adult literacy, one has come a long way. This is my explanation why these are so successful, why some of these strategies are working.

The third thing actually relates to something that I understand is going on at the bottom floor here — not necessarily the music but popular education, arts. That's the other side of it. One of the reasons for the strength of the Nordic model is that there is a very clear structure of popular adult education that takes place in study associations. This is a historical trend that has been developed historically, and it's difficult to talk about how to move it and implant it.

One of the issues you have in front of you is adult literacy and the older population, which increasingly becomes an issue with demographic changes. It's particularly obvious in the Nordic countries that they have a high participation of older adults. That has to do with this structure of study associations, which are set up almost like a community centre but with a particular learning focus. They can offer courses using study-circle methodology and have very good contact with the community.

The specific five places…. We found this in many countries. The difference in the Nordic countries is that it is, to a large extent, publicly funded. In order to decide where to shift the money, there is a structure which allows these countries to shift money into these centres, knowing that they will have a very good possibility of reaching a different population than we reach through the adult education taking place in the more formal system. In that way, you could say that it responds to both the individual and the collective aspirations. The older adults can actually define their own issues and get them to put on a course or something that is done for them in that way.

The last point on this structure that one can learn a few things from has to do with funding. There has been an awareness…. I think you'll find in Europe, in many places in general — and for example, in the Netherlands — where they had set up special regional centres that there was a feeling those became stale over time. They didn't change enough; they didn't develop further. One wanted to introduce more educational markets, allowing different organizations to offer quite similar courses but perhaps to different populations. This has been done, for example, even in strongly social democratic countries like Sweden and Denmark — Denmark less than in Finland — creating financing of educational markets, using public financing but giving it out to certain different groups.

There are some drawbacks with that, which have turned up. For example — let's be clear — in Holland particularly, many of these tend to go after the easy target. You're supposed to go after the people who have the lowest literacy level, but in order to get the money and to fill it, you have a tendency to go after those that are a bit easier target. If one goes that direction, the experience there is that unless one can really find a way of paying the extra money that it costs to recruit the most difficult ones, a system that is built on

the market without too much control will, by necessity, lead to problems of recruiting the most difficult.

The other thing that is clear here is that one needs earmarked funding. What I mean by earmarked funding is…. When the money has gone generally to something that hasn't been very clear in defining that it is for the groups we have defined as target groups, it gets consumed by others. For everyone you want to reach, you get ten of those that you don't need to look after, because they look after themselves.

In that way and to that extent, the link between the recruitment of people with low literacy and public funding is not so clear in the data. But what is very clear in the data is the link between having earmarked public funding and then the extent to which you manage to reach these groups. That's undeniable if you look at many of the European countries on this.

Now just two small things, and then I will wrap up here. With the conclusion, the first thing has to do with the larger picture. You might wonder why this comes now, and all of a sudden you have it. What I mean by the larger picture is if you think about literacy and literacy inequalities in B.C. — and I will try to take the data again…. This axis describes the income inequality. It means: what is the difference between the people in the highest 20 percent and the lowest 20 percent? We describe this.

Then we have, on this axis, the literacy inequality, on the kind of literacy test you probably heard about in the IALS and the ORBs. We have divided that into the group of one to five too. Then we have plotted the countries.

If you look at the country that has the highest inequality in income, it also has the highest inequality in literacy in its population, which is the United States. Second is the U.K. It's very high in Australia and Canada. Then we can go down, and we start to find some of the European countries — Germany, the Netherlands. Then we find some of the Nordic countries at the bottom.

What I want to say by this picture is that we have to remember to have realistic expectations of what we can do with education. The literacy inequalities are really, to a very large extent, a product of the general inequality in a society. That is why so many measurements that are taken in other areas, in the political arena, have enormous literacy consequences. I think this one is important to remember. There is something that embeds literacy inequality.

This is more of the same. We can follow how these broader things impact the family, literacy there, civil society and the job. If we were to go out and look at the B.C. population, we can actually start to understand how they relate to literacy. I'll just come to the final conclusion.

If I were to sum up — and this, of course, is the problem of not being able to speak to a particular country — it is for the long-term strategy and commitment…. The European history, more than the history of the adult literacy, points on one hand to the problem with campaign-based and also things that have a short time, saying: "Here is a three-year program, and let's see what we can do."

The clearly interesting thing with that, for example, is in the U.K. One can see a shift away or a push away from the shorter initiative to a long-term strategy and commitment. The other is the necessity of institutional infrastructure. The reason that the Nordic countries could be partly successful is that there has been, historically, an infrastructure that could be used when the need came for other things. The U.K. is building up an infrastructure of institutions that are there. The Netherlands….

To talk about a learning community and a learning society or a learning city does not make any sense. You won't find any relationship in the European notion that any of the successful countries define these as their key target. They might define and say that if you ask us what a learning community is, I can point to this infrastructure, but it is the infrastructure that makes your learning community or learning society. It's not the words "the learning community," because it's only through the infrastructure that they've been successful.

I talked about the educational market and earmarked funds. The last one is this notion of combining civil society, community and workplace strategies. Among adult educators and in other places, it's often a strong critique that everything has become so economic, and we look only at the economic side. This is true.

On the other hand, we also know how central the work is. There are ways of combining these. For example, if we talk about the improvement of a workplace, it could be to change the mode of production. How we produce in a sawmill here — I've been looking at quite a few sawmills. If we change that, it may also make an opportunity for people to use more skills. That will encourage them to learn.

When you think through different programs, I would encourage you — which may be difficult; I know it's been partly done in Finland — to think through how…. For example, if we take the productivity discussion, we talked about productivity, and we talked about how work is done. We have incentives. I should say that there might be some incentives and programs for changing workplaces. That's a very, very good place to link literacy strategies and literacy initiatives with this.

I don't know if it's still in place, but in the beginning when Finland had its great comeback after the economic crash in the beginning of the '90s, some of their programs that were given to companies and industries to change their production also had one sector that dealt with adult literacy. These were combined.

If one manages with that, one would actually gain quite a lot because on the one hand, one would gain the motivation for people. They would be engaged. We would also get economic outcomes, so if you could come up with some breathtaking ideas around that, I think it would be most welcome.

The other thing is of course, as I said, that the civil society — the community — is a very, very important part. We could see how that worked out in workplace strategies. It's also that if one needs to base it on a very strong economic argument, one could make an argument that many of the community activities actually train some of the soft skills that industry is looking for now. So there are ways.

What I've tried to do is give a broad overview. I'm happy to share more documents with Josie. If you're interested in any of these things, you might be able to use them — or not. Thanks a lot.

M. Polak: I will look forward to getting some of the further materials to read, because I think there's a lot of depth to go into.

I did want to ask you to comment on the relationship between Europe's immigration patterns and how they've addressed adult literacy.

K. Rubenson: Europe has, of course, seen in various parts…. Countries like Holland, England and Sweden have seen very large numbers of immigrants. Spain has large parts; Belgium too, especially lately. Denmark — we know what happened all too well through the press.

There are different strategies. One strategy that has been particularly expressed in the Nordic countries has been that there is special earmarked money that provides language and educational training to all new immigrants — quite extensive. When that started, there were special language institutes set up that were funded. They turned out to be, after a while, less successful than giving it more generally.

It's also clear that what you have in some of these countries…. In the Nordic countries you have a large refugee…. The work immigrants have been less pronounced. Those that come are very high — the refugees. They also benefited largely from the general educational initiatives where one was allowed to raise one's general education.

J. Horgan: You spoke in point six about the importance of the relationship between the social partners in the European context. I know from my comparative politics that British Columbia could be dropped into the European Union and might not miss a beat in certain ways, in terms of those relationships and the power structure that we're functioning in here.

I'm wondering, in your time observing the B.C. context, how that fits in, in terms of the relationship.

K. Rubenson: We have to remember that when we talk about the European Union, my own personal experiences of working have been much more in the Nordic. I think there are some fundamental differences in that way. One is in industrial relations, which are more adversarial here than you would find there. This has to do, historically, with everyone unionized and working with it. The thing which I think might explain some of this, historically, has to do with…. With the Nordic unions for a very long time there was a total distrust of the public system, so there was a need to build up a parallel system. The study circles and all those things were historically grounded in that — and then folk high schools. This meant that there was a large parallel system.

What makes it easier in the Nordic countries to deal with is that you had very strong central trade unions, but you also have a very strong central employer union, which means that you can have contacts with the employee and employer at those levels. Of course, they have been part of the policy-making.

K. Rubenson: Yeah. We had one that came from Ottawa, and then we brought it here.

K. Rubenson: Anyway, in that way, they're not as integrated into the policy issues. There are not, for example, programs here which have public money to do outreach work at the workplaces. Our hope has been on the sectorial boards. There are certain ways it could work, but I think this will be a key in order to get it working.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Dr. Rubenson, just arising out of this conversation…. Am I understanding from what you're saying that if there is less cooperation between the two social partners, there is higher level of…?

K. Rubenson: No, lower levels — less possibility to engage and get programs going on adult literacy, working together. They are key both in setting them up and in how to work with it. Then the issue in each jurisdiction is: what are the possibilities? I mean, how do you do that in certain places?

L. Mayencourt: Our last presentation was from Cap College, and they talked about going into WISH, which is an organization that helps women who are in the sex trade gain some literacy skills. They talked about working with CUPE and a variety…. Basically, they were taking the college adult basic education into workplaces, into social service agencies and such, and they were experiencing great success.

I guess what I'm taking from your statement is that if we want to really ensure the success of this, we're going to have to have these relationships directly with those community groups, the labour unions, whatever. So how do we create the right climate in B.C. to allow for those social partners to come together? Do we engage those social partners as the educators, or do we

just use them as facilitators for putting a worker together with a program? Do you know what I mean?

K. Rubenson: I know what you mean. I've tried to. I'll give you an example. The first time I came and did some work in Canada was when I was invited when you had a Commission of Educational Leave and Productivity. I think it was the last thing Trudeau did. He had a commission on paid educational leave. I remember I came to present and to work a little bit on some European….

It was co-chaired, as the tradition often is here, by a person that represented labour — a high labour figure — and a high person from industry. I met them towards the end. They had got on fantastically well, partly because they had both served in the Canadian Air Force during the war.

At the end they both had the same comment. They said: "We are actually useless now for our organizations, because I have come to understand the other side so well that no one will listen to me when I go home."

K. Rubenson: Exactly. You can see it's a little bit the same in some of these things.

The first lesson of this is that having worked together for a long time, they really started to see the other side much better, and they couldn't hide behind the front. From that you take that if you can have some committees that work closely together over a longer time…. The success of the Swedish big initiatives was actually when the politicians at the local level started to work together. It wasn't when the educators from different organizations worked together. It was when the politicians worked together across different levels because they also developed the shared understanding.

How do you get them to work? When this system has a problem, it is that somewhere you have to give up control. You can't have a very strong ministry taking all the control if you want to have a strong corporate kind of involvement. That's why, if it's either too weak or too strong, it doesn't work.

I think this is where many of these training boards went wrong. There was never, in different Canadian jurisdictions, a clear level where they got the power to do it.

I think if you have something that's actually worthwhile working for and they have it, and they're not only sitting there as kind of legitimate but that you're involving the partners…. They can probably stake out the broader directions, and then it's up to the organizations that you work through to do their job. But I think these two levels are important.

D. Routley: An earlier presenter said something to the effect: "Don't rely on competition. We've had enough of it. We should go forward as a whole community to adopt a plan."

It seems that you're encouraging us to view all the stakeholders in the community as potential partners in addressing the issue. I also note that you acknowledge there was a steep crisis in unemployment in the '90s in Europe — an echo we hear around the Legislature, the '90s.

Part of it is to point out that maybe competition isn't always the primary tool to reach efficiencies. We see a social competition — how's it referred to in the Legislature? — or a social enterprise where all the groups that serve the homeless, for example, will compete with each other for funding dollars and write the better proposal for those funding dollars.

It seems to me that it inhibits us in reaching positive partnerships when we are put in competition for funding to address a social need.

You, I think, sir, pointed to the public funding of educational markets and some of the pitfalls there. Was that the sort of pitfall you were referring to — that competition maybe will inhibit partnership?

K. Rubenson: Well, it might inhibit partnerships, yes. Where the pitfalls were, particularly the smaller, some of them probably with very good programs and so on…. In order to make sure they could hire the teachers and the instructors, they had to make sure they could get the clientele and reach the people.

If you have to reach the people and you start to get too nervous about it, you don't go after the people that are homeless, that are out. You go after the ones that might qualify on the margin. Particularly, the Dutch situation has very good data on that, where this is happening.

On one hand, in some of the ways where we have the…. For example, Sweden tried to work with this — and France. Some of the justification, to start with, was of course that having public money, one thought one could avoid the worst of the market notion of raw competition.

One had the feeling that some of the educational institutions had become…. I shouldn't say lazy. For example, they didn't really try to reach some of the adult populations. They were more geared to K-to-12. One thought that by introducing some of these, they would be more ready.

Now I come to a judgment rather than hard evidence. My judgment is probably that the cost of competition was higher than the improvement of the quality that you got.

There were some other things, however, that happened as part of it, which could be described under

your cooperation. Some of the municipalities set up joint seminar discussions on, for example, adult literacy strategies. I mean the pedagogical things. One offered joint development programs.

Instead of thinking that Cap College has its and this group has theirs, they created a structure with which they could come together and pick up on some of these things. That led to cooperation and had a positive impact.

I happen to have a wife who is an early childhood educator. She told me to say that she's thinking about that too. Now I can go home and say…. That wasn't how I got into this.

In this province now, in B.C., they are very interested in a particular program — the Ready, Set, Learn program. Setting that aside, it has brought all of these very marginal groups together. They educate themselves; they educate each other. If you could find some mechanism — it probably wouldn't cost too much — by which you could get people around here with some structures to work together…. Even if they don't work together, you have to think through these quality issues. You would have done this service.

Just one thing. When I talked about the crisis, which actually was different than here, I meant Finland. Not many people are aware that when the Soviet Union kind of disappeared — it imploded — the unemployment rate in Finland, which is now the most successful country in the world when it comes to the economy, went from 2 percent at the end of 1988 to 25 percent in 1993. The GDP dropped dramatically.

One of the reasons you find today that Finland is so successful — for example, when it comes to productivity, to innovation, to higher education, to adult literacy, to children's literacy — can partly be found, in this crisis, in how one actually uses different educational mechanisms. It's partly at work in other places to really come together. We don't wish that on any country. There's no country that's seen anything like this since the U.S. in the Great Depression.

This is a very interesting lesson about where adult literacy in its broader sense comes together. Different ways have been used. That was what I meant with the crisis.

M. Polak: Just quickly, you sparked a question when you were speaking about the involvement of the partners in adult literacy. Would it be fair to say that the need for a strong partnership between employee groups and employer groups would argue in favour of perhaps a joint professional development model, jointly funded — government, unions, employers…? I mean, is that the kind of structure that they tend to utilize, or is it something else?

K. Rubenson: In Sweden and other countries — there you have these as part of the structures, and they have joint educational committees.

M. Polak: Because we do in education. We do a lot of joint professional development in education.

K. Rubenson: Exactly. They have it joint. It's also very much part of the general workplace committee, which then has educational tasks. The tendency has been to integrate the educational issues into the general workplace issues, both as a question of a right and as a possibility, particularly, to link it to when you do changes.

There are some benefits. We once had a project where we looked at the introduction of new technology to sawmills. We looked at the same technology — a German Linck mill — that was here in the province and one in Sweden. The difference in the time it took to get them up and running was phenomenal. I mean, it was a difference not of one or two weeks, but actually close to nine months.

One of those differences could, I think, be explained by how the committees were set up and how integrated the education committee was in the general committees — how it's structured.

But I agree with you. If you can build trust and build competencies in the general interest, hopefully, there will be…. We know that here too, there could be a controversy, but there are also very large general interests that could fund it under the education and the literacy….

M. Polak: As a comment on this, it faces us as a challenge, and we all jokingly refer to our labour climate in B.C. oft-times as being one that's very difficult. However, when it comes to joint professional development, one of the unions with which governments and school districts have had all sorts of issues relationship-wise is the BCTF. Yet working together with the BCTF and teachers' locals, the joint professional development initiatives that go on in public education between the union and the employers are really top of the line. Despite a challenging relationship in other ways, it's still something that's largely successful.

So hearing what you're saying, perhaps, could be a model to consider around other workplace environments.

L. Mayencourt: First off, we are in a new era of labour relations in British Columbia, of course.

L. Mayencourt: When you were describing the Finland situation, you said they came together in crisis. My question to you would be: what was the rallying call? In other words, you mentioned a short while ago that the notion of productivity can impact…. I mean, literacy can impact productivity. What was the mantra? What got people going, and how did they manage that?

K. Rubenson: I think when one looks, for example, if you back up to the…. Sometimes when we say that some of the programs I pointed to in the Nordic countries, historically, have been…. People say they are

social democratic. In fact, they were not. They were started during a time when 35 percent of the population left to go and live somewhere in North America, like Ireland. We know that under very severe crisis, people can come together. That is kind of the context of Finland.

But the notion was that one had to stake out — find new production. Nokia wasn't a technology company at that time. They did actually, at one time, produce cheap tires for the Russian army, for the Soviet army, but there was no market for that anymore. Nor did the Russian soldiers need any more plastic boots that they also had produced. I mean, it's a question: what can you produce, and what can you do with it?

Then you have a place where there is quite a literate tradition. But we also have to remember that if we look at literacy and compare Finland internationally on this test in the 1960s, they were good, but they were nowhere in the top. It was only after that that they were in the top.

What one did was that one strengthened, rebuilt, the general education system — did things, particularly at workplaces, when you have to do it with the workers you have. It created these kinds of combined programs which were linked into what kind of work we should do, what we can produce, what kinds of skills, and how we can have a broad link with a very strong investment.

But I think that much of the individual motivation, why it was so easy, is of course that you want to survive. It is a good example. Sometimes when one takes a country like Finland, it's often dismissed by saying that it's such a homogeneous country — because Finland is a homogeneous country — that it doesn't have any bearing on a country like Canada, with such large diverse populations. Against that, we can argue that it has not always been a successful country, so it is something in the strategies.

If you go to the OECD now and if you go to many places, Finland is actually the country that one benchmarks against. Many economic models are benchmarked to Finland now. It used to be that in the '80s they were benchmarked against Japan. I think there is a lot to be learned. I would share the Finnish OECD report on adult literacy.

G. Robertson (Deputy Chair): There are a lot of concerns about productivity — economic concerns for B.C., for Canada — and about our productivity slipping relative to countries like Finland. We have had some discussion on this committee around the ties or the connections between adult literacy and productivity generally in our economy.

I'd be interested in hearing your comments on those links — how direct you feel they are in terms of legitimizing a more robust investment in literacy with a direct outcome related to productivity. Have there been direct results in other countries that we can rely upon with our recommendations?

K. Rubenson: Yeah, I think the point that you point to is important. My starting take on that is that when we talk about, on one hand, adult literacy, we talk in economic terms. We talk about it as a supply. We need more people with more skills; we need the supply of them. But we very seldom talk about the demand. What does the workplace look like? What demand for literacy is there, really, at the workplace? How much do they use it?

I think that to develop a strategy for adult literacy, one would have to link these two. This is where we can go on into economic theory. I mean, we don't like the human capital argument for education necessarily, even if I think I can defend it on social grounds. But when it came in the 1960s, there was a strong belief that one invested more in an increase of general education. The Macdonald commission and Davis in Ontario, and so on, led to an expansion. We can find much of that in the OECD 1961 report on education. It's an investment with general education and no discussion about technology.

If you go to the end of the 1970s, there are new developments within economic theory and human capital that actually link the way we produce at the workplace with the technology — what skills are used in doing it — and we shift from this very macro to more of a micro. The famous studies show that when the level of technology increases, people's use of skills becomes important. So that's when it becomes important.

When you increase the level and people have the skills, their productivity starts to go up. But if you keep the level of technology more or less the same, you don't get the same great benefits on the investment — meaning that you could in some ways over-invest. The discussion of overeducation and underemployment really is linked to what the work looks like.

In the present literacy survey that we have — and we have data on Canada — it looks, at least if one looks at it quickly…. In a country like Switzerland — we only have Switzerland and Norway, of the European countries, in it so far at present — they seem to make more use of people's literacy at workplaces. There is more expectation that you use it more frequently, while we make less use of it.

If you're talking about linking…. This is something where I've been stressing so much this link between work and mode of production, because if you really want to get a bang for your money, you also have to make sure there is scope for people to use their skills.

K. Rubenson: That raises a very important point. When we compare adult literacy in Canada — 1994 with 2002 — you know that it hasn't changed very much despite the heavy investment in education. It may be — and now I'm speculating — that in the Canadian workplaces you come out from school with a just okay literacy level. That's defined as a level three in this case I use. If you are in a workplace that does not demand very much, we know from other things that those kinds of skills tend to disappear. It's like when

So when we think about adult literacy, we can think a little bit in these terms. I mean, if you're in a developing country — if you work for CIDA or IDRC in Africa and you have been in a literacy campaign — the first thing you ask afterwards is: how will they be able to maintain this? But when someone has gone through school here and comes out into the workplace, we don't give very much attention to them. How can you maintain these skills? I think that if one wants to make the economic argument, one has to link the demand that is done at work or in civil society.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Seeing no more questions, Doctor, I think it has been a very invigorating and thought-provoking discussion. I want to thank you for taking the time. Please do follow our work as we move along. If at any time you feel a need to call one of us and offer some more suggestions, we would seriously appreciate that.

J. Nuraney (Chair): The meeting is now adjourned until tomorrow morning at nine o'clock.

Hansard Services publishes transcripts both in print and on the Internet.
Chamber debates are broadcast on television and webcast on the Internet.
Question Period podcasts are available on the Internet.

Committee Staff:	Josie Schofield (Committee Research Analyst)

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS (Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON EDUCATION

REPORT OF PROCEEDINGS
(Hansard)

SELECT STANDING COMMITTEE ON
EDUCATION