Education — Issue No. 5 — Wednesday, April 12, 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		59
G. Farrell I. Rootman L. Mitchell

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:	Dr. Glen Farrell Linda Mitchell (Executive Director, Literacy B.C.) Dr. Irv Rootman (University of Victoria)

For the benefit of the presenters, today's meeting is a public meeting that 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 committee's 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 committee's 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 committee's website.

Members, we have with us today Dr. Glen Farrell, who was the president of the Open Learning Agency in B.C. until June 1998. He's also the former manager of the Commonwealth of Learning Literacy Project and the editor of the report ICT and Literacy: who benefits? This pilot project tested the usefulness of various ICT applications in the provision of literacy programs in Zambia and India. Currently, Dr. Farrell is a member of the working group established by the city of Vancouver to create the second learning city in the province.

Welcome, Dr. Farrell. We're looking forward to your presentation. Just a little note: you have 30 minutes of presentation, followed by questions and answers.

G. Farrell: I appreciate the opportunity to meet with you this morning, not necessarily because I think what I have to say is so profoundly important, but the topic you're focused on is profoundly important. If there's any way I can contribute to your work, I'm pleased to do that.

I'm aware that in your past meetings, you have met with some people I do consider and admire in terms of their expertise in literacy. Let me say off the top that while I worked in and led several literacy projects, I don't consider myself an expert in literacy per se. What I would admit to knowing something about is the application of information and communication technologies in a wide array of learning venues, and literacy is certainly among them. If there is a theme to what I think I may offer to you this morning, it would be that.

In terms of some ways in which ICT — I'll use that acronym for information and communication technologies…. By the way, when I say information and communication technologies, I'm not talking just about computers. I'm talking about old and new technologies: the use of radio, the use of television and combinations of all kinds of technologies.

If you look around the world at the way technologies are being applied, one of the things is that there are some interesting ways in which radio and the Internet, for example, are being used in conjunction, where the centre point is receiving questions, doing research and then broadcasting information over the mass media.

My comments over the next few minutes will be focused on four points. First of all, I want to offer some perspectives on literacy. The Chair mentioned that several of the people presenting to you have talked about the different ways literacy is being defined. I may add to your complexity, but it's to sort of let you know where I'm coming from so that when I talk about this, you'll at least know what I consider to be important.

I want to talk about some trends, generally, in the use of information and communication technologies in learning. I'll spend some time talking about examples, both international and Canadian, of some interesting program applications of the use of ICT in literacy enhancement. Then at the end I'll be presumptuous enough to make some suggestions about public policy and some program strategies you might want to think about.

First questions first. Why worry about literacy? Talking to you about that point may be like carrying coals to Newcastle, given the focus of your topic. But by and large, from those who drafted the millennium development objectives, through to the most specific community worker, you would see literacy as a passport to meaningful participation in the social, economic and political life development of both the individual and the community. But it does beg the question: what is it?

I'm going to contrast two polar views. Things never really exist in a polar sense. They tend to have different shades of grey. I think it's true that people have, historically, tended to look at literacy in a rather classical sense. They've viewed it as reading, writing and arithmetic — or, if you like, numeracy.

Having that specific a view of literacy, I think, leads logically to one's thinking about literacy as an educational program. Therefore, if we're talking about adults, we start thinking of it in terms of schooling for adults, forgetting that most adults who have low literacy skills had very bad experiences in schools.

Of course, when you start thinking about schools and the way to address literacy in that context, it leads one to start thinking about curricula and credentials. It's interesting that in India years ago, when the National Literacy Mission was established, one of the first things that happened was that they developed three tiers or levels of literacy. Ideally, people would progress through all three tiers and receive their certificate. There was a curriculum for each tier and inputs and so forth. I'll come back to say more about that later on.

I think the far more prevalent approach is to see literacy now in the context of functional literacy, where the focus is on socioeconomic development. Literacy enhancement programs tend to be embedded in the whole concept of learning for livelihood, beginning with the question, "Literacy for what?" and, by answering that question, coming to the decision about where and how to develop programs.

Learning materials focused on content related to the learner's work, the family and personal interest. When I talk to you in a few minutes about the work we did in Zambia and India, I'll share with you how we tried to address that principle.

Reading, writing and numeracy. Those skills develop on an as-needed basis. As the individual needs to learn something related to something they care very much about — whether it's their family, their health, how to grow better groundnuts or whatever it may be — the motivation for and the application of literacy skills becomes much more intrinsic.

There is also the issue of sustainability. This has many facets to it, but one of the realities, one of the things that over the years the National Literacy Mission in India has been working on…. They've found that literacy skills erode. It's a case of use it or lose it. They've gone back and tested people who received their tier-three certificate, for example, and a few years later their skills were right back at level one or sub–level one.

I think the other thing that relates to sustainability about literacy programs — and this is a global generalization — is that perhaps more than any other sector of learning, literacy programming has tended to be funded on short-term, one-off kinds of projects. The donor agencies tend to be interested in that. If you look at the developing countries that are so dependent in so much of their programming on one-off funding across the whole spectrum of learning, donor agencies are seldom in it for the long haul. That has presented a real difficulty.

Those are some of the things I think about when I think about literacy programming. Certainly, I come down on the functional side as opposed to the pure classical side in terms of how to get at classical skills. The whole notion of enabling people to apply what they learn as they learn it is absolutely critical, particularly with adults, and sustainability of programming is crucial.

Some trends in the application of ICT to learning generally. Well, if we look at infrastructure…. I'm talking about hardware and the way in which we move data around. Some broad observations. The tools we have to work with, in comparison with — what? — two years ago, are much more powerful than they were two years ago or five years ago. Pick your time frame.

Costs are dropping so that the cost of the technology and the infrastructure is now in relation to the cost of developing the products — the materials, the content — in a way that is usable to consumers, to learners. There's a crossover. It's now more costly to develop high-quality content than it is to put the technology infrastructure in place.

Clearly, access is more pervasive. We probably don't think so much about that in a country like Canada, but I go to Zambia or Lesotho or Kenya, for example, and access has a whole other meaning.

It's really interesting to see how wireless technology is leapfrogging the hard-wired technology we tend to have in our country. There are lots of places in this province — you will know better than me — where access is a big issue. Clearly, that's something that's important. The hardware is becoming much more user-friendly.

From a pedagogical point of view — how we use these technologies — there are some interesting trends underway, some important trends. There's more privacy, more individualization of learning. The learner has more control over the pace of learning and the focus and so forth — or, at least, can have. The technology enables it.

Learning can be much more collaborative in terms of enabling people to work together. Individualized assessment and achievement tracking is much more possible. It's so much easier with the incorporation of technology to individualize programs and enable students to see themselves not by benchmarking their progress against the brain in the class but much more in terms of their own progress day to day. It enables blended learning.

What do I mean by blended learning? I'm talking about the blending of different learning strategies. There's a myth that the use of technology is replacing face-to-face conversation, dialogue and group-based teaching. That's nonsense. You can go anywhere in the world, and in spite of all the rhetoric about e-learning, I could probably count on my two hands the number of absolutely pure e-learning environments I've ever encountered.

The idea of blending strategy. What we have with the use of technology is a much greater, larger, sack of tools from which we can select to design the learning opportunities that are particular to the needs of given learners.

In the case of learning materials, these can be tailored to the needs of specific groups and individuals, developed locally by tutors and learners. In Zambia we taught literacy tutors how to use the equipment at a central learning centre, and they then took equipment — videocams, digital cameras, audio tape, etc. — out into communities. They taped, recorded, the stories of the elders. They built learning materials around the environment the learners were familiar with, and it was profoundly more successful than — this is an analogy — the centrally produced Dick and Jane reader kind of model where one size fits all.

The sharing of teacher resources through on-line content repositories is perhaps the most important trend in the application of ICT anywhere. Canada is among the leaders in that, and B.C. has staked out a strong leadership position in that as well.

There's increasing infrastructure as infrastructure becomes more accessible. There's a "but" here, though. Its application is limited by the lack of training for program managers and tutors. There is a dearth of learning material. We need to invest in the production of learning materials that are relevant to people's lives if we're going to teach them and enhance their literacy skills. And there is still — particularly, I would argue, in the community of literacy workers — an anti-technology bias.

Let me talk about some examples. I've mentioned the one I was directly involved in leading for three and a half years in Zambia and in India. Our primary focus: we equipped learning centres in communities. But you'll appreciate that those learning centres then served a radius of up to 35 kilometres, in the case of Zambia — small learning centres, some of which were just benches underneath a big, spreading banyan tree and some of which were in schoolhouses or buildings with no roofs. People would gather there, and the tutor would go there.

We thought, clearly, we were not going to create computer labs under banyan trees, but what we could do is use the centre to provide tutors with the skills and with access to equipment that would enable them to develop learning materials.

We found that the interest shifted from the provider of opportunities to those of the learners. The most obvious example of this was in India, where they had this three-tiered program and tutors were trained to teach that. We turned it around and said to focus first on what the learners wanted to learn and help them achieve that. Then we found that, yes, they were interested.

More than anything else, we found that as people who were trying to enhance their literacy skills mastered the ability to use a computer, their increase in self-esteem was remarkable. They became more active in their community. Many started playing leadership roles. Many of the women no longer were silent and — how can I phrase this? — subservient to what was going on in their community with men playing the dominant role. It created some interesting dynamics in some of the communities.

The Swaminathan Foundation was one we worked with in India. Dr. Swaminathan was one of the fathers of the Green Revolution and made quite a bit of money, but he invested it all in community development work in the south of India. They made arrangements with communities and under certain conditions said: "We'll equip the learning centre. We'll give it to you, but you have to provide people to manage it and run it and so on and so forth."

When we approached them about running a literacy program, they took a unique approach. They said: "Okay, then, we'll make a deal with families. Every family in the community will be able to nominate one member of their family to participate in the literacy program. They will have to cover off their work so that they can attend and so on and so forth."

In turn, the family gets to decide what the person will learn. So it might be, "How do I read a balance statement for our little business?" or "How can I write letters?" or "How can I read the bus schedule so that I can know how to get to the rice market?" — whatever. That led to huge motivation to achieve.

One of the fascinating things is that people think low-income, poverty-stricken, low-literate people can't learn to use technology. Guess again. People learn to use this stuff in a remarkable fashion. I can spend the rest of my time here this morning telling you about the Hole in the Wall project — a fascinating project — that is now happening all over the world. It began in India, in the slums of New Delhi. There's no difficulty learning to use the equipment.

Interesting project in Bangladesh, where they put the technology on boats. Bangladesh is laced with small streams, rivers and so forth, as you will know, and these boats go around to rural communities. The literacy program is embedded. It's designed for development of occupational management and leadership skills.

So that's what people learn about, but in the process, they have to enhance their ability to read, their ability to write and, in many cases, their numeracy skills as well. These boats are equipped with computer equipment, and they can go into a community and work and develop materials. It's been remarkably, remarkably successful, to the point where the Bangladesh government is now sustaining the project. It was begun with a donor loan.

Enhancing project, on community resource centres, ICT-equipped community resource centres in Newfoundland. Focused on socioeconomic disadvantaged parents. Focused on women wanting to re-enter the workforce. English-as-a-second-language learner. Here again, the results show that participants learned computer skills and traditional literacy skills as well.

ABC Canada Literacy Foundation has just recently completed a two-year study linking adult literacy and e-learning. Their final report is not yet…. At least it's not on the national literacy association website. The preliminary results are showing that e-learning is relatively new in literacy programs generally, but it's expanding rapidly. E-learning represents new ways to do old things as well as different ways to do different things.

Another study, again focused in Atlantic Canada, was looking at the barriers literacy workers cite to incorporating more use of ICT in the programs. Guess what. Lack of funds. And because it's often mentioned doesn't mean it's trite. It's a lack of technology, lack of access to technology, lack of their own comfort in using ICT in terms of enhancing skills and providing training, but the wish is there.

This is true in Atlantic Canada. It's true around the world. People want to incorporate more ICT. They see it positively, but they're constrained by these other things. Atlantic Canada has no franchise on that.

Let me close, as I promised, with a few comments about public policy and some programming suggestions. These are sort of interlaced.

I would strongly encourage that literacy programming not be isolated from real life. I would encourage program development people always to search for ways to embed literacy enhancement within social and economic development programs. I would look for ways to integrate literacy policy and program development across ministries.

Again, a global phenomenon is that Ministries of Education generally take the view that if it has to do

with learning, it has to do with and is the purview of the Ministry of Education. In fact, I chaired a conference about a year ago here in Vancouver where the Commonwealth of Learning brought together some true literacy experts from all over the globe. One of the conclusions from these 30 or 35 people is that literacy is too important to be left to the educators. By that, they meant educators alone.

My point is: look for ways to integrate this, because programs tend to exist within stovepipes within most governments. One of the challenges is to work in a…. In the academy, we would talk about it in terms of cross-disciplinary-based programming and research. The same issue, I think, is alive here, so integrate across ministries that have some concern with overall socioeconomic development.

Use non-school learning venues such as the workplace, prisons, community learning centres, church basements, whatever. By and large, adults who have low literacy skills are unlikely to feel comfortable if you run programs in the traditional little red schoolhouse.

I would look for ways of providing laddered certification opportunities. By "laddered," I mean enable people to build on what they already know and what they acquire and to move forward, because people — and especially adults, I think — do want some validation. They often want some external validation of what they're doing. They want some recognition of it, so providing that is important.

I try to work through client-based providers. If the target audiences are first nation learners, I would look for ways to deliver programs through first nation–based organizations — or whatever the client constituency might happen to be.

If one is concerned about literacy for social and economic development, then the role of women is profoundly important. The whole of idea of gender equity and doing things deliberately to encourage and enable women — I say women because we're talking about adult literacy; at least, I'm talking about adult literacy — has been shown time and again to be of particular importance, at least in the international scene where I'm more familiar.

Finally, I would look for some ways to fund adult learning and literacy projects that develop learners' information acquisition skills through the use of on-line e-learning strategies. I just did a quick survey of literacy-related projects that were funded through a variety of NGOs and organizations around the province in 2005. I may have missed it, because I did a quick scan, but I did not see one project that had any ICT component in it. I think that's too bad.

I'm not making any kind of argument for a whole-scale shift, but we have our heads in the sand if we believe that the application of learning technologies to literacy — indeed, across the whole piece of learning — isn't growing exponentially. It seems to me that we do need to make some investment in continuing to explore and enable programmers to learn to use this in the best possible way.

J. Horgan: That was a terrific presentation this morning. It certainly got the juices flowing.

I have about 200 questions. I think I'll restrict it to just three, and they're interrelated. This focuses on what you call the anti-technology bias. I'll take us away from our mandate just for a moment to focus on e-learning in our K-to-12 system and how it's growing and developing over time.

I hear the anti-technology bias from educators primarily because they're concerned that a click of a mouse is a poor substitute for that individual attention that an educator can provide. I know you were touching upon that, but you moved off it quickly. Could you comment on that a little a bit? The difference between independent exploration — you know, those information acquisition skills that are so important…. Absent the educator, how do you mould them?

G. Farrell: I remember, when I first became president of the Knowledge Network, that issue became…. It was the first time I'd really encountered it head-on. It wasn't original with me, but I remember saying that any teacher who could be replaced by a television set probably should be. Now, that's an old joke, if you will.

But, you know, it's as true today as it ever was, and I think that with the benefit of — what? — 30 years' experience since then, we know it absolutely is true. Those who were talking a decade ago about e-learning revolutionizing all facets of education, particularly universities, have come to realize that revolutions in education don't happen, in a sense of really profound and rapid change, and that there are all kinds of learning situations where it does need to be facilitated group dialogue.

How much technology can be incorporated is a function of: what are the characteristics of the learner? What's the nature of the content you're teaching? And how much money have you got? Think about those questions first.

I always tell people: "Forget about the technology. Think about who you're teaching, what you're teaching, what access they have to technology — all of these things. And think about the technology last."

J. Horgan: The next question I have would be about your comment about on-line content repositories. How would they be structured?

G. Farrell: In my view, you've identified the development in ICT applications in the broad field of education that come closest to comparison with the printing press. I mentioned that the cost of content development, to really take advantage of multimedia technology, is very high. Jurisdictions — individual school districts, individual literacy programs, individual institutions — simply can't afford to do this properly unless they have really large economies of scale.

What the technology now enables is for us, instead of thinking about a course, to think about content in smaller chunks. If I was teaching a course on statistics, I might think about the concept of average, and I would design learning around that. I'd talk about the mean, the median and the mode and about standard deviation and stuff like that. That would all go into…. But that's just one part of a larger course on statistics.

You can now identify that. You can tag it with audio, text, video, learning materials. You can tie it to ways of assessing whether the learner has used it. You can put all that together in a package called a "learning object" and put it on an on-line repository.

Somebody else in another part of the world, given the appropriate access and agreements, can access that and incorporate it into a grade 12 course. A professor teaching first-year university might do the same thing. Content becomes reusable.

It can be reaggregated in different ways, and it can be tinkered with. If you're teaching in South Africa, you might want to take the video examples out and put in something from your own environment. These on-line repositories are growing all over the world, and Canada and B.C. are playing a significant role in this.

I keep preaching about this. Thank you for giving me the soapbox. It's a way of sharing learning resources so that we can truly get some economies of scale without sacrificing the individualization and the particularization to a particular group of learners, wherever they might be. It's relatively new. Five or six years ago nobody had talked about this at all.

J. Horgan: Just to wrap up. If I understand then, Glen, with the cost of technology going down and the cost of content staying fairly high, these repositories can bring down the cost of content to the point that it's accessible by educators and learners anywhere, anytime and can be shaped and formed to the outcomes that are required for that pairing or cluster.

G. Farrell: If you want a resource on this, David Porter, who I think is still heading BCcampus, is in my judgment one of the world's most authoritative sources of information about this particular development.

D. Routley: It seems to me that reliability and support of technology is a bigger-cost item than purchasing technology, and perhaps even developing content once the development has happened and the districts or institutions have control over some information they can use on an ongoing basis.

As a former school trustee and a person who has a wife, sister and mother who are all teachers…. They uniformly complain of a lack of support for the technology in the learning environment. There aren't enough people maintaining the hardware, so in a lot of the computer labs, half the machines won't be running. Many of the teachers haven't had enough support in learning how to use the hammer as a hammer or the screwdriver as a screwdriver — learning to use the tool in conjunction with their goals as educators.

Do you think there are strategies we could employ in our schools and in these other institutions to make more efficient use of the technology?

G. Farrell: Thank you for raising this point. I should have had that point on the slide relating to the constraints to the ICT applications. It's profoundly important.

I'm currently heading a monitoring and evaluation team of a project across 16 countries in Africa in which the five largest ICT corporations in the world have formed consortia working with the heads of government, the AU, through the new programs for African development organization. This is a pilot project in which there are six schools in each of 16 countries that are equipped.

The point you have raised is the one that is turning out to be the most critical thing to address. It's being addressed in three ways. I don't see why this isn't generally applicable. First of all, the companies are training people. The school — in this case, it's a school, but it could be a school district — needs to make two people available for training so that they are on-the-spot trainers.

The second tier is that they then have an in-country source who can go out to schools if it can't be fixed there. There are actually four levels to this.

There is an on-line support desk, a help desk, which can be a very efficient way of addressing a lot of these things. How many of you have your own computer? You've called the tech support people, and you've been talking to somebody in India, and they've talked you through the problem. That has happened to me a lot. So on-line tech support can be important.

The fourth level in this particular project is that at the end of the day, the company will fly somebody out. That'll work for the demonstration period, but you won't sustain that over very long. Thanks for raising it. It's a very important point.

M. Polak: I feel the same as John around having way more questions than I can possibly put you through, so I'll try to be selective.

First off, one of the interesting facets to K-to-12 education is that once educators move into the secondary school system, they tend, by and large, to only think of themselves as language instructors when they are, in fact, English teachers. A science teacher would typically think of themselves as a literacy teacher or a language instructor.

One of the more popular notions these days, in discussions with educators, is how you have every instructor taking ownership of the literacy mandate, saying: "If I'm a science teacher, I'm also a language teacher. If I'm a calculus teacher, I'm also a language teacher, because it's a foundational knowledge."

Moving that into our mandate, which is to look at how we might enhance improvements in adult literacy,

are we facing a similar issue around skills shortages with people who will be able to do this kind of work, which we're facing in all sorts of other areas of the province and the world? If so, how might we address that, as we look ahead to providing workers, if you will, or literacy instructors? How might that issue be mitigated?

G. Farrell: In your selection of questions, you certainly ask the harder ones. I don't know, Mary. I don't have any particular answers, except to say that there are some concepts that I think are fairly generic in trying to address issues like that.

One of them is the notion of laddering programs and enabling people as they start to encounter some kind of ceiling, glass or otherwise, which is inhibiting them being able to move on and do something else they want to do. That's the time to address whatever the need might be. If it happens to be a need for literacy enhancement, then embed it in that process.

I'll give you one illustration of it. I'm not current with where this is going, but I'm told the construction industry is facing a real dearth of skills when it comes to a pool of people who can manage projects. They may have the carpentering skills and be superb at that, but to then move up and take on the larger set of skills…. There's a dearth of expertise there.

I understand that some initiatives with Thompson Rivers University are underway, where building on trades certification, whatever that may be — diploma or certificate or whatever — will enable people to get into a bachelor's program in management so that they can add to those practical competencies some of the additional, perhaps more cognitive, competencies they may need in project management.

The same concept, I'm told, is in terms of teachers who can teach trades in schools and in colleges. Again, I'm told that at Thompson Rivers, there are some discussions underway looking at how people with trade skills might then move into a bachelor of education program to enable training. So that's an example.

Let me cite another. It's a purely hypothetical example, because I know nothing about the details. We all know that there are all sorts of negotiations over land claims going on. That involves investing in the development and skills and competencies of first nations people to take responsibilities for various kinds of economic development initiatives.

If you're looking at the possibility of a first nation managing a large forest resource, how much discussion goes on in terms of the kinds of skills that people will need in order to do that? Does that get built in, and is that considered as part of that whole package?

I don't know if it does or doesn't. All I'm saying is that, to my mind, it ought to be thought about, because that's a way to integrate. If you isolate learning some basic skills like reading, writing and numeracy from their application, then, at least for adults, it tends not to work very well.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Let's make it very quick. We only have three minutes, and we have two more questions.

ESL learners. Is there a need to address literacy in their mother tongue if, in fact, they've never been literate in their mother tongue? Or is it not really an issue?

G. Farrell: To be honest, I just don't know. I've not seen any research on that.

G. Robertson (Deputy Chair): You answered, to some degree, my question around structuring the certification opportunities on functional literacy more specific to higher-level and trades-skill-shortage applications in the management side — maybe in terms of challenges not to do with management but with more basic functional literacy.

Are there examples of how certification can be applied there to functional literacy? Or is it all specific to a trade, a particular focus?

G. Farrell: I think the reasons people have for wanting to be able to read and write are immense — right? Terribly diverse. People will be motivated by all of these different kinds of things. In the process, they will seek opportunities to acquire those kinds of skills if they see it leading somewhere, if it's going to lead to some goal they have.

I think it's important to have certification systems that start at a very basic level so that you can, if you like, get credit for what you already know, what you've already mastered. There should be opportunities for you to demonstrate that, if you want to move on. Eventually, that can lead to — what's it called these days? — GED, the high school equivalent, or that sort of thing. The laddering, the structures, the certifications are there up to a certain point, and then there's nothing. It's that sort of last yard that I think needs to be addressed.

G. Robertson (Deputy Chair): One quick question on a much bigger scale: do you have any sense, in terms of numbers, of what the needs are for a more robust adult literacy system in B.C., in terms of investment required? Can you give any input?

G. Farrell: No. My colleagues in Literacy Now or Literacy B.C. would have a far better handle on that than I would.

J. Nuraney (Chair): It's the Chairman's privilege to have the last word. Dr. Farrell, just a quick question. From the lessons learned overseas, in your own repertoire, do you see any applications that we can use here in relation to first nations people?

G. Farrell: Yes, I do. I think many of them are pretty direct. They're lessons such as: don't isolate the learning of literacy skills from what people really care

about, which is earning a livelihood, caring for their family, looking after their health, their kids' education.

Find ways to embed literacy learning in those kinds of things. Do whatever you can to ensure that the learning materials reflect the things they know about, reflect their lives. That's easy to do, as opposed to having a centrally produced textbook they would learn their stuff from.

Ensure that support systems are there. That inevitably leads to a blended learning approach.

Look for ways that ICT can be used to support those who teach literacy in terms of developing materials, helping people share learning materials and get access, collaborating with other teachers of literacy on line, and so forth.

I guess my last point is that, increasingly, what we generally term computer literacy is of fundamental importance. I would look for ways to enable people to master basic computer skills, information-searching skills and some rudimentary information management skills. Not only is it going to be of critical importance to their future, but the impact on them of their self-esteem cannot be overestimated.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you. Can I impose upon you, finally, to see if you can put some of those thoughts on paper and send them to this committee in due course?

G. Farrell: I'll do what I can. I'll have to write it down quickly because I'm at that stage in life where things go off into the ether rather quickly on me.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Let me thank you, Dr. Farrell, for taking the time and being with us this morning.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Members, if I may ask you to please take your seats as we reconvene the meeting.

For the benefit of the presenter, today's meeting is a public meeting that 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 committee's website at www.leg.bc.ca/cmt.

Members, we have today in front of us Dr. Rootman. Dr. Rootman is a Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research distinguished scholar at the Centre for Community Health Promotion Research in the faculty of human and social development at the University of Victoria.

He is currently developing and implementing a national program of research for the Canadian Council on Learning, focusing on the link between literacy and health. His lectures have included: "Literacy, Older Adults and Health: What do we know? What should we know?"

I. Rootman: It's a pleasure to be here. I really appreciate the opportunity of speaking to you about older adults, given the fact that in six months, or less than six months, I'll be officially an older adult myself. I have rapidly developed an interest in this area, although it's not the main focus of my career and my work.

Most of my work has been in the field of health promotion. It has been only in the last four years that I've gotten into the field of literacy and health. It has been a wonderful experience, because it's the first time in my career where I've actually had to work a lot with people in education.

It has certainly opened my eyes to some of the issues that people in education address. I should say that I'm not an expert in gerontology, although I do have some interest, growing by the day.

First of all, I want to acknowledge the input I got for this presentation. As you can see, I've got people listed in all kinds of organizations from all across the country. This is because the information you were asking for in relation to older adults and literacy is not all in one place. You'd think that by this time it would be, but it's not. It's spread all over the place.

Basically, I asked for a little help from my friends on an urgent basis and was fortunately able to get it, which to me demonstrates the value of organizations such as the Canadian Council on Learning, because a lot of these relationships I've built up in being part of the Canadian Council on Learning. I'm going to cover these areas in the less than 30 minutes I have left.

First of all, I'm going to say a bit about the Canadian Council on Learning, because I understand from Gregor that you haven't heard much about that. I think it's important that you know about the council. I'm going to talk a little bit about my own work in literacy and health, then go on to what we know from the research that has been done, then talk a bit about some of the challenges that face older adults who are facing low literacy, and then some of the promising strategies I was able to turn up through canvassing my friends. I'll end with some recommendations and then have some discussion.

Let's start with the Canadian Council on Learning. This council is a not-for-profit corporation set up by the

Liberal government in Ottawa about two years ago with an $85 million endowment. Its mandate is to address information and knowledge gaps in the area of literacy and provide an evidence base to support all stages of learning from early childhood to workplace and beyond.

It's basically like the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, which provides statistical information on health. This organization provides statistical information and other kinds of information about learning, how learning takes place and what kinds of approaches are effective. The council has established what they call learning centres across the country. There are five of them, and there's a list of the names of the learning centres.

As you can see, some of them speak specifically to your mandate. For example, there's one on aboriginal peoples, which is just getting started, and there's another one on older adults, which is a little further along. Then there's the one we have here on health and learning, which is located at the University of Victoria. That's the one I'm associated with, and I think we have something to say, as well, to you in terms of your mandate.

As I mentioned, this particular one is at the University of Victoria. It was set up in the late fall of last year. It just hired staff. There are two staff at the university and one in the Yukon, because this is supposed to be a partnership between British Columbia and the Yukon.

The work of this particular knowledge centre, as is true of all of them, is guided by a national advisory committee representing all sectors and regions of the country. At the present time it is sponsoring 17 projects through a number of organizations — 17 organizations across the country — all of which deal with some aspect of learning and health.

We have three cross-cutting themes to kind of tie our work together. One of them is health literacy, and I'm the coordinator for that theme — part-time coordinator, along with my other jobs. Then we have a part-time coordinator in the areas of healthy communities for learning, and building capacity for learning.

We operate a lot through working groups. At the present time, there are 11 working groups, which you can see listed there. A couple of them should be particularly interesting to you. There's the one on adults, the one on older adults and the CPHA expert panel on health literacy.

This organization — kind of a centralized-decentralized organization — has a lot to contribute, I think, to the work you're doing and the work, in general, in the area of learning across the country. Its main mission is to pull together information and make it available to people who need it, including the general public.

I'm now moving on to what I do for a living, which is research, basically. I have this award from the Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research, which is a five-year award that allowed me to do research on whatever health topic I wanted. The topic I picked was literacy and health, and I've been doing that for the last four years. The projects that are listed up there are mostly related to that mission.

The first project is one that's sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, which was designed to develop an agenda for literacy and health research across the country. That has been done, and we have established some research priorities — which, you'll be happy to know, include all of the groups you're interested in.

The second project is funded through my Michael Smith award, and the role of that project is to develop capacity for literacy and health research in British Columbia. In every project that I do, I try to involve people from other universities in British Columbia — graduate students and so on.

That's what I'm trying to do before I have to retire, shortly. It's going quite well. We've now built up a cadre of people in British Columbia to lead work in this area, not only in Canada, but internationally.

The third bullet there is a set of projects I'm doing, sponsored mainly by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research. What we're trying to do there is to develop some new measures of health literacy for different population groups — older adults, young people, immigrants and diabetes patients. Those are the four groups we've worked with so far to try and develop some new measures.

Health literacy is an interesting concept, but unfortunately, it hasn't been measured very well. We're trying to build some measures so that we can learn what the impact is of health literacy on people and what kind of interventions might be effective in relation to health literacy.

I also participated, in the last four years, in a committee sponsored by the Institute of Medicine in the States on health literacy, and this is the book we produced. It's a pretty comprehensive review of the field. In looking at it in preparation for today, I realized that it actually says very little, if anything, about older adults, which is actually quite typical. I've discovered that there is a big hole in terms of our knowledge with respect to older adults and literacy and what can be done for them.

Finally, as I mentioned, I'm associated with the Knowledge Centre and am a part-time scientific officer there.

I'm going to move on to the next slide, which just tries to make the case — I think, reasonably well — that there is a lack of interest in this area. The first quote is from an expert in gerontology who in 1998 pointed out that very few studies have been done in this area and that he was hoping it would improve. Well, the fact is that it hasn't improved. There's a recent review that was done of the state in the field of adult literacy commissioned by the Council on Learning, and I have a copy of the report here. As you can see, it's a pretty long report, and there's no mention whatsoever of seniors or older adults in this report.

I'll leave that report for you, as well, because it does speak to some of the other groups you're interested in, but it just makes the case that we don't know a heck of

On the other hand, it's really an important area. I have a quote up there from Roy McMurtry, who was the Dean of Medicine at University of Western Ontario. He spoke to the standing committee of the Canadian Senate in March 2000. This is what he said:

So he was pretty direct about that. He thinks it's a pretty important area. I really have to congratulate you for actually picking out older adults as a group you want to find more about and figure out what you should do.

I'm now going to move into some of the things we know from the research that's been done. The first thing I think we know for sure is that older adults are more likely to have lower literacy skills than younger adults. I've put together a table here from the most recent adult literacy and life skills survey, where you can see that average literacy skills drop off starting in the last two age groups — 56 to 65, and 65-plus.

That happens in B.C. and Canada as a whole, although the good news for us is that the skill levels are slightly higher in B.C. in all of the categories except for 16 to 25, where it's about the same as the rest of Canada.

A second point we know is that older adults in British Columbia have higher literacy scores than older adults in other provinces or territories, with the exception of the Yukon. I've put together another slide from that survey, which shows the country bookended by British Columbia and the Yukon.

The Yukon is slightly higher in the 66 and older group in terms of their prose literacy skills, which suggests that we're in the running, but we're by no means the frontrunner in this area.

We also shouldn't get too smug about this, because if you look at the proportions that are in the lowest category in British Columbia — taking the over-65 age group — it comes to 37 percent of the population who fell into the lowest category and another 32.7 percent in the second category.

Being in either category is not a good thing, because it suggests that you're going to have some problems in reading. If you add these two together, you get almost 70 percent of older adults in British Columbia who are in the two lowest categories. We have a way to go. There's work to be done.

The next slide makes the point that the decline in literacy skills with age appears to be less among those with more education. This suggests that education may be a protective factor. The more education you have, the more likely you are to be literate when you reach my stage in life.

This next chart shows this. It's again taken from the data from the last survey. It shows a more precipitous decline in average prose scores by age among those with the least amount of education. So that's the bottom line, which goes: with people with no high school, you can see their literacy skills are dropping as we get higher in the age range.

It happens as well at the top, although not quite as much, suggesting that education is protective. Interestingly, if you look at the three middle lines, the people with college-level education at the higher-age levels actually have lower-average literacy skills than those with slightly less education. Education helps, but it's not the total panacea.

Another thing that I think you might be interested in knowing is that there appears to be a more rapid decline in literacy skills with age in Canada than in Norway. This next slide makes that point. If you separate it out between people with post-secondary education and no post-secondary education — no post-secondary being at the bottom — you can see that compared with Norway, Canada has lower scores in literacy, as the population ages, in the no post-secondary group. In the group with post-secondary skills, Canada starts out higher but is lower as we look at aging.

Now, it's a good question why Norway does a little better than we do, and I asked some of my friends about this. I asked Ron Faris, who I understand you've met with before. His thought was that adult education is much stronger in Norway and other Scandinavian countries, with their study circles and folk schools, than it is in Canada.

My other colleague, Allan Quigley at St. Francis Xavier University, said essentially the same thing: that in Norway, in the Scandinavian countries, they pay much more attention to lifelong learning and to adult learning than we do here in Canada, and they do it in a much more systematic way. That's one possible explanation. There probably are other explanations as well.

Another thing we know from research, which is something I'm interested in, is that there is a very strong relationship between literacy and health. The next slide shows this for you graphically. You can see that people in poor health are more likely to have lower literacy skills at each age level than people in better health.

We don't know whether the causal relationship goes from health to literacy or from literacy to health, but there's obviously a relationship. In fact, some of the literature suggests that it probably goes both ways.

For example, the next slide shows some results from two long-term, longitudinal studies. We took the same people over long periods of time. As you can see from the first one, a thirty-year prospective study in the States found that higher cognitive performance at age seven was related to a significantly reduced risk of serious illness in adulthood. In other words, cognitive development at age seven predicted the extent to which you would experience serious illness in adulthood.

Similarly, three longitudinal studies also found that intellectual efficiency was the strongest independent predictor of health in the future of the people that were studied. That suggests fairly strongly that there is a causal relationship between intellectual capacity, literacy and so on and health over people's lives. When we're increasing people's cognitive capacity, we're also increasing their health status and the health status of the population.

The next slide has some more evidence regarding the relationship between literacy and health outcomes. From a review I did and a review that was done by a graduate student who's working on her thesis at the moment at the University of Waterloo, we've concluded that older adults with lower literacy or health literacy are less likely to report using preventive services.

So if you are lower on the literacy scale, you're less likely to go in for pap smears and preventive services. They are also more likely to report difficulties with activities of daily living, accomplishments because of their physical health, have greater pain interfering with work, and have less knowledge about diseases. In other words, it appears as if literacy does have an impact in terms of people's actions in relation to their health.

Another thing we've learned from research is that literacy is actually a useful skill in maintaining your knowledge and your ability to gain knowledge. From the previous International Adult Literacy Survey, we found that more literate seniors were able to gain knowledge from more sources as they age, and they require less assistance with information.

On the other hand, it suggests that the relationship may go the other way, in that health may also impact on people's ability to learn. For example, an Australian study of older adults concluded that engaging in general lifestyle activities may help to promote successful cognitive aging. So if you work out every day, you're more likely not only to age better physically but also age better intellectually.

The next slide makes the point that health settings can actually be extremely helpful in terms of promoting learning. There have been a few studies, in the U.K. in particular, that tried to create a learning environment in a GP's practice. In one of them, the GP made direct referrals to education programs, and the patients reported both physical and mental improvements as a result.

In another practice, an adult education worker was placed in general practices, and one of the patients indicated that they wouldn't have obtained a college degree if that hadn't happened. So it's apparent that we could make much better use of health settings in order to promote learning.

Of course, we can also make better use of learning settings to promote health. For example, a study in the U.K. found that adult learning participation contributed to positive and substantial changes in health behaviours and to small improvements in well-being among adults aged 33 in 1991 and 42 in 2000.

In other words, because they were exposed to a learning institution, their health was better. Similarly, another U.K. study found that participants in adult learning reported benefits to both their physical and mental health.

Finally, an educational program for adults here in British Columbia that was run by Sandra Cusack, who's just across the street at Simon Fraser, found significant improvements in depression and in mental fitness as a result of that program.

We move on to the next slide, which also is the last slide I have in terms of what we know from research.

It has to do with culture. This was a study that was done in Ontario among older aboriginal women, which found that the participants preferred to read culturally relevant breast cancer information that discussed native people's cancer risk or included testimonials about native women's cancer experiences. Then there are a number of implications of that for how one might deliver such programs.

Just to sum up, some of the conclusions we can draw from what's actually a limited amount of research are: that literacy among older adults is an issue that needs to be addressed; that B.C. is in a more fortunate position than most other jurisdictions in Canada to do so; that the provision of opportunities for lifelong learning may be particularly important for maintaining health and cognitive capacity in old age; and that addressing literacy issues may reduce health care costs. I think we can also conclude that there are some approaches that appear to work, at least based on the literature we've seen so far.

Now I'm going to move on to the challenges. This is the whole list of them, so we don't have to have a long discussion about it, but these are some of the challenges that are commonly identified as being associated with older adults having low literacy.

The one that is usually on the tips of people's tongues is stigma. There seems to be a lot of stigma attached. This was one of the key points that this study concluded in the States, although it's interesting that Allan Quigley suggests perceived relevance of adult education, which is further down in the list, was actually more important than stigma. He says: "The issue we face with this growing subgroup is not so much stigma as relevance. The idea that they are too old or too set in their ways is endemic to the group itself, but they are perpetually at the mercy of the medical system, and many know it. We found this in our study in Nova Scotia. So the unique nuance in this age group is convincing them that literacy education makes a lot of sense."

In other words, according to him, that is one of the key challenges older adults with no literacy face — and that those who are dealing with them face as well. Then there are a number of others that are listed on there as well.

Now, what I'm going to do is give you eight examples in about — how many minutes do I have?

I. Rootman: Two minutes. Eight examples in two minutes. Right. I've been trying to talk fast, but it's hard. I'm going to leave this with you, anyway, so you can look at it, but I'll just sort of quickly skim it.

A couple of these are national examples. The first ones are guidelines for medication packaging and labelling for older adults. That was done by the national literacy program. Basically, the idea is to improve the labels on medications so that seniors who might have sight problems will be able to read it, or seniors who have literacy problems will be able to read it, because it will be in plain language. There are guidelines here that you can access on a website.

The second example is the development of a national network. This runs out of the University of Regina Seniors' Education Centre. It links about 50 organizations involved in providing learning opportunities for older adults across Canada, so it's a very effective network for sharing information about programs dealing with older adults.

I have a community development example in Nova Scotia. I'm not going to go into it in detail, but it's basically working with seniors groups in order to reduce the stigma and isolation they feel in relation to their literacy problems. They've developed various kinds of public awareness presentations and workshop materials to help them do that.

The fourth example is in Quebec. My colleague at Laval provided this. She was involved in a project there to use posters as a way of living at different times in the past. Basically, what they do is create these posters that reflect different eras in the past, and then they use them to help older people discuss what it was like living in that period, to get them talking about some of the issues they face.

The fifth example is a program that's run in Saskatchewan out of the Seniors' Education Centre at the University of Regina, which, by the way, is a quite a unique institution and one we might think about in terms of whether we need something like it here. They have a program called Second Chance for Seniors to address the learning needs of older adults. It involves peer tutoring, group literacy activities and various kinds of educational activities.

The sixth example — and I have only three more — is also in Saskatchewan. It's a resource manual designed to increase awareness of the concerns of older adult literacy learners.

The next one is a B.C. example. It's something that was done at the University College of the Fraser Valley in Chilliwack and involved providing free computer training as an outreach tool to recruit older adults for literacy school upgrading. Unfortunately, it didn't do that.

They weren't able to attract the low-literacy older adults, but they did it with older adults and found that it actually worked quite well. They also learned from it that they have to be a little more creative in terms of how to attract older adults who have literacy deficits. In particular, they suggested that embedding this kind of training in other kinds of services for older adults might be one way of doing it.

Finally, the developmental fitness program, which is described in depth in this book by Sandra Cusack and Wendy Thompson. I think it's quite an innovative approach and one where B.C. is leading the pack. This is a very useful resource. You may want to ask Sandra to come across the street, if you're here again, to tell you a little bit more about that.

Then, I just noticed in the paper this morning that there was an article on the chronic disease self-management program run out of the University of Victoria. It made the point that not only did it help older people address their health issues and improve their health but also gave them an opportunity to improve their cognitive capacity, because they were asked to take on the roles of teachers. I think that's quite an interesting project.

Conclusions from looking at the practice. There are innovative efforts going on; most of them short-term and not very well supported. Very few of them have been rigorously evaluated. In fact, I think the only one, of the ones I cited, was the first one — the one that the Canadian public health association has done. The rest of them…. They've done, maybe, some process evaluation, but they really haven't looked at outcomes.

This leads me to my last slide, which is recommendations. Basically, I reviewed the transcripts from your previous hearings, and I was very impressed with the presentation that Ron Faris made.

My key recommendation is to support the development and implementation of a comprehensive provincial literacy strategy with infrastructure and policy commitments along the lines that Ron had suggested, but at the same time adding some elements that might pertain to older adults — for example, taking some of the promising initiatives and trying them out.

Secondly, to do continuing education and learning to prevent the decline of mental faculties and memory, mental fitness programs for people with mild cognitive impairment and early dementia, and education of employees of provincial departments that provide services to older adults regarding these issues I've been talking about. Then finally, and for me as a researcher, almost the most important recommendation has to do with evaluation.

So many of these things go on — we've got thousands of them across the country — and nobody ever evaluates them. You never know what we've learned from all of it, so I think it's really important to build in evaluation in whatever you do. That goes not just for the seniors initiatives but for other ones you're looking at.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you, Dr. Rootman. I think you've added a very interesting angle to the submissions we've been hearing. As you know, one of the mandates we have is related to seniors. I think your presentation is very relevant to what we are looking for, so thank you.

D. Thorne: Thank you very much. It was a very interesting presentation. I think your additions to the work of Dr. Faris are excellent.

Myself, I'm a bit of a community worker. I certainly agree with your comments on evaluation. I mean, it's not just in this area but in many areas that we spend public dollars on. We have no accountability and evaluation. We lurch from project to project, creating needs, cancelling projects, starting new ones. It has to stop. I mean, it's insane.

My experience is in the community and working with all ages, actually, but doing some work with the seniors at seniors' centres and women's centres. I recognize that a lot of these issues are…. Predominantly, a lot of this is a female issue, and isolation and poverty are huge factors in everything we talk about in this area — right? How do we get around that, the isolation? It has many causes, as you know, as we all know. Transportation is one of them, and health is one, but poverty is a huge one.

Again, how do we reach the people that most need these kinds of services and this kind of information? I think we have to look seriously at working more closely with seniors' centres in the communities and having some kind of program there that deals only with isolated seniors instead of dealing with the ones who can make it into the seniors' centres.

I think this is an area that has not been done to any extent that would have an impact on the kinds of things you're talking about. Certainly, that's my area of interest, particularly when we talk about seniors. I'd be very interested in any comments you have on that, or on anything I can do in Coquitlam or across the province — anything we can recommend.

I. Rootman: I think you've put your finger on two key issues. If you look carefully at the examples I gave you, some of them addressed isolation. I think it made a little bit of progress in dealing with that, but none of them have addressed poverty.

I mean, that's a whole different agenda. It requires all kinds of policies and so on that, I think, is probably outside the scope of this committee, but it needs to be addressed. It's a fundamental issue we face in our society.

I agree with you that we need to have more of these organizations, and they need to be adequately funded. In a way, it's ridiculous to ask organizations to do evaluations, for example, if they don't have the funds to do it or don't have the expertise to do it.

If we just go to the evaluation side of things, we could develop much better partnerships between the universities, the university colleges and the colleges and the various programs that deliver services. We should have much more in the way of ongoing partnerships so that it's possible to support the activities of the various programs going on in the field.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Could I just encourage members and presenters to keep remarks as brief as possible? There are a lot of questions.

I. Rootman: I thought it was interesting. I was happy to hear what she had to say.

J. Nuraney (Chair): We need to ask a lot of questions, and we don't want members to go away from here feeling that they didn't ask you what they needed to ask.

M. Polak: In terms of reaching this segment of our community, do you see applicability with respect to the community hub model, which is now sort of in vogue in a lot of areas of government and public-policy-making? Can you comment on how that might fit — or might not?

I. Rootman: Well, I don't know too much about it. Whatever the comments, it would just be a lay perspective on it. But it does make some sense, if I understand what it is exactly, to have some place to go as a central place that could help funnel people from place to place. Are you thinking of sort of a 211 number?

M. Polak: More a physical location where you would house, or at least have access points to, a number of different services — cross-ministry, cross-jurisdiction.

I. Rootman: I think it's a great model myself. I haven't studied it, and I don't know how well it works.

I have a colleague I've worked with in New Zealand. What he has done is set up what are called "community houses" all throughout New Zealand. They're just places where people, like the kinds you're talking about, can go to, hang out, help one another and be apprised of services that are available and so on.

I don't know whether that could work here in Canada or not, but it seems to work in New Zealand. In fact, just last week, he was given the equivalent of a New Zealand knighthood for the work he had done in this area. I don't know, but maybe that's a model we should be thinking about, as well, to make the places a little friendlier for people.

L. Mayencourt: Thank you very much for your presentation. I have also been in the social service sector for a while, most notably around breast cancer and HIV/AIDS infection. I found that patients increasing their own literacy level about those illnesses — the medications, the reactions they have to a variety of different things — was extremely empowering to them.

First off, there's a great deal of interest, so there's a real desire to do it. But that's an example of literacy coming to someone, as opposed to a person going to literacy — okay? In other words, they come to it because they must, as opposed to: "Oh, jeez, I'd like to know about ganciclovir. Why don't I read a book on it?"

A lot of the models we have been talking about lately have been about people that are educators going to groups, like 411 Seniors or what have you, and creating the interest and the bubbling around. How would you suggest that we approach improved literacy rates for those people? What vehicle would you use?

I. Rootman: You're quite right that having a problem is very motivating. It makes you really try and figure out what you need to know in order to deal with the problem. Maybe we need to have a better understanding of how problem perceptions develop so that we can make sure that people get the information they need when they need it. I would think that going along those lines might be somewhat helpful.

I know that ESL courses are quite helpful to a lot of seniors in terms of being able to improve their literacy in at least the official languages of the country. This Institute of Medicine committee in fact thought this was also a great place to be able to introduce health content. I think there's a need to support the ESL programs and those sorts of things in order to give people who have low levels of literacy an opportunity.

As I said, there's a lot of stigma attached to it, and people sometimes try to hide it. I think professionals need to be sensitive to it so that they can identify where there's a problem and perhaps help people find the services they need in order to deal with it.

L. Mayencourt: I see ESL courses as something that someone would go to rather than it coming to them. I see that that's one of the failings of it. What I'm most interested in is: how do we get the ESL to go to them?

ESL is, for me, the very basic level of literacy in the traditional sense. You can read, you can write, and you can add, subtract — those sorts of things. I view that as a portal. For whatever direction, you'd start from that point. You can go to any kind of literacy. You could go to literacy on fishing or literacy on medications from that point.

How you get that ESL, that base, that portal, to those people…. I don't see that at, say, a college or anything that's got an educational symbol on it, so how do you get that to those seniors?

I. Rootman: Some of the programs I was talking about as examples are trying to do that — to outreach to the community, to try and involve seniors who have low levels of literacy in various kinds of initiatives. That seems to be a good way to get people involved.

I think the one in Nova Scotia, in particular, is quite interesting for how it involved seniors in trying to define what the issues in the community and solutions were and, at the same time, giving them an experience of leadership.

D. Routley: Thank you, Dr. Rootman. You've made a reference to linking demand to literacy. You've made several of them, actually. It reminds me that people didn't invent furnaces until it was cold, not because they thought it might be cold but because it was cold.

Dr. Rubenson yesterday made the same link, saying that increases in technology made demands on literacy gains and that if technology is static, there is less demand on the literacy. We must make better use of people's literacy.

I think of your slide that had Canada with the decreasing levels of literacy from various levels of education. I wonder: maybe the link between cognitive capacity and health is wealth, in a sense — wealth as represented by the job a person has and the demands that it continues to make on their literacy capabilities throughout life.

You also pointed to having a problem making you very motivated. In your mind, is part of our goal here to make literacy relevant to people's lives, to somehow link the demands of their life to their literacy gains? You also referred to first nations women preferring to read culturally sensitive material.

I. Rootman: The answer is yes. Well stated, by the way. I think you made the point as well as I could have that we have to do that.

D. Routley: I just wondered if there were particular avenues we could take for older adults who…. If the assumption that I made were accepted, then how can we, for people of these different groups, provide links to goals in their life? How do we provide that link in a senior person's life and make literacy relevant to them?

I. Rootman: I guess you have to make the initiatives more attractive for people to want to come to them, and I think that's what they were trying to do. In some of these ones I've mentioned, whether or not they'll be successful is a good question, because, as I said, they haven't been evaluated.

But the idea is basically to offer people a carrot to come do something that may, on the surface, not be really related to literacy but can in fact be helpful in terms of dealing with those kinds of issues. I think of the posters in Quebec, for example, where they were just talking about history, but it got them into all kinds of other issues, some of which had to do with literacy.

G. Robertson (Deputy Chair): As we develop the case and, hopefully, build the case for increased resources to address adult literacy in B.C., I keep thinking around the business case. There's no doubt that there's a qualitative and many societal rationales for investing and for increasing adult literacy.

The business case, however. We've heard a number of interesting presentations around economics, skills-shortage related and models in Europe where literacy has made a significant difference economically in countries, and you're bringing up health and health costs.

Your conclusions from the existing research, though, specify that addressing literacy issues may

reduce health care costs. The inference from that is that there are no direct, hard numbers that can be attributed yet, but there are a lot of indicators. Is that accurate?

I. Rootman: That's one of the things this committee took on — looking at the evidence on the costs of low literacy, for example. It discovered that there isn't all that much available.

It did a reanalysis of some data on hospitalizations and found that people with lower levels of literacy tend to put off going to the hospital. When they do, they consume more expensive services. So, in fact, if you could raise literacy, you might make sure they get seen before then and, therefore, reduce the cost.

That particular little study suggested it worked in that case, but there has never been a really good cost-effectiveness study in this area. It's an area that needs to be taken on more seriously, because I think you could make a case that would contribute to the business case.

G. Robertson (Deputy Chair): That seems to represent one of our primary challenges. We look at what sort of scale of investment is most beneficial, is the most prudent way forward. When we keep hearing direct links to productivity in the economy, direct links to health care costs — two of the biggest drivers economically facing us as taxpayers — one wonders: if we're talking about a pot of money that we create to address adult literacy, it could be tenfold, which actually creates a return and an increase in productivity and a decrease in health care costs.

At this point we're having great conversations and presentations inferring these lengths, but at the end of the day we've got to come up with some numbers and a structure around that. Any suggestions for how we bridge that, how we get to find the hard numbers?

I. Rootman: For one thing, I'd get yourself a really good health economist or economist to help you with it. I'm not an economist, but I do know enough to know that this area is fraught with all kinds of difficulties.

For example, if you make the case that people will be healthier and live longer as a result of improved literacy, you don't know what's going to happen at the end of the life cycle, because we also know that people consume more health care services at the end of their lives.

What might be happening is that you're keeping people alive longer and that they're consuming more health care services at that end, unless they simply live up to the biological wall and drop dead at a certain point, which would be a great way to go and very cost-effective for society. But it is complicated.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you, Dr. Rootman. You certainly have shed a great light on one of the mandates we have. I appreciate your presentation, and thank you for coming.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Members, can we reconvene, please? We are marching against time. We have to vacate this room by 12 noon.

For the benefit of the presenters, 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 made available on the committee's website at www.leg.bc.ca/cmt.

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

Members, we are really privileged to have with us this morning Linda Mitchell. Linda Mitchell is the executive director of Literacy B.C., the provincial network of organizations and individuals promoting and supporting literacy and learning. She has developed key literacy initiatives, partnerships and networks throughout the province in workforce education, regional development, practitioner training and learner involvement.

On November 4, 2004, Linda Mitchell was appointed as chair of the Premier's advisory panel on literacy, which presented its interim report on February 22, 2005, identifying eight strategic priorities for action. She also serves on national advisory committees related to literacy and technology, literacy research, health and workforce education, and she is a member of the B.C. Chamber of Commerce education committee.

Mr. Chairman and members of the standing committee — many familiar faces — I really appreciate and am honoured to be here today. I hope you'll forgive me. I feel nervous. I think it was all that about the public thing, because I'm not usually nervous. If you'll forgive me, I'll probably read for a moment, if that's all right.

You've probably heard much of this from other presenters, but just a side comment as well. I am thrilled that this committee has been established. I've been working in this field for almost 40 years, and to see the kind of — is it that awful word? — "synergy" that's happening, when the planets start to align truly, is very exciting for people like me, who have had this as a passion throughout their entire working career.

So just to set the stage. Literacy is a critical issue in British Columbia. It's intergenerational in scope and impact. The latest international adult literacy skills survey — we have numbers now from 2003 that we can compare to a decade ago — indicates that there's been little change over the last decade in any of the OECD countries that participated in the first international survey.

Based on those 2003 results, we now know that 40 percent of adults in British Columbia indeed have low literacy skills, using particularly just prose, although

they tested people on many other domains. Some 17 percent are at the lowest level of literacy. Another 23 percent are at the second level. Only 37 percent of British Columbians are at level three, the level that's felt to be adequate to manage in today's information-based world, and 23 percent are at level four or five, which are the highest levels of literacy.

We continue to have at least 40 percent of our adult population, 16 and over, facing challenges when it comes to understanding and using information in their workplace, at home and in their communities. The potential effect on future generations of not doing anything about this is staggering to consider.

For individuals, the presence or absence of literacy greatly influences the range of opportunities available to them and their ability to participate meaningfully in all aspects of life. Too many people in our province are at risk of being excluded from the opportunities and the gifts that lifelong learning can give them.

I've been asked to speak to you briefly about Literacy B.C., and I will try and be brief. I'm really conscious of some gong that's going to go off after about 15 minutes so that we can ask questions.

I'll try to be as brief as possible. I was asked to speak, first of all, about our organization and some of the innovation and programs and projects we are undertaking and then to speak to you about the panel. Is this correct? Are we on the right page? Good.

Literacy B.C. is the provincial literacy organization that promotes and supports literacy and learning in B.C. The very heartbeat of our organization is to act as a catalyst for broad-sector partnership development, community capacity-building and the integration of literacy and lifelong learning across all sectors in our province and all levels of government.

We were founded in 1990, some 16 years ago — and, as I was telling John — almost virtually at my dining room table. Our organization is the go-to organization when it comes to literacy in B.C. We have a staff of six and a half. We are all women. Our annual budget is just over $2 million.

If you need to know more about our financial situation and sources, I'd certainly be happy to answer questions about that. The financial statements to year-end, March 2005, are in the information kit that you have there, which I hope you'll take home for bedtime reading.

At the very heart of any organization, of course, are the values and principles that govern its activities, and at Literacy B.C. we believe literacy is a human right. We believe in universal access to literacy programs and that literacy services and programs must be based on community need. We encourage, value and promote partnerships with other organizations, sectors, local and regional networks; best practice in literacy and lifelong learning; and the creation of new knowledge through research.

I'm just going to run briefly through some of our key activities. The first and foremost, and I think kind of the foundation, is the notion of supporting adult learners and their families. It's key to our mandate. In 1990 the first-ever provincial toll-free literacy referral line in Canada began right here in B.C. Our Literacy B.C. Learn line, which is 1-800-663-1293, is a confidential and sensitive referral service where people can call and find out what's available in their community for themselves or their families and receive sound advice about what next they could or should do about engaging in learning.

Over time, while we started our organization with very much a focus on adult learners, it has grown to include parents and families and those concerned. We've just been growing with the flow. It's quite remarkable.

Our experience with this Learn line led us to conduct the first-ever provincial research project on callers to our line. We did eight-month, in-depth research on people who called, finding out what the barriers were and what was motivating them, to try and assist government and ourselves with what will be sound policy decisions around ensuring that people have access.

We were then part of a national study called Why Aren't They Calling? and another one called Who Wants to Learn? I've left copies for Josie. It's very interesting when we start to talk about what the barriers are.

Why not engagement? The very fact that upwards of, maybe, 10 percent of eligible adults we might know who need and want learning opportunities…. That's all who actually access them.

We also have a bursary program, and we provide funding support to community-based organizations for emergency funds, because many of the students who attend, of course, are on very limited incomes. They might live north of Golden, and it's 40 miles, and they haven't got enough money for gas in the car to come to their class. Through this fund, the centres are able to give students that kind of access. We'd like to see it much larger than it is.

Another key area of activity, of course, has been our promotion and support for family literacy. Often, we view our organization as a room where people can stand in, no matter what, and so in developing and supporting family literacy as a powerful initiative in the province, our organization has taken a huge leadership role. We are the lead organization when it comes to family literacy development and coordination and have done that since 1997.

The key services. Again, the full text of this gives you the full menu of all of the things that we…. Many of you've been in the room for some of what we do around family literacy. The foundation is, of course, to raise awareness and provide leadership in the promotion of the notion of families and literacy and the importance of it in everyone's life.

We provide training for existing and new family and literacy program practitioners and coordinators. We do a lot of consultation with people in communities as they begin to develop programs, and we provide resources to them and consultation about how best to go about it. Our 1-800 line and our website are key to those. Of course, we provide electronic networking and training for all of the people who are involved in family literacy in the province.

Our very key initiative is that we've brought together 30 stakeholder groups, including all the key ministries, to form a family literacy provincial advisory committee. They are at the very edge of developing a long-term strategic plan for family and literacy development in our province, which I think will greatly inform the province as we go forward.

Another key part of what we do has to do with what we call regional coordination and development: trying to bring our services and the notion of network training, partnership-building and promotion closer to home.

Since 1997 we have funded, through projects, 13 coordinators across the province, and these coordinators provide leadership and support in those key areas within their regions. They also have been key in supporting and helping to promote the Literacy Now initiative, which you may or may not have heard about. There is a Q and A in that folder that relates to that.

So we've been melding, if you will, some of the leadership and coordination we've provided around regional coordination, training and development with this new initiative, hooked to 2010, around planning for literacy at the community level.

On a provincial level, we also do a fair degree of training and professional development, so every other year we do a summer institute. It's two weeks on topics that are of interest to the field and to help promote best practice.

We do regional training events and provincial conferences, and we also house the electronic network for the province so that practitioners have access to one another to share information, resources, research and on-line web-based conferencing.

A big issue in our province, as you know, is isolation. One of the things, when our organization was first founded, was the voice from afar — the rural areas — needing and wanting to be connected. We've worked very hard to bring as much as we can closer to home.

Of course, we have the provincial resource centre, which is our lending library, and again, it's available on line. It is accessed by practitioners, researchers, policy-makers and others.

Another key part of our mandate, of course, is to help government persuasion, as I call it. Through our practice, through our networks and through the voice that learners, practitioners and people in business and other groups bring to us, we work with government to inform them about how policy could change so that some of the barriers that are in the way can be removed. Over time we've done a fair amount around that, and I think, as I say, that things are looking up.

We're also very, very involved on a federal level, moving forward with the pan-Canadian strategy on literacy. We can be thankful, I think, to our Premier, who has shown leadership both at the Council of the Federation and the Council of Ministers of Education Canada around getting literacy on those agendas and made a priority area.

While we've had a change in government federally, we're ever hopeful that the pan-Canadian strategy around adult learning, getting more systematic about it and having stronger interprovincial-federal relations around it — always a challenge — will move forward.

Briefly, on some of the innovative things we are doing — we believe all of it is — that you may be interested in, one is what we call the national youth literacy demonstration project. We're working closely with Surrey school district in doing research and demonstration around what works in re-engaging in learning the kids who are hugely at risk — age 14 to 16 or 17 — and having them ready for moving either into an alternate education program or back into a mainstream program. It has been hugely successful.

One of the key things around kids at this age is that they're very disengaged. Through this new model, the kids who were in the research part of this were mostly at 80 percent non-attending. After year one, they were at 90 percent attending. I mean, that in itself is a stunning result.

The program has been hugely successful. It's now base-funded within Surrey district, and our hope, as we promote and disseminate — there will be a website with resources for practitioners, and so on — is that it will be replicated in other parts of the province. We're trying to put the resources and our learning in the hands of other districts so that they might move forward.

Back to the groundwork. In 2002 we did something called a provincial consultation, which was really the first time we went out. We were in 43 communities and talked to more than 700 people about literacy and learning in B.C. In many ways, really, many of the recommendations that were there have become part of what is next, which is the panel, and with more momentum. Enough said.

Another initiative that is particularly helping move the agenda forward is our partnership with the Britannia Community Centre and 28 other partners in what's called the Canucks Family Education Centre.

It's another research-and-demonstration project around the implementation of the four-component approach to families, adults and learning. Again, your full text gives you lots of detail around it. We're very proud of it. It's completing year two and going into year three.

The research is being undertaken with two universities, and there are powerful partnerships with the Human Early Learning Partnership — I'm sure you're all aware of Dr. Hertzman — and the other community partners. Again, we'll be looking to the research to demonstrate — to prove to taxpayers and everyone else — that these are models that work and that this is the way to make the investment that will make a difference in people's lives.

Another initiative we are honoured to be part of to encourage the notion of learning communities. We've been leading a partnership around Vancouver as a learning city in time for 2010. As the host city for the Olympics, of course, it would be significant — and is significant — that Vancouver actually has taken up the challenge and is preparing to become a learning city by 2010. A working group is hard at work in moving that agenda forward. If the committee is interested, the first report is out, and we could make that available. Again, there's more information in the full-text document.

Another area is around research, and specifically, research in practice. Currently, we are the home, and proudly so, for a growing provincial literacy and research practice network. In fact, B.C. is at the forefront in developing research in adult literacy practice in Canada.

Our support extends to the national level where, in partnership with a national steering committee, Literacy B.C. is managing a project to develop a framework for research in practice for adult literacy in Canada.

Another groundbreaking piece of research has to do with the world we're in now, where it's all about performance indicators, outcomes and all those kinds of things. In an effort to get ahead of having it happen to us, we've begun a project that will train practitioners in the notion of measuring outcomes and supporting the development of creative and unique evaluation tools that can be used in the field. Those will be in place by September. So that's another one.

I'm going to move on and talk about the panel. Would you like us to stop and have questions about our organization?

J. Nuraney (Chair): What's the preference, members? Do you want to stop here or let her finish and then we'll come back?

J. Rustad: Knowing the length of questions we have, it would take up the rest of the time.

L. Mitchell: So I shouldn't let you in? Well, if you have to get out of this room, you can come to our office. It's right next door. This is heartily my favourite topic — right? I could talk about it for days on end, I'm sure.

As the Chair mentioned, in November 2004 the Premier appointed the panel, which I've had the privilege of chairing since that time. The panel's mandate, oddly enough — or serendipitously, if that's a word — is very similar to the mandate of this committee: in other words, to assess the literacy challenges in British Columbia, including the groups whose needs are most unmet, and to develop recommendations for a provincial literacy framework and action.

The panel met — a lot — from November until February, because the Premier said we needed something as soon as possible. A very dedicated group, I might say, from a wide range of our public, if you will. We worked really hard and created what we believe is a very exhaustive report — the interim report, which Josie has copies of.

What stunned the panel, particularly, was that there had been in the past decade 240 recommendations that relate to how we might move this issue forward, none of which had been acted on. Enough said.

In February 2004 we were invited to meet with the Premier and personally present the report to him. I'm just going to hit a few of the highlights, unless you'd rather I didn't because they are embedded in your psyches.

The report is subtitled A Legacy of Leadership because there was leadership being shown, and it was unique and compelling and important, but also because despite the best efforts of many decades, the need for urgent and bold action was required if we were indeed to meet the stated goal from the throne speech 2004 and again in 2005 that we become the most literate — that was 2004 — jurisdiction on the continent. As of 2005, it's most literate and best-educated, so the challenge has increased, I think.

The challenge before the government, of course, is to lead the action. As you well know, it's a very diverse and complex issue requiring interrelated strategies, and this coherent provincial literacy framework is key and will work only if there is support by increased investment and accountability.

Again, the panel applauded and was pleased that the government had taken such leadership and confirmed that there is, indeed, a compelling case — again, those reasons are listed — and that much had actually been done. A lot was in place to further literacy and learning in British Columbia.

In other words, we're well-positioned. There's a solid foundation around our results in terms of PISA, the foundation skills assessment, high school completion rates, though it certainly doesn't get underneath it in terms of the at-risk populations. The panel talks a great deal about those. About our spending per student and so on, and the fact that there is an EDI instrument that's being used. The panel again very much took the life stages approach. It was the best way to look at this issue.

While there is a firm foundation on which to build and a strong will, certainly, on the part of government

and communities, there's a lot of need for diverse strategies for intervention. Again, they stated that many of these recommendations the panel made are not new.

The panel identified six principles — this was an interesting way to go about it — which should become the foundation or the underlay for any approach that government might take — that is, the position of literacy as an issue for all of us. It's complex. It's not about who has and who hasn't. It affects every single one of us.

There is a link between literacy and lifelong learning. Literacy isn't about: "Now you're done, because you can read." There's no one point when you're done. I think it's key that we're actually making this connection about literacy and lifelong learning. They're joined. It isn't that you're finished.

Another principle is to take a collaborative approach — this is to foster and facilitate collaboration at all levels — to build on existing strengths and capacities. There's a tremendous amount of excellent work that has been done around literacy and lifelong learning in our province. We just need to build on those assets.

That brings us to the next one, which is to overcome the knowing-doing gap. We know what to do. The research is there. We have the knowledge to make a difference in the lives of people so that no one gets left behind, so we can develop this framework. We do not need to do more research. We know what to do.

We need to support individual initiatives, mostly through social marketing — it's the story that it's about all of us — to convince young people and parents and adults to act proactively and responsibly on their own behalf and on behalf of their children, their friends, their neighbours. But the necessary services must be in place.

In other words, you can't have a call to action — "Please come" — if there's nothing there to meet people's needs. This is so key. This is a gap, absolutely, that we have around meeting people's needs in the rhythm of their lives — in the place and time, not from one to three on a Tuesday and a Thursday, that's in the rhythm of their lives.

The panel, then, made nine recommendations. To ramp up the provincial government's leadership. In other words, we've had leadership and had words since 2004. Now we really need to get some momentum and action behind it.

We need to construct this overall framework of outcomes and strategies for literacy and lifelong learning.

We must have outcome-based accountability, and we need to build that into the framework. The panel at the time made a recommendation for a single lead ministry or agency that would ultimately be held responsible. When we get to our final bit, we'll tell you more about that, because it's something that has actually happened.

There's a recommendation to strengthen the interministerial collaboration. We all know about silos and that, because literacy is a crosscutting issue and because the notion of using the literacy lens across all policy areas so that policy built in one place is not hurting policy in another, this interministerial collaboration is key. And of course to develop, within each of the purviews of these ministries, coherent strategies for children, for youth and for adults.

We need to build public awareness and engage public support. We need to prove to the public that investing in this, personally and as taxpayers in British Columbia, is worthwhile to each and every one of us.

And of course, the one that probably nobody wants to hear about: there's a need to increase the magnitude of investment if, indeed, we are to become the most literate, best-educated jurisdiction on the continent. Originally, it was 2010. I think it's getting pushed to 2015, but even at that, current levels of funding are inadequate.

Now, that was where the panel was at the end of February. We were told there would be "an official response from government post haste." As you all know, there was in the meantime an election in May last year, and then there was a fair amount of ministry reorganization.

In fact, a lead ministry was appointed. The panel had previously had as its support the Ministry of Advanced Education. It was moved to the Ministry of Education. We have yet, frankly, to have an official response from government, as a panel. However, we have finally, in February of this year, 2006, met with the people from the Ministries of Education and Advanced Education.

The interim report, of course, internally has been used extensively as they moved forward on all their interministerial committees and collaboration. The social ministers are meeting, and I gather, as we understand it, that the development of a plan or a framework is in the works.

Following that meeting with the ministry officials, the panel met again last month and kind of put endnotes to the interim report. We have not had any response to that, so I'll just briefly tell you some of what was in those final recommendations.

First of all, the panel recognized and acknowledged the actions of the Premier and the government over the past 13 months in its response to the interim report and in beginning to act on some of the recommendations. That would include the decision by the Premier to delegate the overall provincial government leadership role on literacy and lifelong learning to a single ministry, the Ministry of Education.

Now, on to the formation of this committee, with a direct focus on adult literacy and, specifically, strategies related to aboriginal peoples, English-as-a-second-language adults and seniors. The creation of a senior-level literacy unit within the Ministry of Education. We — being Literacy B.C. and Literacy Now — have been working particularly closely with them. There is an interministerial committee on literacy. The deputy ministers of social ministries are apparently focusing some

of their attention on literacy and particularly the needs of the at-risk groups.

There's the work of the Ministry of Advanced Education in reviewing the adult literacy strategy, programs and funding arrangements, certainly the ongoing work of Literacy Now in supporting community-based literacy planning, and the work that's apparently underway within the literacy unit in developing a provincial literacy plan and framework.

The panel was pleased that both ministries were willing to meet with us and talk.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Ms. Mitchell, could I ask you to wrap up in two minutes so that we can get enough time for questioning, please?

Basically, the panel went on to make some final recommendations. They believe that there needs to be some acceleration, that literacy must get an even higher priority than it has, and that immediate leadership action and momentum are essential if we're to meet the goal. The panel believes that without significantly increasing an ongoing investment in both public and community approaches, the goal will not be achieved.

Particularly, there has been neglect of, or there is a need for, an increase in investment in local, community and regional development through regional, public and not-for-profit agencies. Just as an example, our province currently contributes $1.4 million annually through the Ministry of Advanced Education to the community adult literacy grants program. It is the lowest investment in the entire country.

The panel recommends that the provincial government make the development of a strategic action framework for literacy and lifelong learning an urgent and top priority. There must be a focused and long-term investment, and we need to identify and change the government policies that are barriers to individual learning and to community and regional action.

As I mentioned earlier, I believe we're at a time of great change and challenge and opportunity. The leadership on literacy by the Premier and this government is unprecedented and unique, and it must be continued if we are to achieve our goal.

I would suggest to the committee that you need search no further than a careful review and consideration of the panel's recommendations and ensure that government and your fellow members in the Legislature move forward on each and every one of them.

M. Polak: Two quickies on the funding. First, with respect to the example of the $1.4 million, do you know if that's a per-capita comparison with the other provinces?

The other is in terms of an ongoing plan to invest in a working framework. Noting that you, along with other presenters, have highlighted the need for these initiatives to focus on a community and regional basis, how would you see the application of, perhaps, an endowment or a trust or something like that, that would operate outside of your typical annual budget allocations and rather as — I hate to use the word "independent;" it's not the right one, but it's the only one that's coming to my mind — more of an independent entity?

L. Mitchell: I think it's a distinct possibility, provided the initial investment is large enough to actually drive the thing over time. I take your point around line items in budgets that go through an annual "Is it going to stay there, or is it not?" within ministries — or something that would ensure a long-term investment in this community approach, provided it was sufficient.

M. Polak: Yeah. It just seems to me that it's very consistent with what we do in other areas — for example, what we do with the arts and culture and various other areas like that — that one might say are softer areas of government than building bridges or what have you.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Ms. Mitchell, in the past little while we have been hearing reluctance on the part of those who need these services of adult literacy, particularly when it comes to the institutions that are offering it — like Education and Advanced Education.

There are certain stigmas, so to speak, attached to these titles of ministries and the delivery of services through those ministries to those people who need it. As I said, there is reluctance on people who are coming to these kinds of programs, which are sponsored by the Ministry of Education or Advanced Education.

Do you see an alternative to this as to having an altogether separate vein that would have these kinds of programs offered so that people are more keen to come into these kinds of things?

L. Mitchell: I think when we make reference to a community approach, as I said earlier about having learning opportunities available in the rhythm of learners' lives and being able to…. There are many exemplary programs that are community based that are not tied to an institution.

They may be bridges to an institution or to people wanting to get accredited in a certain something. But to be able to have people get caught in learning and enjoying it, in many different venues — I think that's at the essence of it. We need to expand that sort of learning opportunities that are available.

Now, families and learning is an enormous area of opportunity, because people who have children want their children to do well, particularly if they've struggled. They want to be able to help them, and we're finding a high level of engagement there. That can be very much a community-based thing.

Also, there are a lot of programs where it's one-on-one, because again, the adult may be pretty reluctant to show up at an institution, but they'll sit at the library with someone and spend some time learning what they think they want to learn just at that time.

What we want to do is to be able to have as many opportunities as possible to catch people and engage them, so they can, if they want, take the opportunity of continuing to learn. Then all the other systems we have in place are theirs.

J. Nuraney (Chair): It is, because there is such a very large spectrum of different ideas. One of the questions I have in my mind is: how do we deliver when there is such a large area of requirements and needs out there? There cannot be a fixed, constrained model, because as you said, it has to meet the rhythm of one's life.

One of the good suggestions that was made earlier on was that rather than calling it a learning process, if you were to say it was developing leadership skills, which would then translate into literacy…. So those are some of these old, traditional stigmas attached to, perhaps, people's comfort.

L. Mitchell: This is where the social marketing piece can come in on how the story gets told. How we capture people, as well. Needless to say, if you are 34 years old and left school early for whatever reason, and you now have children, you know that the next thing that's happening to you is that you're going to have to go on that computer. You don't have a notion about it, and in your workplace, there's nowhere to help.

It's another huge area. We don't have workplaces that have learning embedded in their culture. We have a huge job to do, not only with convincing people that coming back to learning can be fun and engaging and so on. It's to get some other sectors engaged in providing learning, as well, not just the public institutions.

L. Mayencourt: One of the things we saw yesterday, Linda, was from Cap College, where they were working with the Canadian Union of Public Employees, various locals, to incorporate education into the workplace.

I can see a lot of that having great merit, but how do you control the quality? If you've got a million little schools or education centres around the province…. Let's say they just do — I don't know — workplaces with 50 and more employees, for example. How do you ensure the quality of the instruction and the relevance of the materials?

L. Mitchell: I think that's through the development of a framework. One of the legs of the table is this outcomes-and-accountability framework. You would want to encourage it both in the private and public sector through some kind of incentive…. For example, in Britain, voluntarily, both private and public sector people who engage in some kind of learning development for their workforce or for their clients or whatever, get to apply for a Q-mark — a quality mark. They're proud of it, because they're guaranteeing to the student and to the public and to themselves that they're meeting certain standards. There are many ways to have that.

For example, we have developed a framework around best practice in family literacy. It's what's used by family literacy programs as the guide. I think that while you couldn't…. If it's publicly funded, then government, I guess, gets to say: "Okay, you're going to line up this way, or you don't get your money." That's one way.

If it's less formal, then through organizations like ours and so on, as people are coming to a central organization for training and development and program development, you'd be encouraging those best practices.

L. Mayencourt: With the work you're doing with Britannia.…? See, I look at Britannia as sort of a campus of a whole bunch of community social initiatives coming together and all that sort of stuff. I can see that the programs there fit into that kind of milieu. Are there other similar places where we could be doing this in B.C.?

L. Mitchell: I think one model — and I know you're familiar with it, sir, because you've heard a presentation about it — is the Columbia Basin Alliance for Literacy. They actually won the first-ever B.C. Council of the Federation award. It's an example of how, regionally — and it's two regions; it's the east and west Kootenays, and there's a mountain range in between — people can come together and plan and deliver on the literacy and learning needs of the people in their communities in a cohesive way.

They're planning and delivering and monitoring and evaluating and planning again. In a perfect world, if we had that kind of regional planning model, where that was happening in the various regions of the province, we truly could move mountains.

J. Rustad: There's just one question that I have, and I guess it's more based on your history. You've been involved in this for 40 years now — or roughly, give or take a few — and I commend you for that, however long it is.

L. Mitchell: I'm terrible at math, but I know I'm going to get a gold card really soon.

J. Rustad: The question I have is: other than the introduction of technology, how have things changed in the time that you have been in this process? What have you seen in terms of the changes that have moved forward? I don't mean so much specific projects, but just in general approaches.

L. Mitchell: There has not been a lot of change. There has been a huge amount of change. Let me start with the positive.

In terms of children — zero to three and grades four through seven, particularly — our province should be proud of how it is moving forward on investing in kids.

In terms of adults — if anything, there has been deterioration in both services and access and the number of barriers we have put in front of people. If anything, if we really believed that having people have the opportunity, both socially and economically, to…. It's terrible.

I think the other piece is that we've gone through free tuition and not, within the Ministry of Advanced Education. People at the lowest levels of literacy, I think, in most…. Because colleges are block-funded now, there's not the same control over it. People at the beginning levels of literacy don't have to pay tuition, but they have to pay student fees and so on. Many of them are poor.

The current policy is that if you're in receipt of income assistance — any kind of income assistance — you can't go to school.

J. Rustad: What I was actually trying to get at was more the methodologies that are being used in the approaches of education. I understand there's the other side; that has been articulated well, but in terms of methodologies that you've used going forward, like I say, other than the introduction of technology over the last number of years, has there been much change? What sort of changes have you seen?

L. Mitchell: I'm not an expert at the actual delivery, but the introduction of technology would be large in the picture. Beyond that, I feel uncomfortable because I'm not an actual practitioner. I'm not in the classroom or in a teaching situation, so I'm not really aware of how the resources or methods of delivery have changed.

D. Routley: Very quickly. One of the threads that has been woven through all of these presentations is a call for more resources, more investment. But before I go to that, I'd like to say I congratulate you on the work you've done. It's really astonishing to see all these programs developed with the resources you've had. The number that you gave, from 80 percent non-enrolling and 90 percent non-attending to 90 percent attending after one year, is truly astonishing.

You referred to the stated goal of the throne speech — the stated goal, the words that we want to be the most literate, best-educated province — and the Premier saying he wants something as soon as possible. The recommendations, on the other hand, none of which have been acted on…. Then you refer to the level of spending at $1.4 million being the lowest of any province.

Could you tell us what level of funding we would need to provide to be the highest level of funding? If the link can be made between being the most literate province to being the highest-funded province when it comes to literacy…. If we could make that link, where would we have to be? How much investment would we have to make?

L. Mitchell: To begin with, just to clarify, some of the panel's recommendations have actually been acted upon.

Secondly, the panel really did not employ nor have the time initially to have an economist…. We were not able to get under the numbers well enough, for sure. I need to say that those numbers are based on yearly grants to community orgs, not what the government spends in the K-to-12 system for continuing education or advanced education.

I know that through the Council of Ministers of Education, they were trying to do a comparison across provinces, and I think the provinces maybe don't like to fess up to each other — I don't know — but we've not been able to get the comparative data at all. It's work that needs to be done, quite frankly. One of the recommendations is that there be the spending analysis done.

Boy, I just hate to say out loud what I believe. The panel did make a recommendation. These community-based organizations — because that's on that community side — like our organization, live or die by what I call drive-by funding. You apply for it every blinking year and hope that you're going to be able to have the door open, that those families or those adults who've been coming are actually going to be able to come again in September. It's a disgrace, frankly.

Again, the panel is recommending two- and three-year funding so that there's some continuity in program delivery and sustainability and all those kinds of things. Much of the work our organization does, for example, comes from the federal government, from the National Literacy Secretariat. Less than 12 percent of our budget is from this government, and yet much of the work that we do as an organization is the work that's normally done by a provincial ministry.

I feel uncomfortable. We have made a dollar recommendation to the Premier, but it's not…. I don't know what to say to you, but somewhere around $40 million or $50 million would work.

J. Nuraney (Chair): We are coming very close to the closing of our session. Just a quick question that has not been addressed yet: do you see the needs of the first nations as a separate delivery model, or is it a part of your general strategy?

L. Mitchell: We very much see it as part of the overall agenda strategy. That's not to say that there wouldn't be a specific framework that is appropriate for aboriginal persons, much as a framework for family literacy is being developed. I think there can be components within, but I guess to fit within an overarching strategy for all….

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you, Ms. Mitchell. I know you have taken good time out of your busy schedule, and we really appreciate that.

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