Education — Issue No. 10 — Thursday, September 28, 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

Chair:	* John Nuraney (Burnaby-Willingdon L)
Deputy Chair:	Vacant
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) * David Cubberley (Saanich South NDP) * Rob Fleming (Victoria-Hillside NDP) Norm Macdonald (Columbia River–Revelstoke NDP) * Doug Routley (Cowichan-Ladysmith NDP) * denotes member present


Witnesses:	Dr. Satya Brink (Human Resources and Skills Development Canada) Barry Brooks (Tribal: CTAD Consultancy Services) Monty Palmantier (University of Northern British Columbia) Prof. Graham Hingangaroa Smith (University of Auckland; University of British Columbia) Dr. Frank Wood (Wake Forest University Health Sciences)

J. Nuraney (Chair): Before we begin the proceedings, I would like to make an announcement that we've had some changes on our committee. In place of Gregor Robertson, John Horgan and Diane Thorne, we now have Rob Fleming for Victoria-Hillside, David Cubberley for Saanich South and Norm Macdonald for Columbia River–Revelstoke — the new members who will be joining this committee. I look forward to working with all of them. I'm counting on their expertise. Let me offer our warm welcome to our new members on our committee.

Ladies and gentlemen, on February 20, 2006, the Legislative Assembly agreed that the Select Standing Committee on Education be empowered to examine, inquire into and make recommendations with respect to finding effective strategies to address the specific challenges of adult literacy; and, in particular, to conduct consultations to consider successful strategies from other jurisdictions on the promotion of adult literacy; and specific strategies to improve literacy rates among aboriginal people, English-as-a-second-language adults and seniors.

In addition to the powers previously conferred upon the Select Standing Committee on Education, the committee shall be empowered to appoint of their number one or more subcommittees and to refer to such subcommittees any of the matters referred to the committee; to sit during a period in which the House is adjourned and during any sitting of the House; to adjourn from place to place as may be convenient; to retain such personnel as required to assist the committee; and shall report to the House not later than November 30, 2006, to deposit the original of its report to the Clerk of the Legislative Assembly during a period of adjournment. Upon resumption of the sittings of the House, the Chair shall present all reports to the Legislative Assembly.

I am very pleased to say that we have a number of presenters this morning, beginning with Prof. Graham Hingangaroa Smith.

Welcome, Professor. We look forward to listening to your comments. Please proceed.

G. Smith: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Thank you, members of the select committee, for the invitation to be here. I do speak with a strange accent, so please, if you don't understand anything, let me know, and I can repeat.

I'm pleased to be here for two reasons. One is that the issues at hand, in fact, intersect with a lot of the work that I've done previously, so I do have some background and knowledge in this field. Second is the very serious context in which we are all working at the moment in terms of, and specifically attempting to address with respect to, the needs of aboriginal learners — in this case in terms of adult literacy but more widely, perhaps, in terms of what I would describe as a crisis that's abroad in education across the province.

I'm going to present a series of slides from a PowerPoint presentation. Some of those slides are merely pictures to give you the impression, and I won't spend too much time on explaining all the details in the actual presentation. So while you have the documentation in front of you, which details perhaps quite a large and complicated presentation, I will attempt to simplify it for you and pick out those bits that I think are most important.

Let me begin, then. My background is there, and I put that on record as a means to underpin the things that I want to share with you. Probably most important to underline is the fact that I've held a position as deputy-chair of the New Zealand Council for Educational Research. I have come from a department that has been very strong in all aspects of reading, which has had a huge impact internationally, including sharing an office precinct with Dame Marie Clay, who is well known for her reading recovery work; Tom Nicholson, who works in the area of phonetics; Stuart McNaughton; Bronwyn Yates, a student of mine who now heads ALA, the Adult Literacy Association in New Zealand. So I have a number of intersections with this particular issue.

In laying out the parameters of where I want to move this afternoon in my sharing with you, I want to raise a number of questions and points. The first question really relates to the issue of taking literacy in its broadest sense. While we are called to attention to focus on adult literacy — and I fully understand what that encompasses and what is the traditional way of responding and engaging with that particular disciplinary or academic focus area — I want to broaden the discussion. I think when we put the adjective "aboriginal" in front of literacy, it immediately ought to call our attention to a much wider issue. A much wider issue, of course, is to consider the education system and its various components in the round.

That's where I'm moving on that whole terrain. But I just want you to know that I do know. I'm not moving broadly because I don't know what the objective is here; it's simply that I think it's critical to see the intersection of a wider set of issues that relate to adult literacy as it plays out in terms of high and disproportionate levels of aboriginals who are affected by this.

The question of whose literacy and illiteracy invokes a whole range of different views in the way in which we might consider this issue. Also, literacy, from indigenous perspectives, is often considered as colonization, because in a sense often the programs that we're suggesting continue to project the same old formulas that have got it wrong before — that there's nothing really new in what we're trying to do. So the question of colonization and assimilation, I think, needs to be an

index against which we are reflecting on the so-called new approaches in this arena.

The issue of positive spending versus negative spending. Because part of my background is in economics, I'm concerned about this question as well: the extent to which, in terms of the public spend, we are developing a reactive negative spend when, in fact, part of this issue might well be solved by a more heavily weighted proactive spend in the education arena, more broadly speaking. I'm going to be canvassing that kind of issue as we go through.

The prior element of schooling — the pre facto as opposed to post facto ideas related to literacy.

Learning community. I'm going to talk a little bit about learning community because that has been a major point of intervention in the strategies in the New Zealand context. That is, it's not a question of attacking education, schooling and learning with individuals but very much of seeing that those individuals belong to communities and that the community…. Often there is an integral connection between community and individual in terms of the opportunities — if you like, the life chances of success — in relation to learning.

How do we develop interventions that reach beyond the individual and also impact the socioeconomic conditions of the community? It's a very big question, and often, when we focus on one particular issue, we forget to address the broader aspects.

In projecting the idea of learning community…. Again, I want to say that I know the literature that's been written around learning community. A lot of that literature is not what I'm talking about. It's actually a new idea related to indigenous communities.

Just to belabour this point a little bit more and to make it more exact, I think, I would like to say that as a generalization, the way to make change — in reserve schools, for example, taking the Canadian situation — is not just a question of focusing on changing the school but on changing the whole reserve community. How do you do that? And what might be some strategies that allow that whole community to take up the issue of educational intervention positively?

Wananga, the word written there at point 6, is a tribal university model in New Zealand. We have three of them.

You may know the story. Last year one of those institutions, which was the largest institution in New Zealand, was forced to cut its numbers in half by a government decree, the reason being that the drawdown on government funding for university places was so high, and because they covered a wider spectrum of student population, it was felt that they needed to be more precise in what they were teaching and who they were teaching and so on. No one stopped to ask the question: why are all these students in fact enrolling in this institution? I would hold up many elements of that tribal university infrastructure as an intervention potential here in Canada.

Innovation, transformation, political literacy are key points. Culture and identity are conduits to learning.

Let's move on. Quickly I'm going to share insights from New Zealand. We do have a lot in common, although I understand profoundly the differences between B.C. and New Zealand. New Zealand has one language. We have a treaty, and so on. Here we have 33 languages, a very complex situation.

It's not an excuse in B.C. to do nothing. It just simply creates a different context to which we need to respond and to develop our responses.

We share the Pacific. The Pacific is a connector between many nations around the Pacific Rim. We share the Captain Cook legacy — both positive and negative, from different points of view. But in a sense, we share that heritage as well.

Okay, a major point. My platform is basically that the status quo is not working a hell of a well. Therefore, it should behoove the next question, which is: what do we do about it, and how do we make change? That's not to diminish the well-meaning effort that's going in. I want to acknowledge that many people are working very hard and doing things, but the sum total of all of our efforts so far is that it's not really having the major impact we need it to have.

Indigenous people have a particular view of education, more broadly, and I think we understand that. In particular, I've focused, because we're talking about adult education…. Although I understand the pipeline to K-to-12 and preschool education, and indeed, interventions in the home and in the family component, higher education, I think, is very much underdeveloped in this province. I think that we have a problem here because, in my view, there is still ignorance in the institutions about owning up to this issue.

I think that higher education is an important area to start from. I acknowledge that I'm talking now — because I can see the minds clicking — about a top-down strategy, and that this might be elite and so on. I'll address that issue as we go on, and why in New Zealand we've actually deliberately chosen one of our major interventions to occur at the very highest level, in the university sector.

To cut to the quick. The socioeconomic revolution of the first nations communities, of the indigenous communities, is contingent on a prior revolution that must occur in education, schooling, learning — whatever you want to name it. We can't talk about the socioeconomic revolution if we haven't addressed that. It's not sustainable, and so on.

In Canada. I don't want to dwell on this, and I don't want to sound negative, but Canada is an outstanding country. It performs to the highest level for the majority of the population. When we look at the World Bank indicators for potential for the knowledge economy, in most of those indicators Canada is in the top ten of those rankings.

If we start looking more precisely…. I've taken this first nations on-reserve figure from the AFN website. I've done some breakdown of these figures. On-reserve is 48th, which is getting down near what we would…. I don't want to create categories either about different

countries, but it's sort of in the Fourth World arena. The reason we've got this select committee is that we don't want to countenance that in a Canada that, for the most part, is doing well and is a pretty wealthy place.

Just to go back to this point here. The relationship between more self-determination…. I prefer the term "self-determining" because it's active. It means people are participating in developing change for themselves. This is not the Hayek and Chicago School model that I'm talking about here, although I'm well aware of the self-managing schools and the neo-liberal formation of economic autonomy, and things like that. I'm talking about a different form of being self-determining. Some of it is involved in controlling, if you like, key decision-making around economics and so on.

Lots of people have picked up on this in the Harvard project. You can read that for yourselves at your leisure.

A key point I want to make today is: the way in which we've made ground in New Zealand is that we've come to clearly understand, I think, what we call new formations of colonization. If colonization is a problem, then we need to understand that the old script and the old literacies, if you like, that we understood as forming colonization — the schools did it to us, the churches did it to us, and the state did it to us — are the old way of talking about this. Colonization, in my view, hasn't gone away. It's simply changed form.

If we want to respond to this and to make ground, we really need to understand what the new formations are and how these are being developed so that we can take account of them.

Deficit theory. I don't really want to spend much time on this, because it's well-documented and written about, but we really need to, in the context of B.C., because in my movement around the province, I've still come across a lot of managers who were actually schooled in this kind of theory, of this understanding — the explanation for why aboriginals are underachieving, that there's something wrong with the aboriginal students with their culture and so on, families, etc. All of this leads to diminished life chances, lower employment opportunities. It exacerbates itself in a cumulative cycle of low educational achievement and so forth.

Deficit theory. There are some aspects which are true, they hold true, and you can't make a generic blanket statement about this. But I just want to raise the critical issue that deficit theory, as an explanation, needs to be thought about very carefully and interrogated. We need to think about what adult literacy means in this sense. Are the strategies we're using positive, or are they, in fact, actually focused and based on deficit theory?

The more insidious model, in my view, is what's called self-esteem theory. Self-esteem theory, again, has been interrogated in the New Zealand context, because it's very seductive. On the surface it looks appealing. Basically, it says that if we can value culture and develop culture and reflect it back to the students that we're teaching, it's going to create a positive learning environment where kids are going to learn. That's entirely true, absolutely spot on. I've got no problems with that.

It's just that when we…. In Maori context in New Zealand, when we get down to the bottom question of where learning is more likely to occur and ask the critical question, "What learning?" then more often than not in the New Zealand context it's been the same old, taken-for-granted curriculum. All of this stuff has been added on. It's an additive approach to help the same old, in the Maori view, bitter pill go down. It's been about assimilation and the continuance of that. So we need to carefully think about curriculum issues. That's what it's calling our attention to.

What I am arguing is that the new formations of colonization are, basically — in the new neo-liberal context of economics — the intersection of cultural oppression and economic exploitation. I can speak ad nauseam about that. That's the very reason why there's so much focus now on intellectual and cultural property rights and protecting trade maps and various regimes like that, because it's about new knowledge and knowledge prospecting.

Again, I won't dwell on it. I'll just pick a couple of points out of this. In the neo-liberal economic formation, it put this great X on the resizing of the definition of equity. It's a really important point, because basically equity used to mean, in the Keynesian economic model, unequal input for equal outcome. That is, if the ship wasn't balanced you had to give more to one side to make it balanced.

In the neo-liberal economic resizing of equity, it has come to mean that we must treat every citizen exactly the same — otherwise known as the level playing field ideology. What that means is that if the ship is already unbalanced, and we have 20 tonnes on this side and 15 tonnes on this side, in the old model we would have put another five tonnes here and made 20 tonnes on each side. That's called "new funding" in policy-speak.

There's another way of doing this: taking two and a half tonnes off that side and putting it on this side — 17½ tonnes on each side. That's called "redistribution of existing resources" in policy-speak. Or we can apply the level playing field ideology, which basically says: "Okay, let's put five tonnes on that side." But we must treat every citizen exactly the same, so we put another five tonnes on that side. What happens? It remains the same. The level playing field ideology tends to reproduce existing inequalities and maintain the differences in our society.

Not always, but we need to think carefully about…. I'm asking us now to think theoretically about some fundamental issues about the way in which we make our suggestions for innovation. What is the underpinning economic ideology, for example, that might be driving the shape of what we're doing?

Democracy, again, is problematic, and we know that. I'm not saying democracy per se is wrong or problematic. I'm saying that the way in which democracy is sometimes manipulated and so on and applied…. For example: one person, one vote, majority rule. If

you're the only woman sitting at a table of men saying, "Shall we watch the NFL final and not do the meeting?" there is a good chance we'll watch the NFL final — the same with aboriginal students or student aboriginal interests.

Point two: theorizing educational transformation. I'm going to do a bit of zipping here so that I can catch up. In New Zealand a key issue for us has been to understand that it's not working and that we need to make change. But more than that, we need to profoundly understand transformation — how you get transformation, what counts as transformation and how you do it — and really focus on that as an issue. That's really important.

This comes directly out of my own research, but basically, we're arguing against two models of policy development and strategies for change. One is what we call linear development — very instrumental. The problem with this is it perceives that things proceed instrumentally — do this; it'll give you this, which will lead to that. It creates hierarchies in terms of approach — that somehow this model is more important than this other model, and so on. It is often developed as one-off strategies in terms of the silver bullet, one-size-fits-all type of model of change.

What many of us are saying in the New Zealand context is that we need to understand that the development of change for Maori is not one singular issue. There are many things that need to be engaged with simultaneously. Change is not one element. We need to see the whole as much as we need to see the individual activity or strategy that we're applying.

I'll just raise that as an issue. I can speak more about that, but with respect to the idea of adult literacy in aboriginals, the extent to which we are actually viewing the whole is part of this context. We've also developed some really innovative pedagogies for change, strategies for changing inside out. I'll just give you a couple here again.

Vertical and horizontal change: the idea that aboriginals, Maori in New Zealand, are struggling to develop some change that I call vertical emphasis, which is about issues related to Maori by Maori in Maori interests for Maori, etc. — going this way. But there is also the need to develop what we call horizontal change, which is about the integration of society and about working with others.

In any institution the same thing operates. We have aboriginal programming and courses for aboriginals and doing this, but you can't run that in an institution where you're sharing with other people if you're not also doing this. It's about the balance between horizontal and vertical planes in making change. I think we need to understand that there are often two imperatives operating in a colonized society, and how we make room for this and take account of this needs to be thought about. To ignore it is to get it wrong. We need to respond, but how do we respond, and what's the balance?

The top-down, bottom-up policy change in New Zealand, just to give you a bit more, was focused on developing large numbers of doctoral students. The program we initiated about five years ago, called the MAI program, aimed to develop 500 Maori PhDs in New Zealand in five years. I would say that we have about 470 actually graduated, but we have about another 180 still on the books, still going through the system.

The idea here is to develop a critical mass of PhD-credentialed change-makers who have a critical, cultural, community and transformative consciousness. We do that by putting them into…. We're calling them pods. We have all of these pods set up across New Zealand. It's not about institutions; it's about Maori development. We don't care which institution they're at; they all get support.

One of the strategies we're doing here in B.C., which you may have heard about already, is the SAGE program. SAGE stands for Supporting Aboriginal Graduate Enhancement. The idea is to create 250 doctoral graduates here in the province by 2010. We have about 120 students moving inside the four pods. Monty, in fact, works at UNBC and is doing his doctorate, but he is also one of the coordinators of the SAGE pod in Prince George. We have one in Victoria, one in Kelowna and one downtown here. So different strategies and so on….

Theory is important. We engaged indigenous theory. We've talked with people like Derrida when he was alive. You know, we've met with heaps of people, testing the things that we…. Listening to what other people are saying about ideas for living…. It's very hard to connect Derrida with living, but it's a discursive practice.

Point three. Alternative education and schooling. I'm not going to go into that other than to say that we have developed and promoted the development of some self-sustaining models. We haven't got time to do that — but just to say that we've had a similar history. If I didn't tell you this was New Zealand, you'd think it was Australia, Canada, Hawaii. We've had different policies that have shaped our history in the past.

In the 1980s we developed a revolution in New Zealand, which was basically a self-development initiative around language revitalization. It started at the preschool level and has expressed itself all the way through elementary and secondary school and to university level. It is possible in New Zealand now to do total education in the medium of Maori language.

Key intervention elements there. Self-determination. I use that term in a very specific way. By that I mean the ability of communities to have control and meaningful say over the key decision-making that impacts their lives.

Cultural aspirations. Maoris still want to be Maori. First nations still want to be first nations. They don't want to be anything else. They've got first nations aspiration as well. How do we develop something that accommodates that? It's not either-or — right? It's never been either-or for Maori. Maori want excellence in world knowledge; they want excellence in their cultural domain. We've got to move across two sections. It happens in lots of other countries. It shouldn't be put up as a choice. We should create opportunities where

people can have access to both. Culturally preferred ways of doing things — teaching and learning.

Mediation of the socioeconomic impediment. This has been a major element of the New Zealand models. What I mean by this is that the propensity of our cultural ways of working collaboratively and collectively has been enhanced. The fact that we invoke our traditional social mechanism of the extended family has been very useful in helping to mediate what might otherwise be debilitating economic factors.

For example, when you have single-parent households, it doesn't matter so much because there is a collective effort in helping to look after kids and getting kids to school. When kids don't come to school with lunch, it doesn't matter, because the values of the learning situation…. Everyone shares.

When there's unemployment in this home and the parents can't afford to pay for this, it doesn't matter because other parents put in extra. We invoke our cultural responsibilities for collective sharing — in other words, social capital — to help mediate what might otherwise be debilitating circumstances.

In many instances, when kids are individually going to school, all of the things that happen at home — domestic issues and so on — those kids carry by themselves individually. They're having to mediate the school context by themselves individually. There's none of this collective element. I could talk more substantially about that issue, but I just name it now as being a really important part of the interventions that have been developed in New Zealand.

A whole lot of values and so on have been that knowledge belongs to all, and the learning environment has changed. Everyone has a contribution to make — a different pedagogy and different classroom environment.

I was interested to read about the Movement for Canadian Literacy and to just see that their main principles for intervention actually coincide almost word for word with what we've called the Kaupapa Maori theory of intervention in New Zealand. Interesting point. Those things are already thought about here.

Just to give you the current state of…. Actually, it's not the current. That's about four years ago, so it's probably more than that now. Secondary schools focused on academic achievement as well as cultural, using culture as a conduit for learning. That's a key word here — culture as a conduit for learning and seeing it as a positive.

In that New Zealand set…. I'll stop so we can get into some questions, but just to flip through these slides. These are some of the tribal university…. They were built by communities. We developed an MOU with University of Auckland. That's John Hood, now the vice-chancellor of Oxford University, who was my boss. I was in his office. We signed a memorandum for our doctorate, so this tribal university offers a doctorate.

We do things like other institutions, but we developed the learning community as our major thing. How do you involve the whole community in the change process? One of our key strategies was to actually develop a program for elders. The strategy was: if we could involve all the elders in the teaching program with the institution, because they're the head of the family, the elders would go home and just lay down the law for the rest of the family in terms of their educational vision and participation and so on. In many ways that's what we've done — elders on-line.

They come in by the busloads to take these programs. What we're teaching them are things like how to e-mail your grandchildren in Australia, how to write your genealogy and record your family history — a whole lot of things.

This is the doctoral program. Its rationale is capacity-building to grow our cultural and political consciousness, and indigenous research and development, so it's tied to research. Doctors in New Zealand in all fields of medicine, right across the board…. That's a typical cohort meeting that I talked about. Volunteers on Saturday mornings — that's what we're doing in this province. We also have four of these going, as I said, and about 120 people involved in doctoral studies — aboriginals across the province.

We have writing retreats so that we can help them concentrate, get away from family and so on. We pay for child care so they can do stuff. We graduate them in front of their communities to build their status.

This is in Vancouver. These are all doctoral students here. We've just started an ed doctoral program, which has 15 aboriginal students in it. It's just begun this summer at UBC. We've started these in several countries around the Pacific Rim. In Australia we have doctoral pods, in Hawaii, Alaska, New Zealand and Canada now — actually, just in B.C. only. These are the ones from Anchorage, up in Alaska.

My summary of points is that we need multiple strategies, not a single strategy. We need to account for language, knowledge and culture. The critique we develop has got to be insightful and accurate — no use reading off the wrong script and developing the wrong answer.

Move beyond the pathology of what's going on. I didn't really speak to that issue, but there's a lot of pathology around aboriginal underachievement. We need to move to speak about the positive elements and get onto the front foot.

We need to be alert to what I call the politics of distraction and the politics of engagement, where we're constantly reacting to what other people want done rather than allowing us to solve it and get on with it. I don't actually mean accountability in the sense that's being talked about at the moment, though.

Great community and traditional intellectual capacities. It's not just all in the institutions. Acknowledge the work that's going on in adult literacy, particularly in the lifelong learning idea of much wider capacity that's available to us outside of the institutions.

We need to problematize public-funded institutions over their underperformance. That is not happening in this province. I am deeply disturbed. In fact, it would be one of my top recommendations to this committee. We need a mechanism by which we can evaluate and

expect the public spend to be more fairly distributed to meet some of these issues that are plaguing outside of the institutional context — the socioeconomic circumstances that disproportionately afflict some of our communities.

Focus on change, on transformation. That's a key issue. We've got to maintain a positive stance.

The New Zealand revolution, to cut to the quick, wasn't about all of those wonderful ideas. There's only one central thing that was important, and that was to invest in our ability to think our way through this, think beyond it and be proactive in taking responsibility to make change for ourselves and allowing that to happen. That's all.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you, Professor Smith. Before I allow the members to ask questions, I would like to read this on record as to the background of Professor Smith.

Recently Dr. Smith has been appointed to serve as an international adviser on Campus 2020, which is established by this government. It's called the Thinking Ahead project.

R. Lee: Thank you, Dr. Smith, for your very excellent presentation. In New Zealand you achieved the goal of more than 500 PhD graduates in five years. My question is: how many students were in undergrad studies before the plan was in place?

G. Smith: Actually, I don't know the answer to that, and I didn't even pause to think about that when we started. The initiative, really…. We had enough. I didn't make this call of 500 without thinking that we could hit the target.

We had lots of masters students that were coming through, but I would say that the sizing that we've chosen for B.C. is about right, given an estimate of who's in the masters programs and who's available to come on to doctoral studies.

It's a higher hit rate than probably the rest of the population. That is, we would be expecting more of a PhD return from the small number that we've got coming through. I think that's appropriate, because we're in the beginning stage of trying to make a change here and a serious impact.

I don't care if we don't hit the 500 or we don't hit the 250. The point is that we're actually trying something that's really different and…. Monty, did you want to add anything?

M. Palmantier: I think Graham has touched on it. You know, when we are looking at numbers within this province, it really means approaching graduate education for first nations in a strategic way.

G. Smith: Perhaps I should just read into the record, too, the fact that Monty is here. I don't know whether I did this at the beginning, but for…. Whenever I speak about aboriginals in Canada, I like to have an aboriginal there to witness that. So he's here for that reason.

R. Lee: Maybe I misunderstood the data. In New Zealand the program actually hit about 470 already. Is that right?

R. Lee: Then you still have about 150 in the system, and that's in New Zealand.

G. Smith: Two hundred and fifty by 2010 is the target that we are working on. I think we will get there.

M. Polak: I was excited to hear you talk about the, I guess, lack of success around the deficit theory which, of course, we've modelled and still do model much of our educational practice on in North America, although I'm aware that there are many trying to get us out of that.

I wondered if you would offer your comments with respect to using what I've often heard termed as an asset-mapping kind of approach in literacy and whether or not you would find it applicable when we're dealing with indigenous cultures.

G. Smith: Actually, there's still quite a bit of that going on in New Zealand, and it's unfortunate, but often research funding is targeted at doing those particular projects.

I think it's useful in the sense of knowing what resources are available to particular families and communities and so on. It is an issue, so I don't want to diminish it, but it is not the answer in itself to this, and that's the point that I'm making here. I don't want to rule out everything and leave in…. As I said — well, I hope I said — that deficit theory in fact does have some truth to it. There are some elements, but when it's wrapped up as the answer to explain underperformance or underdevelopment — whichever way you want to look at it — it can sometimes miss the boat.

M. Polak: Has the New Zealand model…? In the development of that model, what has taken place with respect to the preparation of teachers for both the Maori system and, I guess, the mainstream system — the K-to-12 system at large?

G. Smith: For the immersion pathway that I outlined — that has been self-actualization development — we have three training components, three teacher-training initiatives that respond to that need. For conventional teaching situation schools — I don't want to use mainstream….

G. Smith: Yeah. But for conventional teachers, there are also very strong programs which are about….. Not all Maori students go into this system. What we're saying is that there ought to be a range of options that are viable and excellent options for Maori kids. Many of them go into the conventional schooling classrooms as well. Teachers need to be prepared appropriately, and we have quite specific programs that handle that.

M. Polak: Lastly, I find myself throughout the presentations we've had — and we've had many — seeing definitely two streams emerging. There's a long-term vision that is presented around ensuring that our future development as a culture produces citizens who are literate, well-rounded and knowledgable. It is striking against, I guess — I almost hate to use that word, because I don't know that they're in opposition — a short-term issue which is also powerful, especially for the people involved.

The 45-year-old high school dropouts who now find they can't get beyond a minimum-wage job — their interest in literacy, of course, is far more narrow. How do we as a committee confront what appear to be two different directions we can choose to take?

G. Smith: It's not either-or, absolutely. Again, I don't want any of what I'm saying to diminish what's going on in the adult literacy area and the targeted programming that's going on, other than to raise the wider questions and the long-term strategy for change. The stark picture to me is: what does…?

The immediate need for a particular individual might be to learn how to take a driving licence, because it leads to…. I worry if that's large enough, either for the individual or for our society. While it's a short-term, finger-in-the-dike strategy, I think it behooves us to think more profoundly about this in terms of: what are the bigger strategies that sit behind this as well?

D. Cubberley: Thank you for your presentation. It was stimulating. There's lots in it to think about.

My question has to do with the point that you ended on, which under your summary of key points was 7, which is: "The need to problematize publicly funded institutions over their underperformance." I paraphrase you as saying that there needs to be a mechanism so that we can place an expectation on public institutions to assume their responsibility.

Can you give me a sense of what that would look like in your mind? If there were such a mechanism, what would it be and how would it constrain a publicly funded institution to begin assuming that responsibility?

G. Smith: Wonderful. Okay, in my view I would begin with…. It could well sit at this level. It could well be a standing committee of the Parliament. It could be constituted with a principle of a cross-party moratorium on aboriginal education. I think that's a really important thing to think about here in the sense of continuity in terms of strategies. The idea is of a standing committee of Parliament that would sit around some principles and might meet a couple of times a year but require a report from the ministry on where they're up to — and for individual, publicly funded institutions to report on the incremental progress in respect of aboriginal development and what they've been doing.

One of the things I've seen is that some very well-endowed institutions have actually no conscience — and consciousness, actually — about redistributing the internal resources to take up this public issue. A lot of things that are done in the name of aboriginal education are done with private funding outside of the institution. I think we could get far more traction with a combination of both, rather than simply just exporting. If it's not supported externally, it doesn't happen. This situation that we are confronting here in this province deserves a bit more consideration from the public purse.

D. Cubberley: If I could ask: did New Zealand take such a step? Did it have to mandate that its universities go to the extent of forming relationships with specific aboriginal communities? How prescriptive was the mechanism?

G. Smith: We did a tertiary education review in New Zealand, which basically forced the issue for many institutions. I would have to say that in New Zealand many of the institutions were moving proactively anyway. We just did not have the people infrastructure to do that. For example, many institutions advertised for faculty, and there were no applications.

Now, for the most part — not in all disciplines but in most — you get two or three Maoris with doctorates who are applying for positions that are advertised. We're still at base 1 here, where we don't get any applicants whatsoever for some positions.

Just on that example, we need to think about capacity-building, but not just capacity. You've got to link with capability. It's talent — excellent talent.

R. Fleming: My question is similar to David's about what a mechanism would look like for this kind of accountability of our institutions to show what they're doing in terms of their spending and what they do for aboriginal students and I guess, really, other underrepresented groups in British Columbia.

You've offered this suggestion of a standing committee. I suppose we have one stand-alone aboriginal institution, the Institute of Indigenous Governance, but in terms of our university system, has there been any discussion or recommendations that you're aware of for autonomous

colleges, I suppose, within the university? In terms of the mechanism, your point there, certainly the University Presidents' Council isn't what we need right now for that.

I'm thinking of one institution in my neck of the woods, the University of Victoria. There have been proposals for a student longhouse for many years, but because it's dependent on private funding, it still has not proceeded.

In terms of that success rate, I think we're still at about 1-percent representation in our college and university system for aboriginal students — far below the overall population. How do we get to that transformative step?

G. Smith: Okay. There are several things in your question. The first thing, just to add to the previous question…. There's an important element here about the select standing committee having the power to incentivize — putting it positively — movement or sanction. In other words, if institutions aren't prepared to do it, they should lose funding or there should be a mechanism by which they are held to account.

On the second part of your question, about structures, I need to acknowledge that we're doing work with the IAHLA, for example, which is the aboriginal colleges and technical institutes section — getting more collaboration across that body, trying to develop something similar to the FNESC element at the K-to-12 end of it. I think that's going to be quite a major development, but they need support. There's lack of surety around the aboriginal colleges for funding. They can't see pipelines for funding and so forth to plan adequately. So there are issues there.

On the issue of the distinctive entity, my view is that in this province a graduate school might be a really good thing. Again, it's top end, but an aboriginal graduate school that sits over…. Basically, the SAGE program that we're talking about is like a virtual graduate school that sits over all of the institutions. The students belong to all of the institutions.

I don't want to play institutions against each other. This is a provincial issue, where we equally take responsibility for doing something about it. I think a virtual graduate school that was given support to develop doctoral students and master's students across the board would be a great idea.

R. Fleming: Just a follow-up on another part of your presentation. You focus on higher education as an admittedly top-down focus, but you frame it as part of a bottom-up strategy, I guess, to achieve the goals that you listed. I'm just wondering: 250 graduates later, by 2010, with advanced degrees…. How does that become the bottom-up strategy that reaches a bigger population of aboriginal people in the field — in the communities out there?

G. Smith: Yeah. What we're talking about here is a question of multipliers and how this operates. The multipliers of this investment, if you like, in graduate studies…. Because we have put them into the cohort, the pods, a lot of the work related to transformation consciousness as I talked about — the cultural consciousness and so on — is about the contribution that these students need to make when they finish their doctoral studies and how they work back in their communities.

Locking them back into a bigger project for making change in their communities, a sense of contribution — that's the significant element of these pods. They're volunteer pods. They're not forced to come into these. But in a sense, it puts that scaffolding around them, the infrastructure to assist that.

The multipliers are in moving communities forward. The multipliers are in aboriginal leadership for change in the communities. Multipliers are the teachers that we put in schools and so on. It's that kind of rounded view.

J. Rustad: I recognize that we're over our time limit, but I want to ask one quick question. Early in your presentation you talked about whose literacy, illiteracy and literacy as colonization and assimilation. Later in your presentation you talked about using culture as a conduit to learning. I'm just wondering about the meaning or what you're characterizing behind those statements.

G. Smith: In the first instance, literacy from the point of view of many indigenous students has got a bad name in the sense that it's aligned with a particular set of assimilation knowledge, if you like. We've got to deal with that. I'm naming that as an issue. If we're talking about literacy, there's an issue there — straight up.

"Whose literacy" is another important question here because it goes to the question of the fact that aboriginals want to be aboriginal, so they're also looking for literacy in their own cultural, tribal nuances.

The third element of what we're saying about the conduit element is that culture, if we package it right, the intervention, if we package it right…. You can actually use the emotional element here related to identity and culture. If we can harness that same energy that's there for the culture and the identity element for learning, you've got the nature of what I'm talking about.

J. Nuraney (Chair): If I may take the liberty. I know we have gone over the time, but I think the experts like yourselves do not appear before this committee very often, so I'm going to take advantage of this.

My final question, professor, is that we have been mandated to find some kind of a strategy for literacy within the aboriginal communities. You, in your presentation, mentioned that it is not a similar situation to New Zealand because we have several different bands, several different languages. You also mentioned about this impediment, so to speak, in terms of perception — that it is a colonial program to teach their language to us. It's perhaps an impediment for them to come forward.

My question to you is…. We do certainly have a very large portion of the aboriginal population who are not literate, in terms of what we call literacy in a traditional sense. How do we trigger the desire for them to learn?

G. Smith: I think to build on the last point I've just made, which is the culture as conduit, we need to create context where the culture and the literacy elements are brought together.

Just off the top of my head, if I was doing it, I would put up some dollars, ask the three or the four or the five now — they seem to be popping up every day — universities to compete for a project which would relate to creating a model school or a model entity which would develop a new approach. In other words, develop a model. Then the second part of this is that once the model is up and running, you can start to impact on-reserve and off-reserve schools by requiring teachers and so on to come and see the model in action.

We have critical resources in different places, so it's how you can manage those few resources that we have to be able to impact the whole. Okay, let's say we gave it to SUNTEP or NITEP at UBC or at SFU to run the model school. Then I would incentivize — on-reserve schools because I know this is a federal issue; this is a provincial issue but it's an issue that impacts all of us in B.C. — the participation of schools by: "If you come and do the course and get the sign-off, then you get this backup and resource from us." It's a way of developing buy-in and participation, I guess, but it needs to be thought about. The key issue here is community buy-in and how you solicit that.

Yep, culture. We've got to find clever ways to do it. Not all the good ideas are in New Zealand or have been discovered yet. There's still a lot out there that needs to be thought about but pertains to this context here in Canada. To me, it's not a reason for not doing it. It's just a different set of challenges.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Seeing no further questions…. Sorry, Doug, very quick.

D. Routley: Very quick — and I apologize for my late arrival here. You've echoed a theme that I've heard from other presenters around two issues of retention — encouraging people to take the courses and retain the knowledge. Those are both more successful when the program has an authenticity that adult learners can trust. I think you've referred to that in terms of you using cultural conduits that are authentic as vehicles. Then the other piece was that adults retain this learning better, at that stage of their lives, when they have goals in their personal lives that have driven them to these programs.

The Chair's question around how we engage people from our aboriginal communities, perhaps providing more hopefulness and more goals that are unrealizable without gaining more literacy skills. Would you say that the living conditions, the hopefulness and the optimism versus pessimism of existence on aboriginal, first nations reservations plays into their success or failure?

G. Smith: Yes, I do, and that is exactly why I've said that part of this has to be about learning community. It's about the whole community. Apropos of what was just said, I think there is an element of employment in literacy. We can't speak to redressing literacy issues without also speaking hand in glove, I think, about employment, of how this connects to work, which is a big issue for many of these….

J. Nuraney (Chair): On behalf of the committee, Professor Graham, I thank you very much for taking the time and being so very informative.

G. Smith: Thank you. I apologize to the committee. I have had an invitation to stay and to share with you, and I apologize to my fellow presenters that I have to take my leave. I do have another appointment this afternoon. You do have my contact details. If you wish to discuss things further, that's fine.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Members, a one-minute break until we set the next speaker on the table.

J. Nuraney (Chair): We will now resume our presentations. The next presenter we have is Dr. Satya Brink. She has a doctorate from Purdue University in the United States and has worked in social policy and research at universities, for government, for international organizations and as a consultant. She's currently the director of national learning policy research, learning policy and directorate at Human Resources and Skills Development Canada. In her current position her responsibilities include the development of evidence of policies related to human capital and lifelong learning from early childhood to later adulthood. She is widely published.

S. Brink: Thank you. It's an honour and a privilege to be here. If Graham had the longest name, then I have the longest title. In the federal government we often say it's in proportion to your size. I'm small, as you can see.

What I would like to do today is to try to put into your hands the kinds of evidence you can use to make decisions that will result in the best results for the people of British Columbia. What I'm going to try to do is to tell a story through statistics. I'm going to also tell you that we have made a special attempt to do some

extra analysis. I'm going to present to you some tables that have never been presented before. I'm going to be using the mouse to point to things because it's a way for me to call your attention to the story that is being told by statistics.

The questions I'm going to answer for you are: what's the level of literacy proficiency — and I do stress that it is for English and French — in B.C.? How does it compare to Canada and other provinces? How proficient are people here in British Columbia in the different component skills? How is it distributed for people in the population of working age?

You know, you brought up economic development. You brought up the labour market. How do age and education affect literacy and numeracy? How is it distributed in the labour force in occupations, industries, particularly for the B.C. economy? What is the literacy performance of aboriginal people and immigrants? Finally, where are they and how are they distributed? That will help you also to look at the service-delivery angle that you will have to manage.

Let me get started, first, by telling you a little bit about the survey we used. In the survey, we measured four different things. The definitions for those four different things are here. I'll let you read this for yourselves — it's kind of a reference slide — but it's important to describe to you what literacy is. In fact, I've come to think that the word "literacy" perhaps is not capturing what we want to do, because as soon as you say the word "literacy," people immediately jump to the idea that the opposite of it is people who cannot read.

What we're trying to measure here is literacy from the point of view of a developed country. In other words, it's to look at how people use printed information in all the things they do as adults. So it is not about whether they can read or not; it's about how well they read. It is so important to look at how well they read relative to the kind of outcomes that they have, particularly in the labour market.

I would also like to draw your attention to this little box here because I will be referring to it often. There are five different levels of performance in the survey. Of this performance, we talked to experts, employers, measurement experts, and this is the level that was decided that we need for the coming decade. So this 276 is an important number. All the while, when I talk about levels, these are the levels we're talking about. If I say they are people with low literacy, it means they are scoring under 276, and they're at either level 1 or at level 2. I'll show you what the differences are as we go through the levels.

Before I do that, I'd like to show you a little bit about the context in B.C. because this will help you to understand the results. I'm looking at census information here. You probably know this better than I do, but you have about four million people — it's from 2003 — or a little bit more now. If you take the labour force age of 15 to 64, you have about three million people. You're fairly dense as a province. If you take Nunavut, for example, it's like 0.03 or something. So for them to try to deliver something, it's a big challenge.

The population 65 and over: it's about half a million. It's about 12 percent. Immigrants are about one-fourth of your population. Now continuing down, again, using the census, about three million people speak English in this province. French is less than 1 percent, so that is not the big issue for you. But this is: there are about a million people who speak neither English nor French as their mother tongue. I'll show you the impact of this.

Now the question, of course, is whether we draw the full benefit of the immigrants we bring in, because they come with human capital, and do we facilitate the use of that human capital for the economy of B.C.

In this box, we are looking at people who are 15 years and over. This was looking at everybody, so it includes children. You have about 25 percent of your population that does not have a high school credential. I'll show you the impact of that 25 percent that does not have a high school credential.

Compared to other provinces, this is on the lower side, which is positive for you. Some of our provinces have up to almost 40 percent, and that has a major impact.

Post-secondary education. About 53 percent of your population has some kind of post-secondary, and this is helping your B.C. economy. Again, I'll show you the impact of that.

We have had two literacy surveys, one in '94 and the other in 2003. Here are those levels that I talked to you about. These two are the low-literacy levels. You can see that between '94 and 2003, the number — this is for Canada — went up from eight million to nine million people, but the percentage of 42 percent did not change.

Why was that? That's because the population of working age went up by three million. The question is: where did those three million go? If you look at the three million…. I mean, these two are about the same at the top. This is about the same. They went into this category: that is, level 3 — good for us. But they also went to this category: that is, level 2 — not so good for us.

These are readers who can read, but they read poorly. Then you can see that the numbers of very poor readers have remained the same. I'll show you later those numbers for British Columbia.

Now we are looking at the four domains. This is a new domain, and we don't have a threshold for this, but for these three domains the threshold is at 276. Now if we include the entire population of B.C. 16 years and older — that is including that 12 percent of seniors, half a million seniors — here are the average scores that you get. You can see that for prose and document — this is printed matter — you are above level 3, which is good. But when it comes to numeracy, you're not.

This has implications, particularly for seniors, when you give them instructions about how to apply for OAS or GIS. It has implications when you tell them how to take medications. It has implications for somebody

who is interested in gardening and is mixing up pesticides. It has implications for a number of things that you might do in daily life.

For 16 years to 65, you can see that you have scored, on average, at level 3, which is good. I'll show you how you compared to other provinces. Here are all the provinces and territories, and here are the three domains.

If it's in red that means that province didn't score at level 3 in any of them. You will find you have scored — this 16 to 65 — at above the level 3 threshold for B.C. If it's in blue, it means that they scored okay in prose but not in numeracy. But the thing of importance for you is to see that in numeracy…. Like in every province, we do worse in numeracy than in literacy.

If you examine the programs that we have, they're usually literacy programs with a tiny little thing for numeracy. Yet the fact that we do badly in numeracy has huge consequences. This means it affects how children do in science and math in high school. It means who goes to universities. It means the kind of startups that you have in British Columbia.

If you're talking about the knowledge economy, this means a lot. The OECD has pointed out that Canada is lower than the other developed countries, particularly in education in the hard sciences and mathematics. The roots are here. We don't do well in numeracy in any of our provinces, so it means that systematically, in the education that we provide, we don't do as well in numeracy compared to literacy.

Here is the distribution, looking at the population 16 to 65, and here's the ranking by provinces. You do very well. We have a tilt from west to east, and you can see…. Here you are.

Yukon does the best. Yukon is not very happy about being the first, incidentally, because the reason they are first is that people from the south have come and taken their best jobs. They are the professionals, and the local people there are not doing as well.

However, B.C., as I said, does very well. You have 35 percent compared to Canada's 42 percent who are below level 3, and you are competing with this number here — 26 percent, which is quite high — of people who are levels 4 and 5. These are the people who are leaders, you might say, in business, in education, in all of those different fields.

Language is very important. Here what we have done is we have taken out in every province the people whose mother tongue is not English or French. When we do that, you see, you are number one. That is because you have 25 percent of your population whose mother tongue is not English or French. You can see that these numbers go up by about four points. In fact, this proportion here…. You remember you had 35 percent with low literacy. Well, this goes up by 9 percent. So you went up from 65 to 74.

That's a major leap. This is telling you that you have brought in immigrants with enormous skills, but because they lack the language skills in English and French — the working languages here in Canada — you are not getting the full benefit of what you could gain.

What would the impact be on your economy and on taxpayers? Up to now I've been talking about proportions — 35 percent, 42 percent. This doesn't tell you what you need for planning. You need to know how many people you're talking about. The costs that you determine are per person. So I'm giving you a rough estimate of persons.

When you look at level 1 — these are very poor readers — you have about 14 percent. That amounts to about 400,000 people here. If you look at level 2 — 21 percent — you have 600,000 people here. If you look at your programs, they tend to be here, and yet you have far more numbers here. So the kinds of programs for improving readers are less easy to find than those that are focusing….

If you look at your curricula, they tend to focus very much on very poor readers as opposed to this group. We talked about the issue of retention. If we don't do something, they're going to tumble into level 1. You can see here that it amounts to one million people. I've told you that you have only three million people who are in your workforce, so one million of those…. In a way, it's like you had an economy with three cylinders, and only two are going the way they should.

I'd also like to say that between Quebec, Ontario, you and Alberta, there are about seven million people in all of Canada that have low literacy.

For numeracy I told you the performance is worse. It's about a million and a quarter who have low numeracy. You can see that before it was about a quarter here and about a third here. You can see that it's more than a quarter here and more than a third here. Again, these numbers are much higher — 471,000; 762,000. These are very large numbers.

Think about the strategic things that you can do. If you're going to work on these people…. It's the kind of question, I think, you asked. What do we do about the very poor performers relative to…? Well, I think we need to do both. But if you want to free up money, a lot of the things you can do is to work on people who are just missing it by a little.

What you want to do is make sure that they retain that literacy. By doing that, you're freeing up the money that you can then…. For these people, you are replacing 12 years of education through high school. You're not going to fix it by any three-week course. Whereas for these people, the time that's required is far less, and the kind of program that you give is totally different.

People confuse education with literacy. They're not the same thing. Literacy is a foundation. We have a person in HRSD who describes it as velcro. The more velcro you have, the more education sticks to you. So if you go to university with little velcro, some stuff sticks to you, but you never earn at the average rate of a graduate from that program. So literacy is what allows you to understand the world around you and to absorb future information in work and in education.

Let's look at Canada first. You can see that most…. You gain 229 points by those 12 years of education. If you're doing it right in Canada, this number should be 276 or more, which we don't do. Sorry. This is less than high school. Here it is. We're almost there, but it's not more. Then, with education, the focus is not on literacy. The focus is on disciplines, different specializations, so the number doesn't go up by all that much. It doesn't go up by another 200 points. As you can see; it goes up by about 70 points.

Here's you in B.C., and you can see that these numbers are very similar to the Canadian average. I would be provocative to say B.C. is not meeting its potential. Look at your competitors. Look at Saskatchewan. They beat you every time. Look at Yukon. So it is possible for B.C. to be able to do much better.

I think the way you do better is to do several things. The first is to do prevention — to keep your kids in school, make sure they get that foundation — and then to be able to do retention — make sure that they retain those skills. Then you also want to do investment, to make sure that you're increasing the level of performance and not working only with the minimum level.

We had the idea that the people who are older went to school at another time, didn't have the same quality high schools, and that older people would therefore have lower levels of literacy. We thought the young people have all the benefits of today, and therefore, as they're graduating, we're going to improve the level of literacy in our population. B.C. and Canada — not true. Why? You can see that in B.C. you have 37-percent youth. For the whole of your population, working age, it's 35 percent. These people coming into your entry level are not going to increase the level of literacy in your population.

That's why I talk about prevention, and that's why I talk about foundation skills. I think you have a school councillor background, and I appeal to you to look at it carefully. If you don't do it in those 12 years, you're paying twice, because you missed it in the 12 years and then you're going back and trying to get them to get something that's a high school equivalency. It never, in terms of cost-benefit, ever works out — much better to do it when they are in high school.

Here we are looking at it by age group. Now these people 16 to 25 may still be in school. They may be in post-secondary education. You can see that they're fairly high, well into level 3. Look at Canada first — these are the blue bars — and you can see these people getting into the labour force, retention, they're using their skills, and then you see a slow decline until it gets here. There's a little bit of a dramatic decline to level 2, and then, kaboom, they come down really to level 1 by the time they get to 65-plus.

In B.C. the decline is much slower. Incidentally, we can do this…. Even controlling for education you see this pattern. This is why retention is so important. In B.C., so long as they're working, you retain a very high level of literacy. I don't know if you saw the C.D. Howe report. They're talking about increasing retirement age slowly up to 70. Well, this is going to be a problem if it's going to be level 2 for this age group. You see that your seniors have a better level than the Canadian average, but you're still pretty low.

S. Brink: It's using the skills. You first have to get them, and you retain those skills by using them. If you have poor jobs where you're not reading, not writing, not using it — you start losing it.

The parallel I often give is the French–language training we give to federal public servants. You know, we pass the test; we do fine. You don't speak it for one year, and then somebody says, "Bonjour," and you say: "Oh, hi." It's not the way to retain those skills.

Here are the numbers for British Columbia. You have a similar pattern to what I showed you for Canada. It's 2.3 million; you went up by half a million in the number of people who are in your labour force. No difference here. A little bit of difference at level 4 and 5. Good for B.C.

This number went up at level 3, which is also good for B.C., but this number went up by 100,000. You can see — level 2. Now, if you can't make the investment and bump them up here, they might be at a high risk of falling down here. Again, you need to look at your programming to see that you have more of them here than here. These are longer term. You have to really look at the way you spend, the way you invest, to make sure that you're able to move these people up here.

In the Canadian situation and in the B.C. situation, what is happening is the improvements in literacy are slower than the rates of population growth. So we're not keeping up, and that's why this growth…. You can see that this is affecting what is happening overall.

So who are these people, and how do they look? Here is level 1. I rounded that number, 400,000, for you. All these percentages are of this number here: 64 percent were immigrants. That's a very high proportion. These are people who could be making a better contribution for you.

A high proportion of these people are employed. Your question: why did they lose the skills? Well, these are people in precarious jobs. They are the people who are doing the deliveries and things like that. They're not using their literacy skills in a way that they're going to either improve them or retain them. That 45 percent who don't have their high school credential — 45 percent of this number, less than high school. So these are people that you don't…. As I said, you're not going to fix by a little short course.

Mother tongue. Very high if your mother tongue is not English or French. Almost two-thirds of this number. Again, it stresses the importance of ESL. It stresses the importance of how soon when these people come here do you give them the language. If they don't get the language as soon as they come and they are waiting for language and to get a job, they're losing both the language skills and their human capital skills.

Level 2. Here's that 600,000 I talked to you about. The number is lower for immigrants, as you can see. Two-thirds of them are employed. Here's that less than high school. Again, a quarter of those people with less than high school are in level 2. A high proportion have completed high school but didn't get enough velcro, and you can see that they're not performing as well. This number here — a third, at level 2 — probably immigrants. So these are people who have come in here with poor secondary education. You're losing that value, because you haven't given them the language skills.

This number here. You see how they flip? The greater part of level 2 people are people who are English-speaking, whereas at level 1 you can see that they're mostly people whose mother tongue is not English and French.

What's the impact of this? Here's B.C.; here's Canada. Here's the average that people score if they are working. Here's what they score if they're not, if they're unemployed. Can you believe that these people can compete with those people and get jobs? What your market is doing is sorting not only by your credentials but by that level of literacy. If you don't have good literacy, it's very hard for you to get jobs in the B.C. economy.

Where are these people working? Two-thirds of them are working. Now in Canada, what I tried to do was say: "Which are the five top areas where they're working?" These are the five top areas. These are the numbers in level 1, and here are the numbers in level 2. You can see that it is about 4 million people who are in these five sectors. You know, there are a heck of a lot of sectors. Some of these are large.

Here it is for B.C. I know some of you have had backgrounds in real estate. I know a couple of you have some things to do with construction. I know some of you have food-service-sector backgrounds. These are the numbers in the B.C. economy with low literacy — in these five sectors. Don't think it's only the private sector. This is public sector.

I don't know whether you would like your vulnerable people to be receiving services with somebody who has low literacy. In fact, if you put your effort in the workplace in these five sectors, you can reach two-thirds of the people with low literacy. So instead of spreading it over the sectors, you can focus your attention on these five sectors, and you can make a difference.

Let's look at it by occupation. There are millions of them. We have condensed them into six. Here they are. Knowledge economy is the top three. Here's the B.C. economy. You can see there is a variation among the regions. In your economy those top three — 80 percent of those jobs require level 3 or above. Even when you take something like the production of goods and the distribution of services, almost 50 percent of your jobs require level three. So the level 3 is a good indicator of what you need to function in the B.C. economy.

This is occupation. Now let me show it to you for industry. Can you see how B.C. is leading in terms of the knowledge economy? Look at the other regions in how the distributions are. Here are the industries that are listed. The first one is knowledge-intensive activities. This is government, public sector, and so on. Here you are: in every sector 50 percent of the jobs require level 3 or above. The dark blue is level 4 and 5, and the light blue is level 3.

Let me show it to you for Alberta. Here is the Prairies. You know, thinking of all primary industry…. Look at this bar. In those primary sectors 60 percent of the jobs require level 3 or above. If you are going to keep your lead in the knowledge-intensive areas, if you want to grow your economy, literacy is something that you've got to worry about.

I've told you that there is a difference between credentials and literacy, and your market is sorting by literacy. It is requiring high levels of literacy. The advantage of putting the money into literacy rather than doing it in discipline is that it is how you get the flexible workforce. These people can retrain, because they have the velcro. They can train. Whereas if they don't, they are unable to perform in your economy.

What happens to the income of these people? We often think that income is linked to education. Here it is by literacy. Here is less than $40,000, and then going all the way up to more than $60,000. Can you see a progression of how the scores are? There is a return to literacy in your earnings. In fact, we have found that the returns to weekly earnings are very high for literacy and numeracy: 6 percent or so for literacy, and about 30 percent for numeracy. The paybacks for literacy investments are extremely high in terms of what people earn.

Now I'm going to go through a series for immigrants. We thought that immigrants came here, stayed here for ten years and were going to be speaking English and French. They were going to be fine. Well, you know what? Sixty percent of them are below levels 1 and 2. Ten years later — no difference.

This is showing us that the integration programs that we run are not paying off. Let's look at it in B.C. Let's look at this group here. This is sort of 16-to-65. About Z\b of the population is immigrants in Canada. About 29 percent of your population of working age is immigrants. I'll show you now how they score. Again, look at this group here — 16-to-65. This is what the immigrants score, and this is what the Canadian-born score.

Another way to look at this is that this is what B.C. scores, and if you take the immigrants out, this is what they would score. If the immigrants score as well as your others, this is the score you would have.

Look at it for numeracy. Here it is for B.C. You can see that there is a 30-point difference or so between the immigrants…. There you have the difference in the two cases. You can see that the difference is lower for numeracy than it is for literacy in English and in French. What this is showing you is that there is human capital that your immigrants come with.

Look at it by level. I'm giving you all these numbers so that when you go back and you're doing stuff, you

have the numbers. Let's look at it for B.C. You can see that a very high proportion of immigrants are at level 1. The difference is not so great at level 2, but it is at level 1. The other big difference is at level 3 and level 4. You see that the numbers are lower. These immigrants could be putting more into your economy, but they're not because they're being held back by language.

Here it is by mother tongue. Three-quarters have a mother tongue that's different. Among your immigrants 50 percent are from Asia, and of those, 50 percent speak one of the related Chinese languages. The next big number is Punjabi, and that's spoken by about 15 percent of your immigrants.

Here it is. You see that the numbers here for B.C. are higher from Asia than for Canada. It's proportionately lower from other countries. From Europe most of the people you bring in are from the U.K., so that is working for you.

Here it is again. Here are the employment outcomes. If you look at the employed, for Canadian-born it's the same. But when you look at the immigrants, fewer of your immigrants are working. Why? Because your economy is demanding higher rates of literacy. I showed you that pattern. Your economy is asking for a level-3 rate of literacy and numeracy.

Now we're looking at aboriginal people. I do want to say that this is literacy in English and in French, not in the language of aboriginal people. When you look at it for 16-to-65, for Canada they're about 3 percent. This is not very representative. But it gives you orders of magnitude, so I've done this analysis for you, or my group has.

You have about 5 percent of people who are aboriginal. Look at the scores. You can see that aboriginal people do score lower. Here's B.C. It's 259 — 30 points lower. Another way to look at it is to say that if you had taken all the aboriginals out, this is what you would score compared to this.

Here it is for numeracy. You can see that it's a higher number here — 40 percent for aboriginal people. Again, you should look at the contents of the way in which you provide services to aboriginal people.

I do want to pick up on what Dr. Smith said before me. There is a value in training aboriginal people for higher education and PhDs. What we find is that if they get that velcro, 276 — the aboriginal people score just as well as anybody else. It is if they don't get that 276, they don't do well. So foundation skill really pays off.

Now, look at it in the labour force. You see that only 62 percent of aboriginal people are employed, and it is because of their lower literacy. Here's the distribution of lower literacy among aboriginal people and non-aboriginal people. You can see that for the non-aboriginal people, it's one-third, two-thirds. You can see the difference for aboriginal people: it's much lower.

We thought: okay, if they don't have the literacy levels when they graduate from high school, we could fix it by training. Is that what's happening? Well, here is what we see. If you are at level 1, only a little over 20 percent get any training at all. Why is that? Because employers and others realize that the amount they can learn is affected by the fact that they don't have enough literacy. So you need to give them the literacy first.

We call it double-credentialing. You give them the literacy and the knowledge that they need to function in the jobs that they're doing. If you don't give them that, you don't get a return for the investment you have made, because they're unable to learn because they don't have enough literacy.

Level 2. You can see that they are poor readers, but they are readers. You can see that the amount of training that they get is so much more. But again, as I've stressed, prevention is always the best thing. Give them the literacy as soon as you can, because that makes the biggest difference.

Up to now I've been giving you two variables: age and literacy; education and literacy. If we have to say: where would you get the biggest bang for the buck in British Columbia…? We ran a regression to look at the points that you're gaining or losing by different factors. For you — blue is Canada — the biggest increase is if you can do something for the integration of your immigrants. You can gain something like 45 points if you do something for your immigrants by doing that integration.

The second-highest thing is if you do something about that 25 percent of your population that doesn't have high school. If you can do those two things, you can make…. That's why I started off by saying that B.C. is not performing to its potential.

Now, if you were going to try to organize your programs — you know, those parts that Dr. Smith was talking about…. This is important, because you want to give it to people where they are. You want to use peer-to-peer type of learning. Adults learn better in that kind of situation.

The people who don't have good literacy hated high school. So you're telling them to go back to high school, and they don't want to go back to high school. They don't like taking tests, so you have to figure a way in which you can give it to them that is absorbable. If you do it in a way that's relevant, related to the work that they're doing, they will learn.

Let's look at it from the point of where these people are in B.C. — this is low literacy — and where they're distributed. I think you know B.C. better than I, but I can try to say. Vancouver; Victoria; Kelowna, maybe; Prince George — all the places with the parts are, come to think of it, except maybe Fort Nelson.

Whenever you see this bright red-orange, that means you have a big concentration. There you can run a course. But if you don't have a big concentration, you have to think of another way in which you can deliver these programs. I've told you that you can do it through the workplace, where these people are, and you can make a big difference.

Since we are here in Vancouver, I also did it for you, for Vancouver. Here's UBC, so we can kind of

leave them out. Here's Stanley Park, and we can leave that out. Burnaby? Here's Burnaby.

S. Brink: Very high. New Westminster, the east side of Vancouver in general — I think you have a high immigrant settlement in these types of areas. I think you can see what the distributions are.

What I've tried to do is give you evidence that can help you make those dollars that you are investing actually count. I'm trying to give you the information that can make B.C. perform to its potential.

D. Cubberley: I'm just wondering if you think programs exist currently, on the shelf or conceptually, which could be applied to address these deficits. Or do they have to be devised?

S. Brink: I'm not an expert in pedagogy that way, but from the ones that I have seen, I would suggest a strong review. The reason I'm saying that is for very poor readers, you might be looking at basic ways of sentence construction, grammar, logic, how you form paragraphs and how you get meaning out of a paragraph the way it's written — things like that.

For the ones that are level 2, that's not what you need. What you are looking at is more correction. I'll give you a personal example. When I arrived in Canada, I went to Ottawa and couldn't get a job. They kept saying: "You don't speak French." So I sort of picked up French on the street.

The next time I went to an interview and they said something, I said: "Okay, throw me a question in French. I'll answer it." But I had big holes in my grammar because I never learned it that way. I never learned why I should use certain types of construction.

That's what's happening for these people who are at level 2. The kind of thing you'd do for fixing my French problems is not the same as for somebody else, where you're teaching them how to spell école, enfant and things like that.

M. Polak: I wanted to pull apart a bit the issue of Canadian-born, new immigrants, etc. We know that in some of our major centres — Vancouver, Surrey — where they have very high immigrant populations, there is an increasing number of students who arrive in grade 1 without the expected levels of English, despite the fact that they've been born in Canada. Two or three years ago it was up to about 57 percent. It was incredibly high.

When we're addressing K-to-12 literacy and considering that, is there a role to play for literacy in the mother tongue?

S. Brink: I'll start off by saying that as a federal person, I'm very conscious that I'm talking about K-to-12, which I'm not supposed to.

S. Brink: I would say that there is a role. What you are understanding is how language itself is constructed. Generally, if you function well in one language, you function well in languages. I speak four, and I can say that is something I've seen in others who are multilingual.

Your point about the very young children…. That is the age at which to correct that. Why? Because your ear is trained. You're going to hear from him, and he's going to tell you about how it gets hard-wired and so on. But if you miss the part where it gets wired, after that you can't hear the difference. So that's the age.

In fact, I'm not showing it to you here, but when I look at the research that we have done…. Cynthia would know, because we did this through the NLSCY. She was there with me at the time. When we look at it, the difference between kids under six across provinces is very little. But then when they go through school it goes larger and larger, because what we are doing in school is not correcting it early. Then you see that the problem gets multiplied because of the lack of velcro.

M. Polak: That leads to my last question, which is around teenagers and in particular those who have arrived in their preteens or teen years to Canada, leaving them a very short time in the K-to-12 system, bringing with them a trained ear. Will a workplace-literacy-type effort positively impact them? Is that an area where we could reach them?

S. Brink: Excellent question. When you look at who goes to work right after high school…. In Alberta they prefer to go to work rather than to post-secondary education, because the economy is so hot that, as I say, they hire anything that moves. You can sort of have people like that. But if you have young people, teenagers, who hated high school and who have difficulty with literacy and numeracy, you've got to get to them through something that attracts them.

I'll give you an example from Sweden. In Sweden they said to them: "We'll give you money if you go to school." It didn't work. They said: "We'll give you information."

I tried this in high school. I said: "If you finish high school and finish a bachelor's degree, the difference in your earnings over your lifetime is $1 million. Does that get your attention?" It gets their attention very shortly.

What did they do in Sweden? They tried and tried, and they couldn't get these kids to sign up for school. What they did was said: "Okay. What is it that you like to do?" A bunch of boys said: "We'll tell you what we'd like to do. You need to give us some space. You need to get…." They chose two things. They wanted to play with motorcycles — Harley-Davidsons, in particular. I'm not quite sure why, but that was the brand they chose. They chose to record music — you know, garage bands and so on. The literacy and numeracy were attached to those two functions.

I don't know anything about motorcycles, but you tell them, "This is the way you fix how the gas flows to

the whatever, and everything," and they get it. They understand they need to know the numeracy. They don't think it's numeracy, you see. Then once they understand the concept of proportions, how you divide, they take it and transfer it to other things. They understand how you work out the interest rate for the mortgage.

What you have to do for adults…. Once they hit 16 or 17, you have to start at what the adults want to do and then do the literacy. When we have this locked-in audience in K-to-12, we can do it in a different way, but beyond that…. That's why I say you have to do a review of the contents of the way in which we present the information.

D. Routley: Thank you, Dr. Brink. It's very informative and also very entertaining. You've given us a lot of information that encourages us towards certain conclusions about how to address and best spend the resources to address literacy.

I particularly like your identifying level 2 as a more productive area to spend resources on, because there are more people there. But could it be that level 1 issues are more related to, say, learning disability issues and a number of issues that are more difficult and that should be identified in the K-to-12 system early and that can be best identified at a time when the ear is ready and other learning issues are more flexible?

Then the level 2 would be more directed at the immigrant population. Perhaps the population of British Columbians who aren't immigrants and who find themselves in level 2 would be best identified through the sectoral approach. These three areas working in combination will help us arrive at an efficient plan to address literacy.

S. Brink: This is great, because you're already thinking policy. Yes, I think that in schools you do have to look at what those kinds of learning issues can be. In about a year I will actually have some data I can show you.

When you look at these people at level 1, how much of it would require a kind of health, therapeutic approach, as opposed to ones that are learning approaches for adults? That will show us the hidden problem that we didn't deal with in school. When that information comes, you can contact me. I'll be happy to provide it to you at that time.

Yes, if we don't start at school, that unaddressed problem…. The people just can't overcome it. Yes, that's definitely right.

As I said, for adults, since you have to do it where the adults are, then it is really good to do it, particularly, for example, in the workplace.

For immigrants, I do want to say that many places have taken the view that you set up a literacy centre, and immigrants will come. I don't think that is the case; 66 percent of these people work. They're working, just like you and me, with kids, with other things that they want to do. Men don't like doing this, so the ones that do go tend to be more women. So if you really want to reach them, you have to reach them as soon as they arrive here. Because what you're going to attract….

In the U.K. — and I think you might hear about it from the U.K. — they say: "Give them the job first. Then work on trying to give them literacy for the double credentials." That's what you need to do for them, because what you want to tell them is: "We value your human capital, and we are going to make it worthwhile. We do it by valuing you at work, and we'll give you the literacy at work and in relationship to what you know." That way, it's going to make a bigger difference.

D. Routley: I think it's really important for us to understand that the resources we have available to us for literacy programs after K-to-12 are best spent directed at a sectoral approach — to people at work, to the immigrant population.

Going back to the K-to-12, I would suggest that assessment professionals early in the K-to-12 system — those professionals who used to be employed to identify these learning issues but have in large measure been cut from the system — were very important. I know that my wife's class of 30 students in grades 4 and 5 has five identified students and one that is obviously having trouble and is unidentified.

Many times — I was a school trustee, as well — we had so many students who required extra services but who were not properly identified, so we couldn't create an adequate plan for them. Those would probably be the students who, after the K-to-12 experience, we're searching for at work.

There is a thing called the tipping point. You remember Helen Keller? She couldn't do anything. She finally understood what water was, which was being spelled in her hand, and then she was on her way. That's what happens to these kids. If we can correct it early and give them what they need, they can fly on their own. If we don't do it, then they're unable to.

We all know of dyslexic people who function really well. They have gone beyond the tipping point, and they're able to fly on their own.

R. Fleming: Dr. Brink, I wanted to ask you, just because we have you here, on a related topic…. Last week there was sort of a fiscal update in Ottawa about many things — tax policies and surpluses and such. One of things that we didn't get a lot of details about was that literacy programs funded federally are facing reductions. I'm wondering if that's something that affects your directorate or your branch.

The second question is about workplace literacy and the effectiveness of that intervention. I'm trying to think how it actually works. In British Columbia, like most provinces, we have maybe half of our workforce working for large employers. I can very well see how you would actualize a culture of learning and literacy programming in a large firm like Telus or Alcan or in a big construction company or something like that. In the small business sector, which crosses all those industry

groups that you referenced, I just can't imagine how employers would want to internalize rather than externalize those costs to a school-based setting, which you said doesn't work as well.

S. Brink: On the first one, the best I can tell you is that the federal role for research and knowledge dissemination will still be there. That's why I said I can give you answers on the next survey.

On the second one, you're perfectly right. It's very difficult for smaller employers.

What are the ways in which they can do it? There are some models which I think are very interesting. There are associations — for example, of companies, of unions — that get together and say: "I can't offer this program just in my little company. But what we can do is jointly purchase something where a number of us are purchasing it together, and thereby we get the economies of scale, to which we can send one person." That's one of the ways in which they have done it.

Another way they have done it is to go to a larger company. The example I can think of — I hope I'm not getting this wrong — is one of the major car companies, actually. You know that now the car is all made in different places and is just sort of put together. This was a deal to look at the…. They were getting a high error rate in the parts that were coming in to put together for the car. What they tried to do was said: "We" — the larger company putting the car together — "have this program, which you" — the smaller companies that are building the widgets or whatever — "can't do. But we can work with you to provide that service as an exchange."

There are ways in which creatively, I think, there are additional benefits that you're gaining. You get a reduction in the error rate and the fault rate by compensating and by saying, "Okay, we provide this information for a smaller employer that's doing this," and then both of them are benefiting, because you get the better efficiencies that are possible.

For small employees, it is difficult to provide this kind of stuff. I'm very sympathetic to employers. Most employers want to provide something that is very job-related. They would see literacy as not necessarily job-related.

I can give you, for an example, the diamond mine in the north. They're shifting from an open-pit mine to kind of the….

To do that, they have to retrain these people. Of course, they have a rule that says you have to hire local people. When you hire the local people, they found that they didn't have the literacy. What they are then trying to do is provide the literacy so that they can be retrained to work in a different type of mine.

They were telling me that if something happens at the mine and you have a safety issue, these people couldn't read fast enough while they were leaving to know where to go. They had to have a body telling them what to do.

You see how the costs of literacy are really high in terms of safety, productivity and everything. What we really need to do is find ways in which the different sectors of society really work together. You can't leave it to government. You can't leave it to the private sector. You can't leave it to the NGOs.

R. Lee: A lot of your study is a snapshot on 2003 data, except one or two of those graphs. Have you done any studies — say, a comparison of a ten-year or five-year period — so that you can see actually how the system is improving or deteriorating?

As well, in high school right now we have an 80-percent graduation rate. Before maybe it was a little bit lower. But that doesn't translate into literacy levels. Elementary school students take probably five years to reach high school — that kind of thing.

S. Brink: We don't have the data, unfortunately, to do that. But we're hoping to have data where we can try to see what the performance of children over time is just before graduation level and then also to look at what the level of literacy is in the population as we are putting our investments in. Right now I wouldn't be able to give you a really good answer on that. It's a data issue, not a methodology issue.

R. Lee: That's right. But also, you can track different groups over time to see if there are any improvements.

You know that B.C., the last time around, invested a little bit of money so that we could oversample. The data I've used are not fully representative. If this is a priority for you, then I would say that you should oversample for aboriginal people — 5 percent. I would have to really oversample for your aboriginal people, but for immigrants, with 29 percent, I wouldn't have to do a very large number. We should be able to do something easily.

The other thing, if it is of interest…. One of the things that I'm hoping to be able to do is a much more focused type of study where, let's say, we would take an organization that is giving a literacy program — you were talking about the content and so on — and say: "Now, design the program. Then give them a before-test — make them do the thing — and an after-test, and

then measure them one year after to see whether they retained it and whether they're still working."

If we can do something like that for a small number, then it's a better way to test it than by a big national survey.

J. Nuraney (Chair): My final question, Dr. Brink. You showed us a slide saying that even after ten years of settlement in this country, the literacy level has not improved. Could that be some deficiency in the programs that are meted out, or is there some other factor?

S. Brink: We are still trying to figure out exactly what the different factors would be that would affect it. It's particularly difficult, because there were some changes in immigration over that ten-year period, as you know.

Frankly, I have to say that as an immigrant, I was very disappointed to see that number, You know that in the last few years we brought in people with post-secondary education, so we were not expecting that to be the case. We also know, though, that the source countries are very different. So we thought that there is something there.

The issue, also, is…. When we do the immigration, we have something that is called "the prime immigrant," and we are looking at the prime person. That's the person who has the post-secondary education. We are not looking, for example, at the wife or the other people. And of course, when we do a survey like this, we have everybody. We don't just have the prime person. Again, we need to be able to see in a household what that case is.

The other thing that we do is bring people in, in mid-career. You have to be around 40 years old or something, so you're really a good person in your career when you come here. The hope that we had was that these people should be a plug-and-play kind of a thing. You can bring them in and put them into something, and they should be able to operate. But we are taking too long to give them the integration services in a way that really works.

Nortel, for example, brought a lot of people from Asia, and they were fantastic programmers. When we had that meltdown, these people couldn't find jobs. As the guy from Nortel told me: "We could dress them up, but they couldn't do an interview." That was because of literacy. They could program the heck out of anything, but they just could not provide the basic things in the working languages.

It's such a waste of human capital. We're sitting on this goldmine of human capital, and you, in particular — 29 percent — could really make this province dance and sing if you get that fixed.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Members, our next presenter is Barry Brooks. Barry is the director for lifelong learning at Tribal CTAD in the United Kingdom. His current portfolio focuses on the national and international aspects of employment, social justice and workforce development.

Before joining the Tribal Group, he was a senior official in the British civil service, most recently at the Department for Education and Skills. As head of the Skills for Life strategy unit, Barry successfully developed and implemented the government's national strategy for improving the literacy, language and numeracy skills for young people and adults.

Welcome, Barry. A pleasure to see you again. As you know, you have an hour — 45 minutes of presentation, some time left for questioning. Please proceed.

B. Brooks: Thank you, John, and I'd just like to thank the committee for inviting me. I regard it as a real honour — the opportunity to address you in terms of the Skills for Life strategy. I hope that in some way what I have to say will contribute to your work.

Just to contextualize what I'm going talk about. I think you've heard from Satya about what B.C. can do, and that's your own raison d'être. I'm here to talk to you about what a nation has done, is doing and will continue to do in the U.K.

I don't have the time at the moment to give you a detailed analysis of the strategy. I'm going to provide you with an overview. I want you, as a result of this, to have an understanding of why what has happened has happened, what in detail is happening, what is likely to happen in the future and, most specifically, given your role, what a central government's role can be in an activity like this.

It's critical that you understand that I'm talking about the British government taking a central role, taking leadership, accepting there's a problem and not abdicating responsibility for someone else to deal with it but actually looking to galvanize all the actors and activities and resources that potentially would be available to make that sort of difference. It also — and it links to something that Mary talked about earlier — is looking very clearly that you address the twin pillars, the twin desires, of securing social justice and employability for every citizen living and learning and working in England.

Through its investment in and implementation of this strategy, the government has demonstrated its commitment to securing these twin goals. Through its determination to demonstrably secure these goals, the government has set itself a demanding agenda with clear time lines and with specific milestones that it was prepared to be held accountable for on a daily basis but also regularly at the polls.

The achievement of these goals — and this is something which I think is pretty unique around the world — is measured by a public service agreement target. That means that target is set and owned by a specific department, the department for education and skills —

my former department — and that department is held accountable for these targets by Her Majesty's Treasury. Progress on them is measured by the Prime Minister's Office through his delivery unit.

Specifically, these targets set out to say that we will increase the number of adults with basic skills over a period of time — starting from 2001 and measured each three-year period — by three-quarters of a million— 750,000 by 2004, 1.5 million by 2007 and 2.25 million by 2010. It's a very focused, qualification-based target. It relates to the number of different adults who achieve a national qualification. It's ambitious because each learner will only count for once in that achievement. That doesn't mean they don't engage in ongoing learning. It just means that you keep people in the system, and you support it.

The reason I've opened in that kind of almost officious way is that it sets the background for the Skills for Life strategy. It is ambitious, it is altruistic, but it's ruthless in its determination to make a difference. It's important for you to grasp that it's a politically driven strategy — as I say, at once altruistic in its intention, centralist in its implementation and ruthless in its determination to secure irreversible change. This notion of not slipping back is central to the strategy.

The second factor is that it's set against its own challenging targets. The Skills for Life strategy has been and continues to be a measurable and tangible success, as the number of individuals that are learning, achieving qualifications and progressing in work is enormous.

What was the driver? The first driver was the IAL survey of 1997, I think. The results were published in the U.K., and it was an incredible embarrassment to the government. I was talking to colleagues yesterday, and I said that if it hadn't been for Poland, we would be bottom.

The government determined to do something about that. We've subsequently undertaken our own survey to give us our own benchmark. What we flagged was that in England, 5.2 million adults aged 16 to 65 had literacy levels below what for us is level 1 and, for you, is level 2. For us that was a dramatic experience. Even more dramatic, though, were the 6.8 million adults aged 16 to 65 who had numeracy skills below entry level, which is your level 1. Fifteen million had numeracy levels below level 1 for us, your level 2.

So in respect of Satya's data, it reflects that same kind of trend — embarrassing on both levels but on numeracy, far more dramatic. And to reinforce that negative impact on England's economic performance, officials at the Treasury had estimated that poor levels of literacy and numeracy were likely to have cost the country as much as £10 billion a year — $20 billion in your currency — in lost revenue in terms of taxes, lower productivity and an increasing burden on the welfare state.

The minister and the ministry had to act. The government highlighted its concerns through the Secretary of State for Education and Skills, when he said: "These people and their children risk being cut off from the advantages of the world increasingly linked through information technology. A fair and prosperous society cannot be built on such insecure foundations."

Skills for Life, dealing with those 16 and beyond, was launched by a government that already believed, through its national literacy strategies in primary and secondary school, that it had started to address the needs of children — very much as Satya said. Again, what was an interesting debate at that time were economists who were telling the Prime Minister and the government: "Abandon the stock of your adults. Invest in your children. Make the difference in terms of the flow of young people into the workforce, rather than dealing with the workforce."

The reality in the U.K. at that time was that something like 60 percent of the existing workforce would still have been in activity by 2015. With the change in demographics and the increasing age of people working beyond 65, of course, that number is much greater.

Again, if you just refer back to Satya's data, in a way that was a naïve set of recommendations by economists because, actually, the burden on the welfare state would have increased if activity hadn't taken place.

So the government set out a target. What they looked at was a set of priority groups. Let's look at those areas where disadvantage is greatest, where the risk of social exclusion is greatest and where we can make the greatest impact.

There were five main areas that we targeted. Unemployed people and benefit claimants — helping people to get the skills to become employable and progress in work and therefore get them out of the benefit trap.

Prisoners and those supervised in the community — people that we describe now as offenders. Offender learning is a key dimension. If you look at the skills of offenders — I've given you some pretty horrific figures for the general population — the data extrapolates five or six times in percentage terms when you look at the offender community.

Public sector employees. Often people raise their eyebrows at that, but if it's a centrally driven strategy, government isn't just setting the work for the people to do. What we talked about is the government leading by example, so public sector employees were a key area.

Low-skilled people in employment. Moving people through — not just starting at the bottom of the ladder to move people in, but encouraging and enabling those people in work to improve their skills, to progress and to move onto higher-level skills and to have a magnet effect by drawing people through.

A whole range of other groups are at risk of what we just described as social exclusion — parents and those living in disadvantaged communities. A really important subset of that was English for speakers of other languages. I'll talk more about that later, because in the early days that was a subset. For us now it's a major issue.

The Prime Minister was heard to speak on this on many occasions. One of his key areas of focus was relentlessness, as I've said. One of his comments was: "By relentlessly delivering our strategy on skills for life, we can together achieve profound and lasting change."

It makes it really easy as a bureaucrat trying to deliver something which is going to change the culture when you can always point to the Prime Minister and say: "Look at what he's saying. Look at what he's doing, and watch what he does." He was very much and continues to be a Prime Minister who didn't just talk the talk but walks the walk in that area.

Key themes that underpin that area of work: modernizing the government agenda — bringing into government experts who understood the context of school and college and work-based and adult learning to work alongside experienced civil servants.

Simplifying the system — a multiplicity of different approaches, a whole range of audiences and constituencies and a whole diversity of context and settings. No coherence. No systemization at all. No real data of any meaning available. The migration of learners from college to adult community learning — all of that was creating a stalling within the system. So simplifying the system, getting value for money, creating a situation that what we invested in….

Again, you've asked questions about accountability — a very strong accountability framework if you are getting money from the public purse. There were some rights but some real responsibilities as part of that.

Setting targets — measurable, accountable targets and holding people to account to those targets. But also the choice and contestability issue. Some people will learn in colleges. Some people will learn in school. Some people will learn in discrete provision. But many others, as we've heard already today, need to work and learn in a context which is meaningful and motivational to them — so creating that structure.

For the first time, starting to get meaningful data and publishing that data, so that people could see what was happening. They could see what was working as well as what wasn't working.

Finally, at the heart of that is a real user focus — looking at what the learner needs at a time, place and pace and in a manner that will engage them in terms of learning.

The strategy, as you can see in this slide, has four pillars: boosting demand for learning, ensuring capacity, improving standards and raising learner achievements. What I talk about is an end-to-end engagement.

Boosting demand is about broader public awareness, as well as about the individual learners — making it clear on public television and through the media what this is about; making it clear why some people miss appointments, why people duck issues, why people are not willing to join committees, societies or become governors — all of those sorts of things.

Working with employers, looking at some of the issues around the workforce. Changing culture and work requirements are some of the biggest issues where literacy and numeracy challenges first emerge.

As I've already said, commitment from key ministers. I'll say more later, but when I say ministers, I mean ministers across the whole governmental process. This was maybe led by the department for education and skills, but it wasn't solely owned by the department. It is a cross-government approach — and, as I say, looking hard and finding information on the scale of underachievement.

Increasing capacity. Often in education revolutions — let's call it that — the first casualty, the first missing link, is getting the workforce issues right. By that, I mean the teaching workforce. You can't secure change unless you carry the profession with you.

I have to say in that the U.K. around literacy, language and numeracy, profession in the early days was a misnomer. If you attended a college, an adult education course or whatever to do English literature, history, geography, engineering, motorcycle maintenance or whatever, you would be taught by an expert. If you attended a literacy or numeracy class, more likely you'd be taught by a willing amateur who felt that their dedication and commitment for change was sufficient to secure commitment for change. What we put in place was a national strategy to improve literacy and numeracy, targets that measured that process, and identification of resources to deliver and implement that strategy.

Now, lots of people when they've looked at the scale of investment — and I'll flag it with a slide later — for the Skills for Life strategy…. There's a sharp intake of breath. I have to tell you, as a former official there, there was not that much new money. What it was, was a reordering, a restructuring and an alignment of existing moneys.

It wasn't just money through Education and Skills or money for young people and adults. It was looking at what the Health department was spending on accident and emergency services in respect to unnecessary accidents. It was looking at what was happening in the Ministry of Defence in terms of the training of soldiers, because when they were recruited their literacy, language and numeracy skills were inappropriate for them to go into the field. I'll talk more about that later, but that's a key dimension.

Central to this — and this was marked as one of my key roles when I first joined the department — was about improving the quality of teaching, as I've said. We didn't just put in place a teaching and learning infrastructure for learners who wanted to improve their literacy, language and numeracy. We put in place a teaching and learning infrastructure for everybody, at all levels.

One of the things that I would say in the early days in respect to Skills for Life was: "We're all learners here, whether we're policy-makers, strategists, curriculum developers, teachers or the guys coming through the door looking to improve their literacy and numeracy."

We've provided training programs and guidance as well as qualifications for teachers. The professional development and support of teachers and those who are supporting the learning and the learner are key dimensions of this area of work.

The really controversial area is increasing learner achievement — how we measured it around the public service agreement target and removed that culture of it

being okay to be just attending a class and not making progress. It was okay to be experiencing the warmth of human kindness by coming in and joining a program, irrespective of if it was the same program on the same night and in the same place for many years. We wanted to stimulate people to realize their human capital and their potential.

The heart of this particular strategy is a broader skill strategy in the U.K. that says if we are going to be a competitive economy, we have to value the potential of every individual — wherever they are, whoever they are and whatever their potential will be. Not everyone is going to be a graduate, but given the opportunity, everyone can optimize their skills and maximize their potential.

As I said, we put in place the teaching and learning infrastructure. For the first time, whether you were in London, Newcastle or Kent — whether you were north, east or west in the country — the opportunity you had, the access to high-quality education, was predicated around a framework. When you joined a program, wherever it was — school, college or work-based — you were screened to find which skill you were weak at. You then had an initial assessment that identified where your strengths and weaknesses were and whatever the various levels were.

That triggered the kind of program that you would be placed in. Once you were in the program, a much more detailed diagnostic was put in place. That allowed you, with the teacher and supervisor, to build what we called an individual learning plan. That plan captures your age, ambitions, hopes and desires as well as the approach to learning, and that then is tracked with you.

The individual learning plan is the first trigger to the public purse. In other words, if a college or a provider didn't want to engage in the program and wouldn't use the teaching and learning infrastructure, then the public purse wouldn't kick in. We have a discreet near-to-government organization called the Learning and Skills Council that is responsible for the planning and funding of all post-16 adult learning. It doesn't matter where they do it — the voluntary sector, the college-based or the workplace — the Learning and Skills Council holds the data. Again, people could do all sorts of things outside of that, but they didn't and wouldn't and couldn't access the public purse.

The creation of that delivery strategy, part of that modernizing of government, enabled us to start and control the area. That specialist balance between people who knew what it was like in the delivery world — in the real world, as I used to say — as well as those people who knew their way around Whitehall, around government, created a dynamic where we built relationships with ministers. They understood the agenda. In the vernacular, they got it. They knew what this was about.

On another level, because this was owned by the Prime Minister, for many of the junior ministers that came in, it was actually their own career path. I served under four of those ministers in the early days at different points in time in terms of Skills for Life. If you look in the British government at the moment, they've gone into Health, the Home Office, the Treasury, Environment — the whole array of people. As I say, this is a part of the fabric of the government's development.

What do you get out of this? What is this implementation really about? We wanted a more personalized service — that's critical — but within the parameters of a national framework to support local delivery. We wanted high quality. It's very easy to throw money at things and not put in place an accountability framework.

We have a coherent inspection service that, in respect of context and setting, looks at the quality of learning, and they report on that quality of learning. There are five strands to the common inspection framework, as it's called. Those five strands relate to the quality of learning, the learner's experience, the quality of the materials, the training of the workforce and — pivotal — the governance of the institution. In other words, the senior managers were and continue to be held accountable for the quality of the learning experience of all learners in that environment.

Choice and contestability. We wanted to create a situation where learners, once empowered, could decide where they learned, how they learned, and the pace and the place of that learning. We eliminated some of the pressures about going to college or going to the adult community centre because of the funding available, so the opportunity was differential. We created the differential in terms of learning style, but actually the learning opportunity and the quality were standardized.

We wanted to simplify the system, as I've said earlier. We wanted someone who lives in Newcastle to be able to get the same quality as somebody who lives in central London. In other words, it was an altruistic system that recognized the importance of the learner and of that human capital. We didn't want the quality of learning to be determined by who they were, where they lived or who managed the local college. We wanted to eliminate that, and we believe we have.

We wanted to secure value for money, and by removing that overlap and duplication, we actually believe we have done that. One of the ways we've been able to see that, and I'll show this to you in a second, is the response from learners — the massive growth and uptake in terms of Skills for Life.

I made mention to you about the change in culture and bringing forward public awareness. Behind you, you will see the gremlins. The gremlins were in a public service set of broadcasting which took place at various times during the course of the day. It was the first public service broadcast ever to be given a watershed by the standards.

People were frightened by one of the experiences because of the challenge between the individual who wanted to improve their learning and this gremlin, who would sit around and say: "No, you don't have to turn up. No, you don't have to pass. You've got by. You don't have to worry. It'll all come right in the end." What we wanted to do was raise that issue.

These advertisements were developed with, by and through learners, because in talking to the learners, what we got was: "Well, why have you bobbed along for so long?" What they were saying was that it's quite easy. You set it aside over there. It becomes the problem that you don't have to talk about.

If you talk to people who are supposedly socially excluded or who are disadvantaged, they don't think about themselves generally as socially excluded or disadvantaged or at risk of social exclusion or whatever. They're getting along with their lives, they're not excluded, and they talk to their neighbours — all of those sorts of things. What we wanted to be able to do was help them move from what I've often described as the margins to the mainstream. What the gremlins campaign did was raise public awareness and then start to raise learner awareness.

In terms of the results that we've achieved so far, I'll show you the stats. We had the first public service agreement target of 750,000 learners by 2004. When we first set that, everybody stood back. At the time we were talking about 250,000 qualifications, or whatever, annually. People laughed. People said: "This is absurd. You will fail miserably."

We achieved 850,000 qualifications by the 2004 target. That's 850,000 individuals. There were something in the order of 1.3 million qualifications achieved. What that means is that people engaged, stayed in and achieved their first and then their second and some, actually, their third.

I was told and have been told throughout my career that literacy and numeracy students don't want qualifications. I've been told that they don't want to go through the same negative experiences they had at school and college. I dispute the first rigorously. I agree with the second.

No, you don't take adults and give them the same education that they had when they were 16. No, you don't put them through a system that they failed in. What you do is create an adult-based, adult-focused learning system that recognizes who they are, what they want to do and where they want to go. That was the strength.

The latest figures I've got from my former guys are that to date we've engaged over 3.7 million learners in over 7.9 million learning opportunities over the first five years of the Skills for Life strategy. As I've said, over 1.275 million learners so far, as of 2005 — so that's going beyond the 850,000 I talked about — have achieved their first national qualification. Instead of waiting until 2007 to hit the 2000 PSA target, it looks very much as though we'll hit it around 2006.

Hitting the target has nothing to do with the learners. We don't talk to them about that. What it does — it's really important for you guys to understand — is put an accountability set of levers and drivers in the system to enable you to be empowered to talk the kind of language that you've been talking in terms of the questions thus far. It enables you to look outwards into other government departments and look very clearly at how you secure their engagement.

In my experience, anyway, you don't get anything in politics for nothing. You give things back. You set challenging targets, and you work ruthlessly and relentlessly towards them. That's what we've set out to do.

The first graph shows you the growth in terms of qualifications achieved from the launch of the strategy in 2001 to 2005. Clearly, at this time the 2006 figures have not been ratified, but you can see the level of engagement here. Again, not all learners at any particular one time are going to be ready to sit qualifications, but you can see the growth in learning. We have engaged people.

What I think is pivotal and what is really important is for you to understand that because everything is part of a coherent and consistent hope, I don't have to show you slides that say: "This is in the adult community end. This is in the further education end. This is in the workplace end." What I'm showing you is engagement.

A lot of countries, when I've talked to them about the Skills for Life strategies, have been shocked by the scale of central government involvement, and they've said to me, "Why are you focusing on the low-level skills?" when it's clear, from all the economic evidence that their analysts give them, that the returns to the employment sector and the returns to the individual are greatest at the higher-level skills. Satya has given you some very interesting information about that.

We've probably all been trained out of our lives, because we're good. We give returns. We benefit from it. Employers look at the lower-level skills and think: "Well, there's not a lot of point in investing in X, because he's not smart enough, hasn't got the velcro" — as Satya says — "to benefit from it."

What we're seeing here is a government that says: "Okay, we see from our data that employers will invest in level 3 and level 4 and HE, higher education. Individuals will invest in level 3 and whatever, because they can see the returns. They won't invest money in the lower-level skills, so that's where we'll put our dollars. That's where we'll put our money. We will invest where individuals and employers won't."

That was one of the key areas, I think, of Skills for Life in the first instance. I'll say something in a moment about the sea change now, in terms of how some of our employers are looking at that.

Again it's a similar slide, which just talks about learning opportunities. The numbers — you've got it in the slide — will show you that although the growth is exactly the same, you've got a situation where the number of learning opportunities is enormous, and in an area…. I go back to having worked in this area as a volunteer when I had black hair and a much slimmer waist — many years ago.

One of the biggest challenges for learners in this area is not getting them through the door; it's actually keeping them engaged. It's the retention, completion, achievement and progression. That's the challenge. Actually encouraging them to come forward in the first instance is generally not that difficult — particularly, you know, if you give them a warm smile and tell them

it's not like school. But what you can say here with the learning opportunities is: "We're getting them in. We're keeping them in. They're sustaining. They're becoming ambitious."

I believe that the biggest thing about the Skills for Life strategy for the learners is not the qualifications it gets them. It's actually the confidence it gives them in themselves because for the first time they've done what they've seen everybody else, as far as they're concerned, do throughout their lives. They've joined that ladder. They're on that system.

This is the growth that you will see: people starting to getting a literacy and numeracy qualification and then getting one in care or health or whatever so that they can work forward in terms of employment.

Some of these acronyms will not mean too much for you, but what I wanted to show you is the breakdown across the territories. Now, the first thing to say is: you can see there's not just one provider. The other thing you can see, for the first time, is how big the scale of the further education activity is in the U.K. That's that big blue part.

You've got provision — and this is what I was talking about when I was talking to you about bringing in other ministries — by DWP. That's the Department for Work and Pensions, the people who are looking at securing employability. Provision by OLSU. That's the Offender Learning and Skills Service. It used to be driven by the Home Office — work that's happening in prisons and work in probation. Employer training pilots is the work which is happening in the workforce, driven in a partnership between government and employers.

Believe it or not — I don't know whether you can see that narrow, kind of pinky bit, a little bit like my handkerchief there — that says HE. It's the number of people in higher education who've actually wiggled their way through and got into higher education who have literacy and numeracy problems — generally around numeracy, actually — in terms of being able to move forward. We do draw down money from the European Union. That's what the ESF stands for.

That enormous, light-blue segment. In terms of work-based learning, if I'd shown you that in 2001, that probably would have been the same as the HE one. There's enormous growth because we've switched our employers on to engagement in learning.

It's a relatively small part now in terms of adult and community learning, because they do a lot of the first-start work, but still an important area. And UfL, which some of you may well know, was the first national approach in the U.K. to use technology — ICT — as providing on-line training and on-line courses.

This purple segment is growing, because that means about the pace and the place and the location and the timing or whatever. People with challenging lives, people with difficult lives…. We shouldn't forget that these are real people. These are not children who are being looked after by someone else. These are real people living in challenging circumstances who need to find a way of using their skills and their commitment at a time and a place, and using technology is a key development in that territory.

I just want to show you that slide. A lot of people think that we have removed all opportunities for learning that don't immediately lead to a qualification. What the purple shows you is that we are prepared to invest in the individual over time.

We don't say: "You join this course, and you get a qualification within six months or a year or two years, or you're out on your ear." We say: "As long as you want to learn, we'll support you through." If you take the first column in 2000-2001, some of those purple guys will be in the blue part for 2002-2003, but you can see the growth. You can see the development.

If you look at the next slide at the bottom area…. Now, if you think about the levels, just work on the fact that we're talking about the lowest level of skills of individuals at entry level. The blue at the bottom — these are the people who are most disadvantaged with the lowest-level skills. We recognize that they're the ones who will take longer to achieve qualifications.

But if you go back to what Satya was saying in terms of your own thinking about targeting, look at what we're doing at the higher levels. The guys at the top are the ones who are achieving. They'll go on to the higher level — the technical skills, the vocational skills. The purple ones will move up, and they will be the graduates of the future. So there is what I describe as a magnet effect of drawing people through.

In the early days when we first launched, the detractors would say: "Huh, it's just about the kids in college. That's all you're doing. You're just dealing with the kids in college." If you look at 2001, all the achievements are just coming through from the kids in college. We actually started, quite honestly, with the low-hanging fruit, but what you do…. You can see by the growth that we're drawing more and more adults into the system as we get rid of that notion that it's not okay to admit you need support in developing your skills.

An interesting glitch around 2002-2003. That was when some of the weaker qualifications in the system dropped out, so we noticed a dip. We projected it. We planned for it. But as you can see, the exponential growth…. The overall trend is very clear.

One of the biggest challenges we have, and I made reference to this earlier, is ESOL — English for Speakers of Other Languages. You can see that the vast majority of learning, as you would expect in the U.K., is in the white indigenous population, if I can call them that. But what you can also see is an increasing growth, particularly around the Asian area and the black area.

What I haven't got is the next phase of those slides, because we're analyzing them, but if you looked at it, you would see an enormous growth in the ethnicity. Unfortunately, it's not based on first, second and third generation of non-English speakers coming in to provision. It's based on the massive influx of migrant workers coming in from the European Union.

Skills for Life is having to take stock at the moment around the ESOL area because European law says that

all European citizens have access to the health and education services of the country they're working in. There are companies that are in Poland and Czechoslovakia or wherever — and you can look at this as a good thing, as the Chancellor does, because they're paying taxes, or as a bad thing, as a policymaker in respect of this particular strategy — that are recruiting everything from doctors, dentists, nurses down to shelf stackers for the supermarkets.

They are saying: "Come to the U.K. We'll give you a job. We'll give you somewhere to live, and we'll show you where you can get free English classes." That is having an impact. As I say, my expectation is that if I were here in 12 months time, I think we would be looking at some slight differential approach to English for Speakers of Other Languages.

In respect of your context, the important thing is that level of engagement. Some of the data suggests that in the U.K., and in England alone, there have been one million new adults in the stock of the workforce. I'm not talking about school leavers coming through. I'm not talking about that demographic. I'm talking about one million new people. If you think about….

In the U.K. you always have a fair number of people who move out. You know, people get to my age in the U.K., and they buy a house in Spain and whatever they want — the ones who aren't civil servants, anyway. They go off to Spain, and they move away. So there are more migrant workers coming in than just that.

I won't dwell on this, because I know it rubs up my colleagues in B.C. and Canada and around the world pretty much, because of the scale of the investment by the U.K. government. I think the important thing, from your point of view, as I've said, is it's not just about new money. It has to be about looking at drawing in resources that are already being used in other areas. Roughly, the government set aside £1.6 billion for the first three years of the strategy, a further £1.7 billion for the next three years, and we've got about the same amount to take us up to 2010.

It's about looking at the resources and persuading colleagues across government about the wins for their own policy areas. One of the things that we were very keen on and worked very hard at is to show how you would get a win-win in terms of benefits for employment and improvement in skills — as I said, benefits in terms of the quality of soldiers as against the improvement in new skills. Reduction in accidents in the home is part of the new skills development. Greater social cohesion, in terms of the offender community, by greater investment in education.

We talked earlier, and you were asking questions, about employment. There are a couple of slides here that I think are very relevant to you. It's a piece of latest research that has come through in the U.K. that I'd commissioned about three years ago. In terms of the general further-education area in the U.K., we're moving from what's talked about as the supply-driven to the demand-led.

In colloquial terms, it moves from the college that says, "You'll get what I've got when I want to give it to you," to the learner and the employer actually saying, "These are the skills that I need. These are the opportunities I need. This is when I want it to be delivered. I need it at the end of shift. I need it at midnight. I need it on the weekend," and moving people into that domain.

As Satya said, if you can get double duty for your dollars in that respect, what you will get is an improvement in the vocational skills as well as the literacy and the numeracy skills. If you look at that particular slide in respect of literacy — and this is work-based activity — where you had discreet provision of literacy in a workplace setting, the achievement was 50 percent.

In other words, you're working for Pirelli, and you come off shift, and you do some general literacy work. If you're working in Tesco's, a supermarket, and you learn about retail and literacy in the context of that, look at the difference in the achievement in terms of it being worked and delivered together. The scale, again, is in terms of numeracy.

The messages I'm giving you are the messages that we're picking up in the U.K. — that learning actually becomes more meaningful and motivational if it's in a context that the employer and the learner and the provider can understand. This has been so influential that there's a system in the U.K., which is also by the Learning and Skills Council, called Train to Gain, where employers are being given a certain amount of cash for training if they will release people during downtime or during worktime.

Lots of the training takes place on the premises — workers aren't embarrassed — supported enormously by the unions. We have unions in this country now who will talk about not just pay bargaining; they talk about skill bargaining. They talk about going in to see the boss and saying: "I want my guys to be able to do this. I want my guys to be able to use the computers during downtime to get involvement."

One of the biggest employers that we've just brought in — and this is one of the things I've done since I joined the private sector — is McDonald's. Last week in the U.K. McDonald's launched what they call the learning lounge for all 73 McDonald's crew. See, I even know the language. This means they can learn on the premises. They can access the learning from home over the Internet. They have an e-tutor identified for them.

They have the opportunity to do their qualification on line, at a time and a pace and a place. It's supported by the Learning and Skills Council, so it's a real partnership between the private and the public sector, and the benefits of course are accrued to the learners.

I'm sure the demographics for those who work in McDonald's here are very similar to the U.K. Most of the learners are low achievers. For many of them it's their first job, and what they get is a feeling of ownership and commitment to the company.

What you've got there — again, I don't want to go through that — is a diagram in terms of learning of skills, which shows you the interrelationship of policy

in the education and learning domain. I promised you that I would say a little bit about other government departments. I really do think that where you are and where you're thinking…. If you need to get more resources, then you start to raid other people's coffers, not just the learning and skills through the education and skills domain.

I talked to you about the treasury. They were the key driver around Train to Gain because of economic competitiveness. They were the key department that funded the creation of the union learning academy for the trade union movement. In other words, treasury is about economic competitiveness focused in that area, if you want to go in the treasury.

The Home Office has two focuses in the U.K. Social cohesion…. You'll have read in the newspapers about the riots and about the bombs in terms of the Muslim community. We work very hard with the British Muslim Research Centre in terms of employment opportunities and improving enterprise, but in the context of English as a second language. I've already talked to you about offenders.

Ministry of Defence. I've talked to you about the quality of the work of the soldiers.

The Department for Work and Pensions — employability. The velcro again, as Satya says, is dependent upon your literacy, numeracy and language skills. It may not be pivotal at day one, but as soon as changing work practices come in, it actually becomes the key agent for change. The Department for Work and Pensions understands that.

The Department for Media, Culture and Sport. Training of trainers, sports coaches — again, a much more recreational part.

Department for Communities and Local Government. We've long invested in neighbourhood regeneration. When people have talked about that, they've meant the fabric — building schools, houses, roads. Actually, you regenerate a community by regenerating the people. Investing in the people makes the change. We talked about the Department for Health.

I just want to close. In the U.K. we took hard decisions between 2000 and 2001. The government put itself on the line. It created a unit to work across the government. It actually engaged with the teaching and learning workforce, the teaching and learning activity. It created an end-to-end process. It was relentless; it was ruthless. But as a result of that, we believe that we've secured the kind of irreversible change that was important. Lots more to do, but we have absolute confidence in terms of what we're doing.

M. Polak: What kind of measurement tool do you use? What role did teacher education play in any shifting in what university programs are for them? And the qualifications you mention — how was that put in place so that they carried some weight and were recognized?

B. Brooks: There were a variety of benchmarks in terms of measurement. If you go back to the teaching and learning infrastructure, we had a set of national standards that said what an individual should know and understand and be able to do at a certain level — so stage-related and nothing to do with age-related. It was drawn out of what was part and parcel, in general understanding, of what happens in school.

We didn't talk about having the skills of a five-year-old, but we actually looked at what the technical levels were. The initial assessment would take a high-level view of that. The diagnostic assessment would take a detailed measurement of that. Those are checked over time, captured in an individual learning plan and then part of the ongoing skill bargaining, if I can call it, with the learner.

Teacher education was absolutely pivotal. We put in three new qualifications and frameworks with our universities and our teacher training organizations, as well as the ongoing CPD framework, across the country, which looked at the skills for those people who led the learning.

We've gotten away from this argument of, "I'm a lecturer. I'm a teacher. I'm a supervisor," or whatever. The person who leads the learning has to have the highest level of skill. That's the university level. The person who supports the learning — the teaching assistant or whatever — for us is your four, our three. The person who supports the learner — moving away from just having the willing amateur who puts the arm around the shoulders — we gave the opportunity to be part of the ladder.

We were creating a situation — again, that magnet…. You get your first qualification, if you are starting from base, to support the learner. That then gives you the impetus to look and to become an assistant. Then you move into the qualifications. The qualifications are national qualifications. We have a tradition in the U.K. where you form a specification for a qualification, and then you allow the awarding bodies to interpret that qualification and then sell it.

In terms of Skills for Life, we didn't want that. We didn't want people to say: "Your literacy qualification is better than mine at level 2 because you've done it with a more difficult awarding body." We took that in centrally. We used our qualifications in curriculum authority not just to write the specification, but to create the qualification.

The qualifications have moved increasingly on line, so they can be taken, as I say, anytime, anyplace, anywhere. The exponential growth of people being able to take those qualifications and accessing them is amazing.

D. Routley: Thank you, Mr. Brooks, for that informative presentation. I really appreciate it. I especially appreciate your definition of accountability as a system that, by view of this slide, runs both ways through the pipeline. You mentioned that senior managers are held accountable.

In our world here, we tend to think of accountability pointing downwards all the time towards the service deliverer from the system. A piece of the accountability

pipeline here that you point to, the end that I think the leaders of the system need to be concerned with, is ensuring capacity.

We can boost demand, and we can increase expectations. We can set goals and label those goals with adjectives — colours. But if we don't ensure that we provide the funding, the capacity, the seats and all of the coordination, then we are, in fact, making empty the words that created the demand. So I really appreciate that. I think we can all learn a big lesson from that in our system — that we are accountable, as well as those who deliver the service.

You also mentioned a couple of things that I just want to agree with you on first. The biggest thing is not the qualification, but confidence. Particularly with this committee being tasked to address aboriginal literacy issues, confidence is always a huge piece of that puzzle. This is a transferable confidence, so I congratulate you in identifying that for us.

Another question, somewhat political, on the skills part — skills bargaining issue. My role in the opposition is that of apprenticeships and skills training critic. I note that you say that you brought the unions to the table, that the workers helped identify what their needs were, and that industry was a participant in that. Do you see it as a mistake not to invite those workers to that table or, worse yet, a bigger mistake to drive them away from it?

B. Brooks: One of the strengths, I think, of the Skills for Life strategy — hard words in there about ruthless, relentless, whatever…. One of the key words, also, is "ownership" and working with people from day one. If you work with people from day one, try to create trust in the system and share the vision, then it becomes a shared vision.

Certainly, in the early days, we had employers who would say…. A wonderful example was given to me by somebody who went to a turkey-plucking whatever in Norfolk and had gone in to the see the boss and was talking about it.

He stood up, and he threw the window open. A big array of people was pulling away. He said: "I'm not going to waste my money on them. I'm not going to waste my time on them. Why should I? If I do that, then they'll walk away, or they'll want more money, or they'll go on strike, or whatever."

What we did was worked with him and with his employees — clearly, a non-union situation as well. I don't think there's a turkey-pluckers union or whatever. Could be, though. Maybe that's a new job. But what you got was people being prepared to stay after work, people feeling: "Hey, that guy up there who normally shouts abuse at us rates us." Productivity went up. Absenteeism went down. Accidents started to be reduced, and camaraderie and trust were built.

I knew that we were starting to do something. I made reference to Pirelli earlier. I knew we were starting to do something when Pirelli in Carlisle, in the north of the country, started to pay their workers overtime to stay behind to improve their literacy and numeracy. None of my guys had been in. None of my guys had gone in and knocked on the door and said: "Hey, why don't you do it?" It was the fact that employers were starting to recognize that you actually could get benefits.

Of course, the other thing is — and you must know this in terms of apprenticeship — many companies get involved in apprenticeships not because of government money, not because they're altruistic but because they can talent-spot. If you start to release the human capital that Satya says is in your existing workforce, you might get a chicken plucker to become your next bookkeeper, or you might get your health and safety executive within that. Employers are starting to recognize that.

R. Lee: This is a very high-level presentation. I would be interested in many more details. My understanding is that you set up some curriculum, and then everybody has individualized plans in order to satisfy those qualifications. Is it possible that that kind of Skills for Life curriculum can be implemented in high school so that every high school graduate would have that kind of qualification?

B. Brooks: It's on this diagram, but I didn't talk about it. One of the last things that I did before I left…. It was kind of my coup de grâce in a way, thinking I'd embedded it and could walk away. There were two White Papers, government documents in terms of education, that were launched last year.

One was on skills for adults, called Getting on in Business, Getting on at Work and the other was on 14-19 education and training. What I did with those White Papers is…. I wasn't responsible for all of it. I did the Skills for Life end. What I was writing for 14-year-olds, 15-year-olds, 16-year-olds, 17-year-olds and 19-year-olds was basically the Skills for Life strategy that I was also writing in for the workers.

What we've got now is a situation, which is emerging, where they'll talk about functional English and functional maths and functional ICT, worked with through the sectors — the Sector Skills Council for employers — which will be part and parcel of the curriculum for 14 and upwards. You know that if you hit something and make it compulsory at 14, it bleeds down the system to seven, eight, nine, ten, 11, because teachers and educators start to prepare.

Yes, Richard, we've started to do that. The lessons we've learned about engagement and starting to stop what we described as "the disappointed, the disaffected, the disinterested and the disappeared" are those kids at 16…. We're starting to look at it in that territory.

R. Fleming: I just wanted to ask a question about something you said to describe, I guess, the mobilization of resources that the Prime Minister and the government began in 1997. One of the things you said it was premised on was an observation — or a fact, really — that people and companies are willing to invest in advanced education and specialized instruction and human resource development, but they're very reluctant to invest in the sort

of skill level 1 and 2. I think your quote was something like: "So therefore, governments must."

In our jurisdiction here we've seen tuition fees for advanced education double in just a few short years, and I think it's probably about a billion-dollar-a-year revenue source now for the government, up from $400-odd million. But we haven't seen that shift of resources.

Is that what you were talking about? There was an introduction of tuition fees in your country and a reinvestment in other types of learning or…?

B. Brooks: No, because the money that has come in…. We've trammelled our tuition fees at HE level over the last three years. That money goes straight into HE; it doesn't go into the treasury. That's money that the universities have been saying we can't invest in research, and we can't pay our academics the right amount of money. They leave England and come to Canada, or whatever, to get more money and things. It's about stopping that brain drain and increasing the quality.

What I was referring to, Rob, was the notion that in a normal company…. Well, let's take the civil service. In the civil service I could do 40 days of training a year. In the school system and college system, they've just increased the amount of required training for teachers to something like 35 days a year. That's mandatory. They have to have a log.

We don't train the cleaners. We don't say to the cleaners: "You've got to have 35 days of training a year on the company." We don't say to the groundsmen in schools and colleges or in our public sector: "You've got to have 35 days of training a year." We just say: "No, we're going to invest in the top because that's where we see the tangible returns."

The danger, and the reality from our point of view, is that those who have it continue to get it and those who haven't don't. There was a slide that I haven't shown you, which talked about school leavers in the U.K. before Skills for Life. It was about those who achieved the upper-secondary leaving certificate and then went on to university, and those who didn't. The slide was entitled "If at first you don't succeed, you don't succeed." In other words, if you don't do it, if you don't capture them or you don't put in the rescue packages, which we've started to do, then actually you're casting people into the wilderness. It's what I mean when I talk about it being an altruistic intervention.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Thank you, Barry. Final question. You talk about the individualized skills assessment…. You don't call it that.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Learning plan. Can you throw some light on exactly how the process works?

B. Brooks: Okay. It's very straightforward in a way. Once you have an organization called the Learning and Skills Council that's responsible for planning and funding, as a principal of a college I'd say: "Next year I'm going to have 2,000 Skills for Life learners in my system." The Learning and Skills Council representative would look at my demographic and say: "Yeah, that looks about right. You deliver. You've delivered in the past." So that money is allocated — not given, but allocated.

As the learners come through, every learner — and I mean every learner — will sit down at some stage and do the screening and initial assessment and the diagnostic and have an on-line individual learning plan captured. That is then logged with the Learning and Skills Council. The Learning and Skills Council will monitor that development. The first payment to the college is based on the individual learning plan.

Subsequent payments are based on completion of program and achievement of program. It's a centrally measured system. If you don't complete your individual learning plan and the Learning and Skills Council, when they do their monitoring…. Then you don't get paid. If you don't complete your individual learning plan when the inspectorates come around and start to look at them, then the inspectorates go down on you like a ton of bricks. Not only don't you get your money, but your reputation goes down the tubes. That's what I mean by an accountability framework.

B. Brooks: Not every one of them is on line, but the majority are on line. The diversity of the context is such that some people are still working with paper-based. The aspiration is that ultimately it will be all on line.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Barry, thank you very much once again. This is your second visit to Canada, and I'm sure a lot of us have benefited from what you have said.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Members, our next presenter is Dr. Frank Wood. Dr. Frank Wood has been on the faculty of Wake Forest University's school of medicine in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, since 1975. He currently holds the titles of professor of neurology, head of neuropsychology and associate in radiology.

Since 1986 he has directed a National Institutes of Health–funded project on dyslexia genetics, brain imaging, behaviour and classroom intervention. He's also an adult literacy researcher for the National Institutes of Health and is active in the United States Adult Literacy Research Network.

Welcome, Dr. Frank Wood. Thank you for taking the time. I know you had to travel to be here. We appreciate that, and we offer you a warm welcome. Please proceed.

F. Wood: It is certainly an honour to be with you. May I say that I'm unaccustomed, in United States state government, to such high levels of policy deliberation. I'm very impressed and grateful for what you are doing

today and across time in seeking a higher level of service and outcome for your people.

I will mention that I am also a member of the faculty of medicine at the Nelson R. Mandela School of Medicine in South Africa. I mention that because I want to begin by making just a few comments that are not printed in my slide presentation on some things that were said today. I've been doing research in South Africa for the last ten years in literacy. I'd like to share a few perspectives from that experience, because they seem relevant to some of the discussion here today.

Ten years ago I was standing in a store…. It was actually 11 years, a little more than a year after the installation of the new government. The lady behind the counter, an African, was singing with the radio, which was playing the national anthem, Nkosi Sikelel' iAfrika, meaning "God bless Africa." She was doing so with tears in her eyes. I didn't have to ask. I just looked at her invitingly, and she said: "I was just thinking of the time when we installed Nelson Mandela as President of South Africa. I saw those jet airplanes going across the podium in the sky, and I said that for the first time in my life, those airplanes were flying for me." Then she said: "You see, I'm taking an adult literacy course. I don't read English at all well. The reason I'm taking the course is because I want to read Nelson Mandela's Long Walk to Freedom."

I bring that to your attention as a vignette to remind you that the motives of adult learners are varied. When we talk to them in our research, they tell us a whole range of reasons far beyond the workplace why they want to read. It's usually because they do have things they want to read. It's often religious texts of all religions. It's often biographies of people they love and respect. But it's also: "I want to learn to read so I can read to my children."

A wide range of motives brings adult learners to your doors. Let's not forget that reading per se, irrespective of its economic impact, is a major ingredient in quality of life.

Secondly, and I'm partly resonating here with what our first speaker, Graham Smith, said about aboriginal or first nations populations…. There's another experience in South Africa I would share with you. All white people in South Africa, who constitute 15 percent of the population now, do a lot of identifying with the majority culture. They learn to sing African songs. They routinely now learn in the schools to speak isiZulu or isiXhosa or other African languages. By the way, there are 11 official languages in South Africa, not just two as here. Only two of those are European languages — English and Afrikaans.

The leftover establishment of white people is doing all it can now to learn African culture. I would submit to you that you'll know that you have succeeded in a qualitative way when your majority ethnic community in British Columbia wants to learn Chinese or Indian or Korean or first nations culture, wants to read their treatises, study their heroes and sing their songs.

As another comment, I was grateful for some of the questions — one being the question: what must we do about existing programs on the shelf? I endorse wholeheartedly Satya Brink's answer, which is: "Review them carefully." I'll have more to say about the standards for making that review momentarily.

Also, I'm appreciative of the comments relating to the linkage between childhood and adult education. I'll be making some comments and showing some graphs related to that.

I'm very interested and grateful for the emphasis in our last speaker's talk about the government's interest in defining what works. I want to share with you what happens in the United States. The Department of Education at the federal level has what they call a "what works" clearinghouse. This clearinghouse vets any submitted research findings which allege efficacy. It demands of those findings, before it will list them in the "what works" clearinghouse, that they be a proper experimental versus control group design.

There are few studies listed in the "what works" clearinghouse for that reason. But this is one straw in the wind of our government's effort to make it clear that research — and, in this case, efficacy research — must be rigorous. The only way to make it rigorous is to compare the treatment to a non-treatment or alternative treatment control — in the best case, a randomized prospective design, but if not, then at least in a comparative study of two groups that were equal at the beginning but turned out differently at the end.

With those few little things off my chest, let me proceed. I would welcome you jumping in and asking questions. I have fewer slides even than Barry, I think, and I was deeply impressed with how few he had. For some reason, over the years I've tried to present less and less. I don't know if it's more that is less, but we'll see.

The work I've done over the years requires lots of collaborators. Here are some of them. I'll not go into them except to say that Guinevere Eden was a graduate of Oxford who did her dissertation in our laboratories in Winston-Salem and is an immigrant to the United States.

Other collaborators who've supplied test versions of curriculum materials to us — people in our own department and in the radiology department that we work closely with and so on….

It turned out that back in 1985 the U.S. National Institutes of Health engaged in a major initiative to learn about reading and dyslexia at the school-age level. They followed this in 2002 with an initiative in adult literacy.

This comes from a collaboration, as Barry Brooks pointed out, between departments of the government — in this case, the National Institutes of Health, the primary movers here, and the Department of Education.

Literacy is a health issue in several ways. I've given you a little extended written summary of some of our

work. I may send you some reprints of articles that we've published. But I want to say that suicidality, and the precursor of depression leading to suicidality, is — with everything else that we now have to control, equal between the two groups — far more prevalent. Suicidal ideation is almost six times more prevalent in poor readers who are teenagers or young adults than in good readers. Being a poor reader is a major threat to your well-being, your health and even your life. Never mind — of course, do mind, but for the moment, never mind — the economic impact, which is huge.

Here are some of the investigators in the adult literacy network. Abt Associates is a for-profit company that does research, policy guidance and so on around the world. The Educational Testing Service is well known to you, and so on.

Now I'm going to present just a few ideas. I'm going to present some data under some of them and then submit the rest of the time for discussion.

I've learned the very hard, bitter lesson that it does not matter what your philosophy of education is. We have lots of clashing philosophies of education. What matters is whether your learners learn. The way you find out if they learn is by seeing whether they can read. That's the behaviour we're targeting. If they learn significantly better reading than they had, then the program has succeeded, if you compare that to a control group who didn't learn it. I don't care how wonderful a program is in its conception. If it doesn't work, it doesn't work.

I've added a comment or two in yellow ink on this slide show that aren't in the handout. I've reinforced the 18-percent genetic risk in point 2 here. It is a secure finding across Canada — which has been a leader in this work — the U.K., Germany and the United States that a very substantial reason why learners, either children or adults, don't read is because of genetic variation.

Perhaps I should not use the word remediable, but I want to be sure to say that just because it's genetic doesn't mean you can't fix it. In fact, it means you know better how to fix it, if you know its cause. I'll try to make that clear. Brain structure and function, as I will illustrate momentarily, do differ in low and typical readers, and these can change with instruction, as I will show.

Perhaps the fulcrum of this little line of evidence that I'm presenting to you is point 4. It is shocking, as I'll show you, in replicated studies how much of the variance in adult or child literacy is predictable from those three factors alone — phonology, meaning ability to hear the individual sounds and attach them to symbols, but never mind the attaching to symbols. It's not a hearing problem, but it's a dissection or a pulling-out process by which people pull sounds out as individual little pearls on a string from within a word. That's what I mean by phonology or phonemic awareness.

Vocabulary is clear. Fluency means how quickly you can look and say. If you know those three things about somebody, you know an enormous amount about how well they now read or will read in the future if you don't do something.

F. Wood: Asset mapping. I loved that. You need to map their assets in these areas, because if you know their strengths as well as their weakness across these areas, you know what it's going to take to teach them. It won't be the same for all learners.

Whatever it is — whether it's phonemic awareness, vocabulary or fluency — there's no such thing as not teaching it. This notion that somehow if we just talk about it, they will learn it has proven utterly false. They learn what it is we teach them, and more than that, they learn what it is they practise.

Attrition is a huge obstacle that's already been mentioned. There are some ways to ameliorate it, as I'll discuss. In our hands, at least — and there are other studies going on that might perhaps yield the fuller replicated picture — you get more for your hour of instruction if you do ten or 12 hours a week than if you do three or four hours a week.

As has been mentioned, teacher training is utterly essential. There's another way that some people in the U.S. say it. It's regrettable that they say it this way, but they do say it. I'll go ahead and say it, and then I'll apologize for saying it. They say some teachers shouldn't teach because they can't hear the sounds themselves.

I don't say that, but I do say that unless you can teach the teacher how to deal with the individual phonemes of the language, you're not going to have a successful teacher. But you can teach the teacher that.

Something that has proven true in our experience — and, I think, is proving true in the experience of the others in our network at other institutions — is that often immigrants and English-language learners actually learn a bit better or more quickly than native English speakers who are literacy challenged. I think you can probably figure out why that is. For some, though certainly not for all, of those immigrants or English-language learners, their only obstacle is the language. They are not dyslexic. They don't have other challenges other than English vocabulary.

I'm also going to say that we think, across our network, that we've all found that unless you teach both phonology and vocabulary comprehension and unless you do it in a repetitive format, you will not succeed. There's no such thing as teaching literature without teaching how to read the literature. Part of that is a mechanical process of learning the sound-symbol relationships, and part of it is extensive practice with the literature itself.

This is, I think, my strongest message to you, or will be…. I'm going to all this trouble to tell you what I'm going to say so that I can just then say it and be done, you see. The big reservation here is that we learned again, all of us, the hard way that no program

should be thought of as effective unless tried in a pilot form in a local setting. I'll just give you one example.

We have a lot of immigrants in our Portland, Maine, site, roughly halfway between Halifax and Boston — not halfway perhaps, but in between there. So 60 percent to 65 percent of the Portland adult education program, which is part of the public school system, is composed of immigrants from all over the world, especially from Middle Eastern, African, South Asian and Southeast Asian countries.

One of our little lesson plans that some of them were using had an owl in it. We discovered that was why some members of the classes, when they encountered this, were in tears and bit their lip, and some even became tremulous. That's because in many cultures around the world, the owl is a symbol of fundamental evil — almost evil incarnate.

Who knew it? We poor country boys from the south didn't know that. Our literate literacy instructors in the northeast didn't know it. You never know these things until you get with the local people and the local clientele and work these things out.

The richness of the culture and the diversity of it in this province especially suggests to me the need, first of all, to vet any program by consultation with local cognoscenti and, secondly, a pilot test to see if it actually works in a given culture.

I want to endorse with all my heart what has been said about the contribution that multiple cultures make. I've become something of a student of paleoanthropology on account of my work in Africa. I've concluded that since the hunter-gatherer days — even during those days — and ever since, the normative default human experience has been to be multilingual and to be multicultural. It's an aberration of human history to speak only a single language, and it's an aberration of human history to be out of contact with nearby cultures.

In hunter-gatherer circumstances, which are now almost vanishing but not quite, this contact with local cultures may occur over a 200-mile radius. In our setting it's occurring over what in the U.S. we would call a worldwide catchment area, from which you attract your population.

The human brain, if I may put it this way, is better stimulated by multilingual experience and a multicultural one. So it's good for majority ethnic people to learn non-English or even non-French languages. They should learn both of those and others. It's really good for them and for their head.

The genetic factors have gone to the point where we've now — not ourselves only, but especially others — demonstrated at least three genes, variations on which cause reading problems.

It appears that at least two of these are on chromosome 6, and the risk they impose is a fairly broadband risk that ranges from phonemic awareness all the way out to vocabulary. It's like all of the above, in my little list of three factors earlier on, are impacted in some way by variations in genes in chromosome 6. But in chromosome 1 it looks like it's a more selective issue having to do with sound-symbol connections and fluency.

On chromosome 15 it looks like it's a separate factor still, having to do with word recognition by sight and with fluency. Which is to say that if dyslexia — or reading problems, we'd better call them — are often genetically based, then it's not always the same problem. And it's useful to the teacher to know which of these problems a given learner has.

To repeat — and as I say, there are other chromosomes where we've also seen linkages: we're sure that there are at least six chromosomes and at least eight genes. These genetic factors, of course, are cross-generational, and in any population we've studied — which includes North Americans, Europeans in South Africa, as well as Africans in Kenya and Tanzania — it looks like the genetic risk is running at around 18 percent.

So about 18 percent of the population has a genetic variant that can cause problems in reading. It doesn't do so for all of them who have these genetic endowments, but it does so, perhaps, for about three-quarters of them. What it causes is a varying degree of challenge, some rather mild and some quite severe — as you know. Now, this 18-percent estimate is a touch high, but that's what our data show.

All right. Back to brain activation. I show you before and after pictures, now, summarized in a single picture of changes in brain activation in adults after 140 hours of instruction focused on phonology more than on vocabulary. What this shows is: on the left I'd be looking somebody face on, and I'm looking at a transparent image of their brain. On the right I'm looking at a transparent image of the brain from the person's left side. So the person is looking to your left, and this is a transparent group image of, I think, about a dozen or 15 individuals. And this is those same individuals looked at from the front.

The circled area is routinely found in studies to be the area that is underactive in children and adults with major literacy challenges. The fact that it's coloured yellow and red in this picture means that it got quite significant and gratifying changes in the level of activation as a consequence of the instruction. Similarly, areas in the right hemisphere, which are…. Perhaps you can see the mouse here — the pointer. These are in the right hemisphere. In these people, the right hemisphere rose in certain areas to above-normal levels of activity, indicating compensation.

When you teach literacy-challenged individuals, children or adults, you change their profile of brain activation both by raising to normal levels their areas of weakness and by raising to higher-than-normal levels their areas with which they will do some compensating. You therefore don't decide philosophically whether to teach to strengths or teach to weaknesses. If you teach at all, you will do both. If you succeed in either, you'll be doing both.

Now, back to my comment that vocabulary, rapid naming fluency, and phonemic awareness — just calling them by slightly different names, picture-naming vocabulary, in particular…. Those three skills are very strong predictors of concurrent and future reading.

I'll now point out that if you add the fourth skill, which is itself a derivative of these three, then you get a prediction that is truly breathtaking in its power. You can predict 84 percent of the variance or have a multiple correlation of 0.92. As I'll show you on the scatter plot on the next page, to get a multiple correlation of 0.92 is a very uncommon thing in psychology or education or anything else.

This graph is the relationship between what those four factors say your reading skill will be in childhood and what, in fact, it is concurrently measured to be on a standard test — at least in the United States. The Woodcock-Johnson is a commonly used, almost gold-standard test — the full Woodcock-Johnson, including text, comprehension, and not just word calling, of course.

In our literacy-challenged adults, they're all below 95, but the tightness of fit from these four tests is every bit as strong as it is for children. This close relationship, almost like flies on whatever you call those…

F. Wood: …strips that attract flies and stick them — that's what this reminds me of. This is replicable across samples.

There are two or three things to say about this. It takes 15 minutes to give all four tests. This is only for literacy, of course. So the idea that you have to do hours' worth of testing to understand a child's or an adult's literacy needs and instructional needs turns out not to be the case. With high reliability, you can accomplish this testing in 15 minutes, whether for children or adults.

The second thing to say about this is that the goodness of fit is as strong for English-language learners as it is for native speakers of English. If you have an immigrant recently arrived who is going to be examined, if that immigrant has enough English to understand the test instructions, then you will have as good an understanding and prediction of their English-language reading as you have for people for whom English is their native tongue.

This has been mentioned; I've got to mention it again. It's perhaps not so serious in workplace programs, although even there it's non-trivial. In stand-alone adult education programs, if you have less than 50-percent dropout, I want to come and see you and find out what you're doing.

The truth is that these people do drop out. It's not because they're lazy or unmotivated. It's because they have babies, they move, they can't get transportation, their car breaks down, their job — they get fired — and on and on and on. It's also because of the high level of psychopathology that I've already described as a correlate of poor reading.

Don't say to yourselves: "We'll give them the money for this program, but we're not going to do it in another year if they don't have 90-percent retention rate." It's impossible. Now, there are two things you can do. One is to speed up the program by giving more hours per week. These random events of disease, childbirth, child care, employment changes and transportation issues are distributed randomly over time. The shorter time you take to get all your teaching done, the fewer such events occur and the less cumulative dropouts you have.

Secondly, if you can give some social services — that means everything from how to get on a bus to get to this facility to where you can get child care — and if you can give mental health services to help ameliorate the depressive and dysthymic diathesis that occur in so many of these people — almost 25 percent of them — then that's, as far as we can tell, your first blow against attrition.

That's my last slide, and I'll put it to you for discussion. I've said already that if I were to recommend something that I wish you would do, I wish you would decide to authorize some peer review committee, perhaps, of your province to fund up to a dozen or more different programs that look promising. That's relatively small pilot studies. You equate those as best you can so that the samples are similar and see which ones work. I think you will save an awful lot of money if you'll do that.

Now, in my case, I'm saying to you that I'm attracted by the ethnic diversity and certain other features of this environment here enough that I'd like to do a pilot project on our own dollar, because I'm funded to do these things, and I don't have to do them all in the United States.

I'll be talking with some more people tonight, and I've already talked with some others earlier about the prospect of our own pilot study. But don't let me be the only one who does a pilot study here. Get others to do it, too, just so you'll have data.

D. Routley: Two comments. Suicidal ideation being six times greater amongst poor readers is a significant piece of information for us given the aboriginal task we have here to examine aboriginal literacy issues. Of course, you may not know, but we have very, very high rates of suicide in our first nations. In some communities as small as a few hundred people have had 30 suicides in a single year. We also have very low literacy rates, and that was an interesting connection that we need to consider.

The question I have is…. You've identified 18 percent of people across whatever culture is measured as having genetic factors that may lead to difficulties, and it seems that you've pointed us towards testing being key to identifying those issues so that we can make plans to remediate.

We have had significant cuts to testing capacities in our education system, but you mentioned that the test-

ing needn't be onerous, needn't be hours and hours of testing. Could a testing regimen be developed that could help the few professionals we have, and the teachers they're supporting, to address those issues? Is there something that could be imported as a format?

F. Wood: In a word, yes. Why don't we, seriously, call it asset mapping or skill profiling or something instead of testing?

You also identified social and mental services as being a significant barrier. I flipped back through my notes. Ingrid Kolsteren talked to us about taking away the barriers — removing the financial barriers and making the programs free. We've heard from Grace Tait, who represented aboriginal mothers, talk about child care issues. We heard another person, Mardi Joyce, talk about the barriers to social assistance. Social assistance in this province doesn't recognize illiteracy as a barrier to employment. People who are on social assistance can't access literacy programs while they receive funding.

Are those the types of social barriers — transportation, child care…? We did have $7-a-day universal child care in this province. Those issues seemed significant in what you've presented, and I would support it. Quebec has the lowest skills-shortage crisis, and they attribute that to the fact that they've had universal child care available to parents at a very affordable rate. Are those the kinds of social supports that you're pointing to?

M. Polak: I'd like to get down again into teaching and learning, which is really what you seem to be pointing at — methodology, really — which is a tricky thing for us to talk about. In British Columbia we don't have a great deal of control or say about what our teacher-training programs include or what they highlight. It's a university model whereby influence of government over what teachers learn is…. It's a challenging thing to achieve.

Nevertheless, I think it's worthwhile to explore what we ought to be looking for, because teachers want to be achieving good things for their students. By and large, to create change one needs to prove the case that there's a need for it, I guess. In terms of the trends in teaching language, you've pointed to more of a focus on phonemic awareness strategies. We know that back in the day, there were all the arguments between whole language and phonics and all the rest of that.

To your knowledge, are we on the right track, now, in terms of what we're delivering K-to-12 as a teaching-learning method for language? Or have we yet to come to grips with some of the realities you're pointing out?

F. Wood: Well, I'd have to admit that, from what I've seen here and know otherwise across the United States, we're not yet quite on track. It's easy to say phonemic awareness, but it's all about whether you actually do it or not. What really counts, having done it, is whether they've learned to read or not.

Your literacy rate is the indirect outcome of how on track you are with these things. The evidence is pretty clear that if you get on track with these things, your literacy bumps right on up, no matter whether you do this with adults or children.

Now, I have to add…. This is, in our hands, a remarkable finding — utterly unexpected. If you have to choose — and God help us that you not have to choose — between a pure phonics curriculum for young or middle adults and a pure vocabulary curriculum, our data show you do a little better with a pure vocabulary curriculum than you do with a pure phonics curriculum. The data are especially convincing that you only do really well if you do both. I'd have to say that there's even less attention to vocabulary and comprehension instruction than there is to phonics, both for children and for adults.

R. Lee: It's very interesting to see the correlation between the brain activities for the test you are talking about. How strong are those correlations? I think it was very strong, according to your….

F. Wood: Well, that particular finding is in Annals of Dyslexia in either December of 2005 or January of '06. I think it's actually dated December 2005. In that, we review a number of other studies which lead toward that same conclusion, although the one we report in our own study gets it a little stronger quantitatively.

As to the brain activity, there've been a number of studies on that, but I would say those of Guinevere Eden, and to some extent those from the Haskins group at Yale — Ken Pugh — may be among the most prominent of these studies. But there are multiple sites that have done these brain activation before-and-after studies, getting similar results.

R. Lee: Down syndrome research also used some energy kind of mapping. MEG — magnetoencephalography.

F. Wood: Yeah. Down syndrome has been investigated with these techniques quite a bit as well. Yes. But magnetoencephalography shows these same things for literacy-challenged individuals, and those are especially prominent in the work from Houston, with Andy Papanicolaou as maybe the principal mover in those studies.

R. Lee: May I ask a question, actually, along Mary's…? It's about phonics. I read an article just last week. There is some movement in numeracy issues, going back to

the basic fundamental skills, instead of new math, going back to old math — that kind of debate. I don't know. In the U.K., can you see a general trend emphasizing more fundamental basic skills?

F. Wood: I would say it's better to think of us as going forward than going back, because part of what people want to go back to is a pure phonics approach or a pure whole-language approach. The data are unambiguous. Both are necessary, and neither is sufficient. That's just the simple fact of the situation.

I'd say that the cutting edge in literacy, both for adults and for children, is on fluency training. Although there are other ways to do it, it has to do more than anything else with the group taking a text that they will master, reading it repeatedly for many days — chorally and antiphonally and with drama and lots of explanations about the words — before the group masters the text.

That seems to be the teaching activity, which is also not sufficient, that shows the strongest relationship between how much the teacher does it and how well the student outcome is.

D. Cubberley: This is interesting. Phonics is obviously something that we're intrigued by.

I had the experience of studying French in high school for five years. At the end of that program I had high enough marks to graduate in French and could not hold a conversation. It was basically based on memorizing vocabulary, learning sentence and paragraph structures and being tested on spelling.

I had the experience, because I was curious about this, after university of going to Laval in Quebec and going into an immersion program, which is set up to prepare people to follow a university course in French. It was graduated, and they just watch you, and you go in. That program had, for the first time in my learning career, a strong stress on phonic awareness.

The paradigm you've talked about was embedded in the program, which is the group awareness of a fairly simple story structure that you spend a lot of time on, going over the pieces and coming to a common level of understanding of. It also had a lot of stress on language lab, where you train the ear to hear and separate different kinds of sounds that sound somewhat similar but aren't the same and begin to take words apart.

I learned very quickly conversational French and became free to become a speaker of French because of, I believe, that stress on the ear and not simply the stress on the eye and the mouth.

D. Cubberley: The ear led me to become a speaker. I became quite convinced from learning a second language that you learn as much through the ear as you do through the other aspects.

I'm intrigued by your stress in your comments on phonology as part of the teaching method. It makes me wonder. Is it because the typical teacher of adult literacy is not trained to a balance in these areas, and we're currently understressing phonic awareness in our attempt to bring people to literacy?

F. Wood: Yes, it is. And I would add a very important point. A phoneme is defined as the smallest unit of sound in a language that makes a meaning difference. It's not any sound in the language. If you're speaking some African language, as in isiXhosa, then the sound is a phoneme. But if I'm speaking English, and I'm saying, "Gosh, we're going to have a nice time tonight," and that sound comes out, it's meaningless. Same sound.

So the point here is that vocabulary and phonics are intimately tied to each other. You learn more vocabulary by learning phonics, and you learn more phonics by learning vocabulary. They reinforce each other, because they are really two sides of the same coin.

D. Cubberley: So what's the challenge to get our teachers trained to do the work that we need to do? Is that a challenge in the place where they're taught? It obviously is. Is it a theoretical challenge to overcome an existing paradigm that is inadequate?

F. Wood: No, I don't think it is a theoretical challenge. I think most teachers are thrilled to learn this. They'll all tell you they didn't learn it in college or graduate school, and the best way to teach it to them is in in-service education of all kinds.

The in-service education model is the only one that will get you any quick payoffs. Rather like he was talking about, you can't fix the adult workforce if you just start in kindergarten. You've a long way to go before they get in the workforce, he said.

J. Nuraney (Chair): Dr. Wood, just one final question from me. You talked about some methodology of finding out at what level of literacy the person is at through some testing that you have invented, so to speak. Is that any different than what Mr. Brooks was talking about in assessing at what level of literacy the client is, so that they can be slotted in the right individualized program?

F. Wood: I don't know, because I do not know what his assessment, his diagnostic, consists of. So let's ask him.

B. Brooks: I think you'll probably find that what Frank is talking about is something which is a universal process — a universal test. The kind of assessments that we were looking at was very much based on the learning and dynamic of the U.K. system, related to the pitch and demand of various levels of learning programs, which I think is different from what Frank is talking about.

F. Wood: Well, I would say that a lot of adult literacy programs that I know of do their testing following IALS or other national models, which is more about

S. Brink: I would say the test is not the important thing. What is important is linking the test to the response, because you can measure it through many tests, and they all work in identifying and doing the diagnostics. Some are better a little bit on this, and some are better a little bit on that. But the point is if you can fix it to what the learner needs. It's that relationship that is important. So we've found, for example, that the Swedes use a different test. It's not the test; it's this connection. It's the connection that makes it work for the learner. That is the important thing.

J. Nuraney (Chair): I think — correct me if I'm wrong, Satya — one of the challenges it seems we have had in the past is that when you examine the amount of funding, for example, that goes into the ESL programs and look at the outcomes and when we hear you telling us that after ten years the results haven't changed, that people have not learned…. Is it that we have not, in the first instance, assessed the level of their ability to learn and then slotted them into the right programs, which Barry is talking about that they are doing in the United Kingdom and what Frank has now alluded to with this new methodology? Is that what is missing in the link in what we are delivering? Because our outcomes are very poor.

S. Brink: But don't forget that for most immigrants here in Canada, it's a self-selection thing. They don't volunteer to go and take the course. What is great, as Barry was saying…. The thing is you offer it to them: "Listen. I'll give you the job, and I'll give you this training." That's what we should be doing.

They're not even assessed. Because it's self-selection, only the ones who opt to, do this, and the ones who opt to are usually the ones who are already pretty good. They say: "I want to master this thing." There are a whole lot of people that we're not touching at all. It's only when they have some dramatic problem that we identify them, and that's not what we should be doing.

We should be saying…. It's like when you are investing your dollar that you have for your pension or whatever, you want every one of those dollars to count. We don't do this with these immigrants who come. We want to say every immigrant counts with whatever human capital they're bringing. Therefore, we're going to put this investment into their language training.

We're not doing that. We either let them fail first and then we give them something, or we let them self-select. We have another survey. We ask Canadians: "How good are you in English and in French?" Everybody says they're fantastic. What is this 42 percent in Canada? Same problem.

F. Wood: I just want to add really quickly what I think is the irreducible minimum here. That is, you have to decide whether your client is dyslexic, more or less, or whether your client is simply ESL. A lot of adult and child teachers assume that if an immigrant is not reading well, the person is dyslexic. That is not always the case. Perhaps only half the time or even a quarter of the time is that the case.

This is easy to do. Ideally, you do it in the native tongue, and we love to do that. We love to develop such instruments for other languages. We have done them in three African languages and also in Spanish. We want to do them in French and others.

Ideally, you want to know if they are dyslexic in their mother tongue, phonemically unaware or disfluent. If so, then they need a kind of conventional adult literacy, phonological vocabulary program. If they are not, all they need is English-language learning and vocabulary. You can save some money that way.

B. Brooks: Just to add — in terms of the different context but the same sort of idea of getting the notion wrong and wasting a lot of money — in terms of offender learning in the U.K., I talked earlier about the multiplier effect of deprivation. There was a notion that went around for quite a few years, until about 2004, that something like 85 percent of offenders were dyslexic, on the same kind of notion that Frank was saying: that they actually couldn't do it. They couldn't read very well. They weren't benefiting from the program, so they must be dyslexic.

When we targeted and looked hard at that, it is still a multiplier in terms of the national population, but it's only something like 40 percent. That's a big difference in terms of how you set up the learning program, how you provide the support and the kind of momentum or pressure or whatever you can work with. I think Frank is absolutely spot on. You've got to get your assessment instruments — whatever they might well be — right, and then you can start to target your money as well as benefit the learner.

There is a lot of almost quasi-science around at the moment, and some of that is because the teachers aren't trained in that way, particularly in the adult literacy notion. A lot of adult literacy discussion with teachers is about engagement. It's about identifying where they are and what they want to do. People mistake that for actually saying that you don't need to teach the underpinning skills, either to the learner or to the teacher, to be able to do that.

Phonics is a classic area in terms of adult learning. Very few programs actually engage in it in that particular way.

Another dimension, similarly, is the notion of individual learning. A lot of group teaching doesn't take place in some provision, because they say: "Oh no, every learner is unique, so we'll focus on you." So you don't get the interactivity in programs across groups.

The alternative happens as well. In some places everything happens in terms of groups. Then you don't get the individual.

It is about looking hard, deciding what you want, getting the baseline right and then building from there.

J. Nuraney (Chair): One more time. Is the diagnostic element in what you people do absolutely essential?

F. Wood: It is, at least to this minimum level — distinguishing between kind of a broad band, including phonics deficit, versus a vocabulary–second language deficit. I think at the very least you have to make that distinction.

R. Lee: A follow-up question. You mentioned that about 18 percent of the population is at risk and is remediable. The system…. For example, special education teachers: do they know of those tools available — I mean, in general?

F. Wood: Yeah. The other side of this is…. I love the fact that if you throw money at a program, you often get good results. That's a deep truth of nature and life and so on. But the cost for teacher education in an in-service model with distance education and large groups at different venues all learning from the same source is pretty cheap compared to a lot of things. Testing of curriculum — similarly cheap. We get a lot of mileage out of using public domain, copyright-free literature, for example. We don't pay anything for it except the printing cost.

While I hope you will throw money at this — lots of money — I'd say that you should get more for your dollar in this arena than you will in a lot of others.

B. Brooks: The one thing I would also say, John, building on that: because there's so much going on internationally, there's no reason why you should reinvent the wheel. It's actually building and taking what's already there. Many of the gestalts have already been developed. It's about deciding what you want to do and what you want to recommend and then going and building around that. You know, there are people like ourselves…. Countries like ourselves would be delighted to work with B.C. in that notion.

J. Nuraney (Chair): That was one of the reasons why we invited all of you here today, so that we can learn and not reinvent the wheel.

Once again, on behalf of the committee, I want to thank all of you for being here: Dr. Wood, Barry Brooks, Satya. We have enjoyed the morning and afternoon sessions enormously and have learned quite a bit. We're going to sit down and digest to make sure that we have understood what we have heard today. Don't be surprised if any one of us gives you a call to assist us in making our final report and final recommendations. I hope that you would oblige.

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.



CONTENTS

		Page

Presentations		175
G. Smith M. Palmantier S. Brink B. Brooks F. Wood

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