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Struggling with literacy as an adult can have a devastating effect on multiple areas of an individual’s life, a parliamentary committee has heard.
Managing household bills, helping their children do their homework and managing their bank accounts are just some of the everyday tasks that adults with low literacy can struggle with.
“People are unable to have the literacies to have agency over their being,” Adult Learning Australia board member Ros Bauer told the committee on Monday.
According to the OECD, one in eight Australian adults are functionally illiterate, reading at an OECD Level 1 or below.
Worldwide, Australia scores averagely within the OECD, ranking below New Zealand, Japan and the Netherlands but above Canada, the UK and the US.
At present, there is no national adult literacy policy within Australia.
University of Melbourne professor of language and literacy education Joseph Lo Bianco stressed the need for such a policy.
“There is no other mechanism in (Australian) society for this to happen,” he said.
The ALA stressed adults struggling with literacy required help with tasks that would not occur to most people.
“Our members help people get their driver’s license … you’ve got to write forms and that sort of thing.”
Professor Bianco said anyone from new immigrants to people who had lived in Australia for generations could struggle with adult literacy.
“There’s lots of reasons why people fall behind,” he said.
Indigenous Australians and Australians living in regional and remote areas were at a particularly high risk of facing adult illiteracy.
In its submission to the committee, the Lowitja Institute highlighted that an estimated 40 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander adults had “minimal” English literacy.
The institute noted this figure was as high as 70 per cent in many remote areas.
Professor Bianco emphasised that a low standard of education was not the only cause of poor adult literacy rates.
“People might have achieved reasonable literacy rates in school but they went into jobs in which there was really no requirement for ongoing literacy activity,” he said.
“It’s not like once you have literacy, you’ve got a permanent inoculation against literacy problems in life.
“If you never use the reading and writing skills gained in school, they actually fade away.”
The committee is set to meet again on Tuesday to discuss disproportionately low rates of adult literacy in Tasmania.
