To be successful in the twenty-first century, Great Britain must first address a massive skill crisis caused by the emerging knowledge economy. Those were the unpleasant news in the UK in 2001. David Blunkett - Secretary of State for Education and Employment at that time - stated it like this:

"We live, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in a society of challenge and opportunity. The growth of the knowledge economy and the spread of information technology are having a more profound and more rapid effect on our work and home lives than any other social change since the Industrial Revolution."

And the effects were terrifying. An OECD-survey claimed that 7 million adults - or 20 percent - of the UK population had poor literacy and numeracy skills at or below the age of an eleven year old child. This claim provided an important justification and catalyst of the establishment of the so-called 'Skills for Life' national strategy. This strategy entailed the allocation of over five billion pounds toward ring-fenced funding for free literacy, numeracy and English for speakers of other languages, the development of core curricula, learning materials and national qualifications based on new standards etc.

Professor Karen Evans and Research Officer Edmund Waite, colleagues at Institute of Education, University of London, now question many of the assumptions underpinning the UK government's declaration of a literacy and numeracy skills crisis. The two have collected qualitative and quantitative data from 2003 to 2008 in the project 'Adult Basic Skills and Workplace Learning': 564 learners from 55 organizations in a variety of sectors took part in structured interviews. Their research reveals a major disjunction between policy assumptions about large scale literacy and numeracy deficiencies in the UK and employees' actual capacity to cope with their existing skills and competencies.

"The disjunction has emerged because a narrowly defined skills agenda has been adopted together with vague assumptions about the increased significance of literacy and numeracy skills in the 'knowledge economy' era," says Professor Evans. She explains their skepticism towards the perceived skills crisis:

"We argue that policy imperatives underpinning the Skills for Life national strategy - which have sought to highlight a 'skills crisis' based on narrowly circumscribed perceptions of literacy and numeracy - have led to insufficient recognition of the complex constitution of employee skills and competencies in differing organizational contexts as well as the significance of learning outside formal educational channels."

Does that mean that you do not recognize that UK was - and is - facing a skills crisis?

"Of course many people's employment prospects are adversely affected by poor literacy and numeracy skills and it is extremely important to address poor literacy and numeracy skills where such skills deficiencies exist. We are not disputing this. What we are saying is that it is important to look at the social and organizational context in which people are using their skills rather than simply assuming that large-scale skills deficiencies exist in all organizations and at all levels of the UK economy. The precise impact of the knowledge economy on literacy and numeracy practices amongst lower-level employees is never specified in policy documents. Instead policy statements tend to be based more on a logic of appearance than on empirical evidence. There are too many non-validated assumptions about the negative impact of large scale literacy and numeracy skills deficiencies on the UK economy," says Edmund Waite.

How widespread is the skills crisis?
Karen Evans and Edmund Waite cite evidence from the UK Skills Survey which suggests that the UK may be faced with a rather different sort of problem than that of a 'skills crisis': Many people are in fact over-qualified for the job they have. There may be as many as 6.9 million jobs in the British economy that require no qualifications to obtain the post, but just 2.3 million adults with no qualifications.

According to findings from Karen Evans' and Edmund Waites' in-depth interviews with a subsample of 64 employees from 10 sites, the majority of the learners self-reported that they coped adequately with their existing literacy and numeracy skills in the workplace. Twenty learners mentioned that they struggled with aspects of literacy or numeracy in general - whether at work or home. Only eleven of the twenty learners revealed that poor literacy or numeracy skills had either adversely affected their work or prevented them from fulfilling career plans.

Karen Evans and Edmund Waites' research support the conclusion that the knowledge economy has a range of different effects on lower-level employees, effects that depend on widely differing organizational contexts.

Many learners accounted for their capacity to cope with their existing literacy and numeracy strategies on the basis of relatively light exposure to literacy in the workplace. For example, bus drivers only occasionally had to fill in an incident report form. In this respect it is important to take account of widely differing organizational contexts; whereas some jobs have been affected by such processes as increasing report-writing in response to auditing demands and increasing health and safety regulations as well as the 'leveling out' of management structures in some companies, there are also many occupations which entail negligible use of literacy practices, explains Edmund Waite.

We all enjoy learning
On the basis of UK policy declarations, one would expect that the employee's primary motivation for committing to further or post-vocational training would be that they want to keep their jobs despite changing and increasing demands. However, Karen Evans' and Edmund Waites' research underlines the range of motivations that lie behind engagement in workplace 'Skills for Life' provision.

In fact, one striking finding in their research is that the generic motivation of 'learning new skills' was most commonly cited by 51 percent of the learners, and the outcome surpassed such expectations. 35 percent of the learners cited the improvement of work performance as a factor and rather less listed this as an actual outcome. It is also noteworthy that for the majority of the learners the motivations of learning are not tied narrowly to an aspirational trajectory. One example is that only 18 percent and 23 percent respectively rank 'increase chances for promotion' and 'increase chances for a better job' as a possible outcome of participating in a course. See figure 1.

Edmund Waite explains: "These findings are also consistent with our findings from our in depth studies which have highlighted a whole range of factors for engagement in such courses. It ranges form curiosity to wanting to make up for missed earlier educational opportunities. From wanting specific help with job relevant skills to wider career aims. From a desire to help children with school work to wanting self-improvement and personal development."

Use it or lose it
Of course, these courses may make a difference for the individual's personal development and social setting, but it is an open question whether a course in reading or math makes a difference for the organizations and their competitive edge in the knowledge economy.

The answer depends on whether or not the organizations put the new skills to use or not. Karen Evans and Edmund Waite have, for example, shown that in the case of a weapons manufacturing company, the learner whose level of literacy had improved most substantially in that organization had been promoted after the course and now actively used a wider range of literacy skills as part of a broader organizational shift towards the delegation of responsibility to lower level employees.

But other learners they interviewed - from the same organization - had not benefited from these structural changes and had not been promoted. They continued to engage in the same working routines made either no progress or neglible gains literacy scores. This makes a modest literacy gain as a result of engaging in literacy courses understandable since the organizations fail to make use of the opportunity for competence development and the workplace.

By Claus Holm clho@dpu.dk

Karen Evans
Karen Evans is Professor of Education (Lifelong Learning), at the Institute of Education, University of London. She works at the Department of Lifelong and Comparative Education.

Edmund Waite
Edmund Waite is MPhil, PhD at the Institute of Education, University of London. He works as a Research Officer at the Dept. of Lifelong and Comparative Education.

"There are too many non-validated assumptions about the negative impact of large scale literacy and numeracy skills deficiencies on the UK economy."

6.9 million - the number of jobs in the British economy that require no qualifications to obtain the post.

2.3 million - the number of adults in the UK with no qualifications.