#basic reading skills

The Education 2030 Agenda (SDG4), which sets out a new vision for education and lifelong learning, dedicates a specific target (4.6) to youth and adult literacy, namely to ‘ensure that all youth and a substantial proportion of adults, both men and women, achieve literacy and numeracy’. While literacy and numeracy play important roles across all age groups, there is an urgent need for transformative action to effectively address global sustainability challenges specifically related to youth and adult literacy and learning.

Altogether, we can observe a growing recognition of literacy and numeracy — together with other essential skills and transferable competences — as integral elements of other learning, education and training. There is a growing awareness that the literacy challenge must be met with an approach that includes all subsectors and all age groups. This requires the development of institutionalized learning systems which need to offer flexible learning opportunities that support learning at all stages of a person’s life and in a range of diverse settings, modalities and spaces. National qualifications frameworks (NQFs) and operational systems for the recognition, validation and accreditation (RVA) of non-formally or informally acquired learning outcomes can help to overcome the still-prevalent compartmentalization of education subsystems and enable out-of-school populations to obtain recognized certificates and qualifications. Available evidence suggests a wide variety of venues and places where people can learn and develop their literacy, numeracy, language, digital and other competences. In general, there is limited recognition of out-of-school literacy and numeracy practices and a lack of awareness of literacy practices, languages and local knowledges used in informal learning spaces. The diverse learning spaces in which indigenous and/or (inter)generational learning activities take place range from neighbourhood spaces to workplaces, marketplaces, religious spaces and above all, the home. While some of these spaces are falling out of use, other informal intergenerational spaces are growing in popularity and new spaces are being created. Formal or non-formal literacy programmes can take place in physical and/or virtual environments and be found in diverse contexts (i.e., urban or rural) and settings such as at home, at school, at the workplace, in public, private and religious places, in adult and community learning centres, (mobile) libraries, museums, prisons, and, of course, in digital environments. Many literacy programmes use various learning spaces in complementary ways, or encourage their learners to expand their literacy development activities beyond scheduled classes and classroom spaces. The way how different literacy programmes have creatively and productively used the potential of literate environments outside of classrooms has been studied in contexts of home environments, libraries, prisons and digital environments. Another recent research examined the roles that Community Learning Centres (CLCs) and other community-based learning institutions can play as learning spaces to enable participation of vulnerable and excluded groups struggling to overcome various barriers to learning. Such institutionalized forms of teaching and learning offer opportunities for literacy and livelihood skills training, health and citizenship promotion, basic education, and vocational training, in line with the principle of lifelong learning, and in the context of local communities. The analysis concludes that CLCs and other community-based institutions can be developed as cornerstones to local infrastructure because they offer a one-stop shop for a variety of services to all target groups on the lifelong learning continuum and across sectors. Therefore, they can improve access to literacy and increase levels of inclusion and participation, in particular among the (most) difficult to reach.

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