Adult Literacy Policy and Practice: From Intrinsic Values to Instrumentalism By Gordon Ade-Ojo and Vicky Duckworth


Cost: £45.00 (hardcover; can also be purchased as e-book) Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Pages: 138 ISBN: 978-1137535108 Reviewed by Genevieve Clarke


Genevieve Clarke is a Programme Manager at The Reading Agency, an independent charity that inspires more people to read more, encourages them to share their enjoyment of reading and celebrates the difference that reading makes to all our lives. She coordinates the annual ‘Reading Ahead’ programme (formerly ‘Six Book Challenge’) for less confident readers which in 2015 reached 48,000 people through public libraries, adult community learning, colleges, prisons and workplaces.


I was very keen to read this book as I have long been interested in the interplay between policy and practice in adult literacy. As the title implies, the authors’ main thesis is the shift from a focus on intrinsic values (i.e. education for its own sake) to a more instrumentalist position (i.e. as a means to an end, in this case dictated by the ideology of successive governments) which, in their view, happened as early as the late 1970s. I am sure there is much truth in what they say and indeed there is evidence of this continuing direction of travel in current discussions around functional skills reform. I also applaud the authors’ attempt to pose an alternative model based on a transformative and more creative approach. However I am not sure that they fully tackle the dilemma facing any service dependent upon public sector funding: how to build in accountability without saddling the system with a deadening bureaucracy. It is a crucial debate that deserves far more air time than it gets, but I’m not sure that this book allows it to surface sufficiently clearly.


This is partly because, in my view, the four chapters are very uneven in terms of content and style. Chapter 1 focuses on terminology but I am afraid that this reader struggled with this long preamble – not least because the first mention of ‘adult literacy’ only appears on page 25!


I was relieved to find that Chapter 2 began to deal with the history, dividing the last few decades into three main periods: 1970s to early 1980s; early 1980s to mid-1990s; and mid-1990s to date. This starts well and I felt I was really learning something about the early days of a movement that I only joined in the 1990s, classically as a volunteer tutor. In fact it doesn’t bring us right up to date but mainly covers the first two of these periods. Undoubtedly they provide ample evidence for the oft-stated move to an instrumentalist view of adult literacy with employability as a key driver. I share the authors’ concern about policies predicated upon false assumptions. Yet I found their negative view of any link between adult literacy policy and the world of work too simplistic and even patronising when, for many learners, progression to a job may well be the main goal of their studies, especially if it pays for the needs of a family.


Instead it was left for Chapter 3 to tackle the significance of the Moser Report published in 1999. Here again I was eager to read the authors’ views of yet another turning-point which at least brought new funding into the field. But most of this chapter gives us a repetitive critique of the instrumentalist position of the Moser Committee itself without naming any of its members or setting out its conclusions or any detail of the Skills for Life agenda that flowed from it.


Finally Chapter 4 allows the authors to redress the balance by outlining an alternative vision that could help to shape future policy and practice. This is indeed refreshing and something to which most tutors of my acquaintance would still relate to in terms of starting where the learners are. This is home territory for RaPAL members with reference to the New Literacy Studies and ethnographic research by Brian Street, Shirley Brice Heath and Vicky Duckworth herself. I was particularly glad to see mention of creativity as my own interest has focused on the use of reading for pleasure as a way of integrating everyday practices into adult literacy provision and encouraging learner autonomy and confidence-building. But, reassuring as this was, it takes us back into the field of literacy theory rather than tackling the implications for policymakers and their funders.


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