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Our Views
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 The Basic Skills Agency's expertise and experience are widely recognised. This page outlines the Agency's views on issues of importance in education at the moment.
Raising standards in schools
The Basic Skills Agency believes there is a need for a more meaningful approach to evaluating learning than the current regime of testing, target-setting and league tables. The Agency has been arguing against league tables and national targets for schools since they were first introduced, and is pleased that the government is now moving towards more locally set targets.
This year's Key Stage 1,2 and 3 results fell short of the government's targets for literacy and numeracy. But progress has been made in recent years with more than three quarters of 11 year olds now reaching standards that only two thirds reached 5 years ago. The problem with the targets is that they were never objective or based on the knowledge of teachers and schools.
What ensures good quality teaching of basic skills is the ethos, commitment and attitude of the teachers. There is a need for a way of measuring a school and a pupil's progress that takes into consideration teacher's knowledge and experience. If young people are to leave school with the basic skills most of us take for granted it is important that testing does not take place at the expense of teaching in schools.
ICT - the third basic skill?
ICT is coming to be seen, by the government and others, as the third basic skill, after literacy and numeracy. But the Basic Skills Agency does not regard ICT in this way.
Lack of mastery of ICT is largely a problem of age. The profile of adults who have difficulty with ICT is very different from the profile of adults who have difficulty with reading, writing and maths. And that's because ICT was not so important when they were at school.
Nowadays most children have mastered basic word processing, spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations by the end of primary school. And the Children who do struggle with ICT usually struggle because they have difficulty with the other basic skills. It's not the technology that they have trouble with but the reading and the spelling and the maths.
As more and more children who use ICT at school pass through the school system and become adults, our ICT 'problem' will disappear. However, this isn't the case with our literacy and numeracy 'problem'. Despite considerable improvement in attainment in primary and secondary schools, a considerable number of children still leave school with weak literacy or numeracy skills. Mastering literacy and numeracy are much more difficult and take much longer.
Parental involvement in education
The Basic Skills Agency continues to argue for concerted and far-reaching action to help encourage parents to develop the language skills of their young children. Children do not enter schools free of all external influences and parents have a vital role to play.
Research suggests that the younger the child the greater the difference adults can make. This is particularly the case with parents and carers since the majority of 0-3 year olds spend most of their time at home. Home is where for many children early learning experiences occur - for richer or poorer.
The Basic Skills Agency believes parents should be integral part to the learning process. One of the key elements of the Agency's flagship award, the Quality Mark, is that schools should have a strategy in place to engage parents in improving their children's basic skills. It is important that every parent knows that their local school teaches literacy and numeracy well.
Improving adult skills
Britain needs to reduce the number of adults with poor literacy and numeracy skills if it is to compete with other countries as a place for new investment and employment, and to ensure it does not to waste its most important resource - people.
Basic skills are essential in every workplace and jobs that don't require good literacy and numeracy are disappearing rapidly. The Basic Skills Agency believes that employers and the government have a key role to play in helping employees improve their basic skills.
The recent Skills Strategy White Paper highlighted the government's commitment to developing skills across the workforce. This is clearly very important. But it is just as important to ensure that the needs of individuals with weak basic skills are also met.
The Basic Skills Agency is concerned that those adults whose literacy and numeracy skills are recognised as poor - those performing at Level 1 or below - could be overlooked in the drive to improve the skills of the much larger group of adults who are below Level 2. It is important to tackle this, otherwise the pool of adults with poor basic skills will continue to grow.
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