Skills for Life National Survey – 2010/2011
If by chance someone has knocked on your door in recent months and asked if you would mind taking part in a government survey about literacy, numeracy and ICT, then the tests you will have taken will have been devised by AlphaPlus.
After the publication of the Moser Report: A Fresh Start in 1999, which revealed that more than one in five adults in the UK had severe problems with everyday literacy and numeracy, members of AlphaPlus worked with BMRB (the British Market Research Bureau) on a National Baseline Survey designed to obtain hard evidence about the skills shortfall. The survey report, published in 2003 provided the foundation for the Skills for Life policy into which the Labour government pumped billions of pounds provision to raise skill standards.
In the summer of 2009, AlphaPlus was commissioned to advise the government’s Business Innovation and Skills division on how it should best repeat the earlier survey to discover what impact the Skills for Life policy and funding has had on skills levels of adults between the ages of 16 and 60 in the intervening years. Again working with BMRB we carried out a small-scale pilot exercise and in the spring of 2010 presented a report of more than 1000 pages, with advice on matters such as:
• the tests to be used
• the underpinning algorithm
• the scale of the survey
• the population sample to be involved
• how to compare the results of the two surveys.
On the basis of this research the two organizations were then awarded the contract to conduct the full-scale Skills for Life Survey in England, which commenced in summer 2010 and is due to be completed with a final report in summer 2011. Staff trained by BMRB are now interviewing adults in 7500 households across England andadministering the tests designed by AlphaPlus. Each adult takes a combination of the computer-based tests in literacy, numeracy and ICT that take typically about 50 minutes to complete. AlphaPlus staff are accompanying the BMRB staff to some of the interviews to make sure that there are no problems with the test software and to observe whether any particular sub-skills are proving particularly difficult. When all of the interviews have been completed, AlphaPlus will be responsible for analysing the test data and drafting the sections of the Final Report that confirm the current state of adult skills in England, what progress has been made since 2003 and what lessons the survey contains for the future direction of government Skills for Life policy.
