Imagine the practicalities of a trip to the supermarket if you are unable to read. You can’t write a shopping list, your choices are restricted to the goods you have learned to recognise, and you’re not sure what you will have to pay. Other days see you struggling to catch the right bus, to fill in forms at the doctor’s, to send a birthday card to your daughter, or to read letters about your benefits. The handicap of having limited or no ability to read and write impoverishes adults in a multitude of ways. Shockingly, at least fifty percent of men and women in the UK who experience homelessness fall into this group.
Now picture yourself as a rough sleeper who moved into hotel accommodation when the covid-19 pandemic first gripped this country. You are being helped to find more permanent accommodation, but without literacy skills, how will you ever deal independently with the documentation and form-filling required to sustain a tenancy?
Your future challenge will be to find work. Job opportunities are mostly found, and applications made online. But, unable to read, there is no chance of acquiring digital skills. Dependency on others when searching for potential jobs, completing your CV and submitting applications is a handicap and a humiliation. You are at the bottom of the pile in an increasingly competitive market and risk being pushed even lower.
A resolution to improve your literacy skills is likely to be frustrated by the dearth of appropriate literacy services to suit your needs. One option is to enrol at college. Here, funding that is contingent on measurable outcomes demands standardised courses and curricula governed by success in tested results. Men and women with experience of homelessness frequently have a range of complex issues: poor mental and physical ill health, substance abuse, learning difficulties such as dyslexia, and chaotic lifestyles. Many are fearful of the classroom, retaining traumatic memories of home and school. These factors diminish the resilience required to access college courses, to attend reliably, and to remain motivated.
Sector- and community-based classes that would tailor support to your psychological and educational needs may be more appropriate. Disappointingly, this personalised approach is scarce. Where it exists, quality is variable. On the one hand, there are third sector organisations with well-managed services run by qualified tutors. On the other, provision is short-term and ad hoc, staff with no literacy training offering little more than help to fill in forms or read letters.
Now turn to the tutor in a well-established literacy service who throughout the past year has endeavoured to reach clients remotely. But adult service users in the sector have lost many months of learning opportunities because they too, like some children, suffer digital poverty, having no access to a device and no knowledge about how to get online. The tutor, perhaps the only person in the agency with a deep interest in literacy, cannot reach peers to discuss these challenges.
Many of the problems experienced by literacy learners and tutors existed before covid-19, but now they have been magnified. Following the pandemic, how do we ensure that poor literacy does not cause countless homeless people to return to the streets, losing their chance to maintain secure housing and jobs, and remaining a cost to the taxpayer?
As co-founder of Literacy100 and a tutor working with people who have been homeless, my experiences suggest that there is a significant cost-benefit to the provision of effective basic skills services. Targeted funding from national government is essential. Recent research from the Learning and Work Institute demonstrates that support paths for homeless people are most effective when they are holistic, needs-led and situated in a Housing First context. At the local level, government should ensure that councils use devolved funding to provide basic skills courses for previously homeless people. Employers should be supportive of employees who need to access these services. It will be a net gain on both sides. Homelessness organisations might explore opportunities for greater collaboration, looking at co-funding models and sharing access to in-house services.
Quality of provision might be addressed in several ways. Adult education colleges must be allowed the flexibility to remove barriers to participation for learners with complex needs. For example, to avoid the need for formal testing the offer of a DWP and DfE recognised Certificate of Literacy Proficiency could boost recipients’ self-esteem and provide a vital component of personal statements for employment purposes.
Qualified literacy tutors with a research-based understanding of ‘what works’ are always the gold standard if a cycle of failure is to be avoided. Amongst them might be volunteers (the re-emergence of ‘literacy champions’ perhaps), including retired or part-time schoolteachers, dyslexia specialists, and teachers in higher or further education who respond to volunteer brokerage opportunities. Non-specialists can play a role if they are given substantive training by independent literacy specialists, universities or dyslexia centres. Finally, homeless-specific literacy professionals and volunteers would welcome a national network to provide ongoing training and networking opportunities.
In conclusion, the Learning and Work Institute has reported that only one in two adults with poor basic skills is in work. It is a moral as well as an economic imperative to address the shocking frequency of illiteracy amongst the homeless. The adage, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, you don’t succeed,’ must not be so commonly fulfilled. Let us provide opportunities for our most vulnerable citizens to gain greater digital inclusion, to sustain settled homes and jobs, and to fully participate in society.
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