Research programme

Skills assessment

Measuring what adults know and can do, and what low proficiency actually means.

Studies: 3
Span: 2016
Published: 3
Under way: 0

The Survey of Adult Skills measures literacy, numeracy and problem solving in the adult population, and its results are usually reported as the proportion of people below a threshold. What that threshold describes is less obvious than the reporting suggests.

Work in this programme covers both the results and their interpretation. Country notes read one system against comparable ones. The more useful output asks what low proficiency actually means: an adult below Level 2 in literacy is not illiterate, and the tasks that separate Level 1 from Level 2 are specific enough that the distinction can be stated in plain terms rather than left as a band number.

That matters because the policy response depends on it. A population that cannot locate information in a dense text needs something different from a population that can read but cannot evaluate what it reads, and the headline figure does not distinguish them. Most of the value in this data sits one level below the number that gets quoted.