Beadle's heartfelt and scathing criticisms of the Skills for Life (SfL) Adult Literacy Core Curriculum and the official teaching resources are engrossing.
I don't agree with everything he has said. I'm not convinced by his comment that the literacy materials are really designed for people who are not native speakers of English. It was also not at all clear why he felt the literacy lesson he observed in Southwark - Was it Southwark? It somewhere in south London - was "incompetent". Harsh stuff! What had that poor teacher done so badly? We saw very little of the lesson, but it was obviously a much higher level course that the course Beadle had to prepare for his beginner and near-beginner readers.
However, I do agree with him that the official SfL materials are not good for beginner readers. Insofar as I understand it, when they were prepared, there was an assumption that someone who joins an Entry Level 1 class will not really be completely illiterate. However, as was shown in the programme, there most certainly are adults who are genuinely illiterate.
I gather from some notes that C4 has put out about the series that Beadle is going to go on to make further criticisms, including pointing out that the SfL project, as it works at the moment, is geared to getting qualifications for people who are already quite literate. This is very true and I'm delighted that this point is being made on TV.
It is not wrong to help people to brush up their punctuation and spelling and, after a bit of exam practice, gain a Level 1 or Level 2 National Test qualification in literacy. (L2 is supposedly equivalent to A-C grades at GCSE and L1 to lower grades at GCSE.) That's what I do and I often enjoy it. More importantly, getting the qualifications is very good for the morale of the students and may help some of them get jobs that would not have been open to them otherwise. They even learn a few things along the way.
The trouble is that the people who have the greatest need - like many on this evening's programme - tend not to get the help they need. The biggest reason for that, I think, is that they are the hardest to persuade to join courses.
The government and the education bureaucrats should stop congratulating themselves and each other and pretending that all the qualifications gained indicate great progress for previously illiterate or fairly illiterate people. Instead, they should admit that much of the SfL effort has involved certification (at L1 & L2) rather than education of those with the greatest need.
