Jobs and Skills Australia (JSA) released its discussion paper on foundation skills. It’s a national study on adult literacy, numeracy (LLN) and digital literacy skills. Both LLN and digital skills are hot topics, especially as recent articles in the press have suggested that employers have concerns about the levels of LLN skills.
In addition to considering the range of issues surrounding foundation skills, the paper raises a series of ‘discussion questions.’ It also considers the range of available data and information sources.
Why does JSA think foundation skills are important?
As their paper points out:
“The ability to read, write, count, and engage with technology is a critical foundation for meaningful work and active participation in the community. The commonly quoted research shows almost three million Australians lack basic literacy or numeracy skills, or both.”
So, it’s not a tiny problem!
In fact, “foundation skills are often considered to include language, literacy and numeracy and digital (LLND) skills, and depending on the situation, the definition can also extend to other employability and life skills such as collaboration, problem solving and teamwork.”
One suggestion is that the term ‘foundation skills’ might not be the best one to use as the skills may be traditionally seen in VET’s lexicon as too basic rather than fundamental. Some ask whether enabling or ‘core’ skills or some other term might be better, especially if other significant life and employability skills are also covered under this umbrella.
The paper then goes into providing definitions of the various terms, and this is helpful.
What JSA’s study involves
The study consists of three elements:
- “a survey of Australian adults to assess their current skills levels (‘the survey’)
- a feasibility study into how best to assess the literacy, numeracy and digital literacy levels of First Nations people (“the feasibility study”); and
- analysis of Commonwealth administrative and other data to ‘drill down’ into the results for priority groups.”
Next steps
This will involve consultation with stakeholders on survey design and data requirements followed by survey development and testing. The survey itself will be administered in mid 2024, with initial findings expected by the end of that year. We’ll be keeping an eye out on this one too, but any real action and insights are probably a way off.
Having your say
Unfortunately, there was a very short timeframe for making submissions related to this paper. We will keep monitoring things, though, and let readers knew when more information and insights are available.
