Functional Literacy Skills of School Leavers in Flanders

Abstract

The ‘discovery’ that — despite compulsory education, despite school attendance that is only problematic among marginal population groups, and despite the many resources invested in education — a significant number of people in the industrialised countries can be considered ‘functionally illiterate’, dates from relatively recently and has been a shocking revelation. Following England and France, the front runners in this field, Belgium and the Netherlands have also been developing initiatives to tackle ‘illiteracy’ since the late 1970s. It has been the aim of these initiatives to address the question of whether the adult population as a whole has sufficient basic skills, including literacy, at a high enough standard. This implies, on the one hand, that people with a low level of basic skills may be able to manage to function and communicate despite that, and, on the other hand, that people with relatively high skills levels could be faced with serious problems. The participation of Randers in the International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) was one of the efforts to gain a more differentiated view on the literacy levels of the population and of pupils completing compulsory education.