5. What’s needed for an effective literacy programme?

• Effective literacy programmes provide explicit teaching of the knowledge and skills that learners need along with opportunities to practise, in contexts that are meaningful and purposeful.
• When adults have low levels of reading skills, fine-grained and specific assessment is needed to determine exactly what their skills and needs are in order to maximise instruction.
• No single measure of reading achievement will be able to identify an individual’s strengths and learning needs. The Literacy and Numeracy Assessment Tool will probably not be suitable because it requires adult learners to be able to decode. Other general assessment will only have a few items at the lowest levels, and therefore will not provide the detailed information needed for planning instruction.

Next 6. First things to find out about learners