Workplace literacy and numeracy: Ginnie Denny

View comments from Ginnie Denny, Director at Marginz, taken at the Symposium in Hamilton, July 2011.

Key content

Where we're at, and ideas for moving forward with workplace literacy and numeracy

Transcript

Well I think workplace literacy and numeracy is a really interesting place to be. It’s still very emergent as a sector. We’ve got some strong providers who have a good sense of what programme delivery can look like and what the possibilities are for providing good quality teaching. And we have some employers who are engaged in their own right to run their own programmes. Saying that, there’s still quite a lot of room for growth. If we look at the numbers, we‘re still only delivering to a very small proportion of employees, and we know that there are way more employees in the workplace who need it. So I think where we’re up to, we have good evidence that we can deliver, that we can provide results and benefits for learners and for companies that are quite tangible. But we need to do more, we need to scale up. We need to have more people who can do it – not everybody can do it, it’s hard work and it’s complicated work. So we need people to come to the challenge, we need companies to come to the table and say, "Yes, this is part of what we do and we need to grow it".

We’ve got to look at a systems process – a way of taking on organisations and shaping the way that they do things so they only issue and provide ongoing solutions for them – and that’s quite a stretch. We also need to grow skilled tutoring staff who can offer these very highly contextualised complex programmes to companies, to learners in often quite challenging situations themselves. So we need more professional development, and that will come through the national centre and their new project. So we need more people at the table, more people doing it, more professional development; and I think we also need to engage in new forms of delivery. So I think online learning, and looking at what the possibilities are for workplaces to engage in a different way so that we can free up some of the funding for people who have the lowest skill sets who really need some intensive stuff.