View comments from Alison Sutton, Strategic Analyst from COMET, taken at the Literacy Forum in Wellington, May 2011.
Key content
Alison talks about changes that organisations make as a consequence of embedding literacy and numeracy, and thoughts about sustaining the changes.
Transcript
The point I think we’ve got to face now is having got a national literacy skills measurement tool, what are we going to do about measuring the progress that individuals make as a whole and that organizations make as a consequence of embedding. Because it actually changes more than simply a person’s literacy skills, it is the whole issue about personal confidence and affirmation and the ability to take risks. And organisations are changing because they’re embedding, they’re thinking about learning in their companies, in their organizations and ITOs in a different kind of way.
A lot of people come into their literacy role and they are the only specialist and if they go the capacity leaves the organisation, so how do you make literacy skills part of the organisation’s ongoing competence and are each of the people here who are literacy experts coaching a replacement.
Are you grooming other people to do what you’re doing? Are you grooming it into management? Is it being written into policies rather than being in a specialist staff role that is can easily go, the point of funding. We have to see how we can work collectively to embed it, to embed the expectation of high quality literacy delivery in what training organisations and learning organisation do as a matter of course. Not an oddity and not one that’s going to end the minute the funding dries up.