International Journal of Educational Development 31 (2011) 596–605

Changing policy discourses: Constructing literacy inequalities

Mary Hamilton *, Kathy Pitt

Lancaster University Literacy Research Centre, Lancaster University, UK

A R T I C L E I N F O

Keywords:

Policy discourse

Governance

Adult literacy

Social exclusion

Citizenship

Inequality

A B S T R A C T

This paper explores the ways in which policy discourses have constructed rationales for addressing adult

literacy over the last 50 years. In particular, we examine how policy positions the literacy learner as

citizen within discourses of rights and equity. Taking the case of the UK, we compare two key documents

produced at different historical moments. Our discourse analysis reveals a long standing discourse of

individual deficit within a functional model of literacy. This is now overlaid by a discourse of social

exclusion that views adult learners as entrepreneurial global citizens who must compete within a

market economy.

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1. Introduction and aim

In this paper we explore the ways in which policy discourseshave historically constructed rationales for addressing adultliteracy inequalities over the last 50 years. In doing so, wecontribute to a growing body of scholarly work that is trackingthe effects of globalisation on national educational and socialpolicy. This work suggests that local policies in many, individualcountries are increasingly framed by the ideologies of a dominantglobal order that promote particular understandings about thenature of literacy and society.

We begin by offering a brief overview of the discovery of the‘‘problem’’ of adult literacy in rich, western countries since the1950s and the role of international agencies this process. We go onto look at the specific case of the UK by examining in detail two keypolicy documents: the Right to Read manifesto of the 1970scampaign and the Skills for Life Strategy document produced in2001 by the New Labour administration of Tony Blair. These twodocuments were produced during different policy periods, the firstat the end of a period of welfare reform concerned mainly withsocial justice; the second a product of neo-liberalism reflecting theincreasingly globalised international back drop to national policy.

We use discourse analysis to look for both continuities anddifferences in the construction of the adult learner and the goals ofprogrammes across these different policy periods. As a windowinto policy discourse and issues of inequality we examinespecifically how adult learners and users of literacy are constructed

* Corresponding author at: Dept Educational Research, County South College,

Lancaster University, Lancaster LA1 4YD, UK. Tel.: +44 01524 592861;

fax: +44 01524 592914.

E-mail addresses: m.hamilton@lancs.ac.uk (M. Hamilton),

k.pitt@lancaster.ac.uk (K. Pitt).

0738-0593/$ – see front matter � 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

doi:10.1016/j.ijedudev.2011.02.011

as citizens within national policy documents in the UK: how theirrole and positioning within the polity (educational, civil andeconomic) is described; their rights; their attributes and activities;and their agency in relation to literacy and societal change. Incarrying out this analysis we assume that discourse is constitu-tively linked to practice and has real effects in shaping adulteducation and public beliefs about literacy. As Alan Rogers puts itin his paper on women and citizenship, we learn to be citizens (andwhat kind of citizen we are) through daily engagement withliteracy programmes like the UK’s Skills for Life, both through thediscourse and the practices we encounter in them (Rogers, 2007).

Henry et al. (2001) have examined the role of the OECD inglobalisation of educational policy. Ozga (2009), Lawn and Grek(2009); and Dale and Robertson (2009) focus on the regional role ofthe European Union while Fairclough (2000), Levitas (2005) andClarke and Newman (2007) have specifically looked at how thesechanges have been reflected in the policies of New Labour in theUK. This work suggests that the current dominant global order isradically reshaping processes of governance and in turn re-makingfundamental ideas about citizenship, rights and equity. Inparticular, Fazal Rivzi and Bob Lingard have identified ‘‘theemergence of new global policymaking processes in educationwhich are often linked more to the interests of global capitalismthan to the needs of particular societies or specific individuals’’(Rizvi and Lingard, 2009:421). These new processes of governancehave eroded the power of the national state as a central decision-maker and provider of public services. They are characterized bythe competitive involvement of private and public bodies in socialpolicy, and transnational agencies of all kinds – corporate,governmental and NGOs.

Historically, individual country policy responses to adultliteracy have often appealed to nationalism focusing on themaintenance or creation of national identity (see Freebody andWelch, 1993; Bhola, 1999; Walter, 2002, 2003; Collins and Blot,

M. Hamilton, K. Pitt / International Journal of Educational Development 31 (2011) 596–605 597

2003). Reviewing a wide panorama of national campaigns incountries from Europe and Scandinavia to Africa, Latin Americaand India, Arnove and Graff conclude that

‘‘large-scale efforts to provide literacy have not been tied to thelevel of wealth, industrialization, urbanization or democratiza-tion of a society, nor to a particular type of political regime.Instead, they have been more closely related to the efforts ofcentralising authorities to establish a moral or politicalconsensus and, over the past two hundred years, to nation-state building.’’ (Arnove and Graff, 1987:2)

The rhetorics of literacy education policies call on broader idealsof citizenship. In the two policy texts we examine here, for example,the literacy programmes being promoted are described as contrib-uting towards a ‘caring, sharing society (A Right to Read, foreword)and ‘A prosperous and fair society, in which all individuals have an

opportunity to fulfill their potential’ (Skills for Life, paragraph 6).International agencies such as UNESCO and the Organization for

Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have been veryinfluential in promoting literacy as a policy issue over the last50 years, initially in poor ‘‘developing’’ countries but more recentlyin the rich countries of the West. Following a US Right to Read

campaign in the 1960s (Sticht, 2002) adult literacy campaigns tookplace in the UK and other European and Anglophone countries suchas Australia and Canada. Leslie Limage records that governments inthese industrialized countries were initially reluctant to recognizeor commit funds to dealing with adult literacy (Limage, 1987).They have needed persuasion from international bodies whichhave been concerned less with the relationship of literacy withnational identity than about establishing universals – theachievement of individual human rights or – more recently –the shaping of global citizens in a market economy. Themes ofprogress and national development are harnessed to this vision.Empowerment, prosperity and equality are said to be achievedthrough it. UNESCO has been a particularly strong advocate of‘‘literacy as right’’ for this whole period and its recent Global

Monitoring Report on Literacy devotes a whole chapter to this topic(UNESCO, 2006). However, as Anna Robinson-Pant discusses in hercritical reading of this report, the discourse of rights is limited andcomplicated by the wider agendas for literacy that UNESCO nowaims to address (see Robinson-Pant, 2008).

2. Mapping literacy and inequalities

Since the 1950s UNESCO has collected literacy statistics fromcountries across the world, initially based on self-report ofparticipation rates in education programmes. These have chartedincreases in overall literacy rates during this period but also biginequalities between countries and between social groups withinnation states, especially between women and men (see UNESCO,2005). In recent years there have been increasing inequalities ofwealth within many countries as a result of the structuraladjustment policies of the World Bank and consequent reductionsin public investment (see UNDP, 1999). These factors haveexacerbated differences in literacy attainment. Rather than simplylooking at comparisons between national literacy levels, therefore,inequalities between social groups and individuals have becomethe focus of policy attention, as can be seen in the priority groupsidentified for policy action by the New Labour government.

Over the last two decades, UNESCO and the OECD, stronglysupported by the USA, Canada and the European Union, havedeveloped increasingly sophisticated measures of adult literacythat can be used to produce international statistical league tables(see OECD, 2000; UNESCO, 2005; Schleicher, 2008). The results ofthese league tables have prompted new policy initiatives and

discussions about adult literacy across a range of European andOECD countries in recent years including Australia (Castleton andMcDonald, 2002; Lo Bianco, 2008; Lo Bianco and Wickert, 2001),Canada (Sloat and Willms, 2000) and South Africa (Prinsloo, 1999);Ireland (Bailey, 2006); France (Guerin-Pace and Blum, 1999) andNew Zealand (Cain and Benseman, 2004).

As we move into the second decade of the new millennium, theprevailing policy argument is that inequality of opportunity leadsto individual literacy deficit; literacy deficit reinforces inequalitiesof opportunity. Evidence on the relationship between wealth andeducational and literacy achievement, however, shows that thissimple cause and effect model needs to be reconceptualised (Graff,1987b; Rogers, 2007). The situation of women, for example, andhow it is changing, varies greatly between contexts (see Robinson-Pant, 2004). In terms of socio-economic status in the UK socialmobility has been negligible in recent decades even thougheducational achievement is much higher and widespread, asmeasured by examination results (Blanden et al., 2005).

A critical literacy approach to policy and practice has offered analternative to the prevailing conceptualisation. This approachsurfaces issues of power and inequality in both the process andoutcomes of literacy education: Paulo Freire, as philosopher butalso state educator, has been an inspirational figure (Freire, 1995).National and international initiatives have built on his approach –for example in Nicaragua (Hanemann, 2005); Belgium (http://www.lire-et-ecrire.be/); and the REFLECT approach developed bythe international NGO Action Aid (see http://www.actionaid.or-g.uk/323/reflect.html). Such initiatives aim to bridge community-generated perspectives with national state policy.

Street (2004), Barton (2007), McCaffery et al. (2007), Rogerset al. (2007), Kell (2008) and others have shown how this can bedone through a more complex, ethnographically informed viewthat analyses the role of literacy within the relations of ruling(Smith, 2005) and the place of literacy within other semiotic(meaning-making) systems as shown by Menezes de Souza (2008)and Jewitt and Kress (2003). However finding ways to ‘‘scale up’’critical literacy initiatives to national level while retaining a focuson local participation, diversity and minority interests is still achallenge. This is especially problematic when a narrow economicdiscourse dominates social policy, together with managementpractices that emphasise closely monitored outcome-relatedtargets as was the case with the New Labour administration inthe UK. Such practices tend to promote standardised, top-downsystems and models of assessment that leave little room for localvariation or learner involvement in the curriculum.

We turn now to examine how these issues play out in the UK,focusing on how adult literacy learners have been constructedwithin the dominant discourses of two policy texts in different timeperiods in the UK. We show how an historical Critical DiscourseAnalysis (CDA) can show the detail of changes and continuities in thepolicy discourse and how these discourses construct inequalitiesbetween British social groups in particular ways. We lookspecifically at how literacy inequalities, citizenship and the rightsof learners are positioned in these documents. This paper is one of aseries exploring these issues in the UK context and tracing similardiscourses of participation and citizenship through the prevailingpedagogies, institutional structures and curriculum of the two eras(see Taylor, 2008; Burgess, 2008; Hamilton, 2009; Pitt, 2010).

3. From ‘A Right to Read’ to ‘Skills for Life’: constructing the UKliteracy learner

3.1. The policy context

The period we discuss in this paper stretches across the last fourdecades, from the early 1970s when A Right to Read adult literacy

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campaign was led by a coalition of voluntary agencies with apowerful media partner, the BBC. The campaign was structuredalong the lines of earlier well-known mass campaigns indeveloping countries like Cuba, based on informal, grassrootsorganization, one to one at home or informal groups meeting in theevening with volunteer teachers or based in old school buildings orcommunity centres. There was no formal curriculum and fewopportunities for accrediting learning. Although the Armed Forceshad long-established basic skills provision for their recruits (seeWhite, 1963), the vocational style of teaching literacy they haddeveloped was hardly acknowledged in the campaign, which wasdriven by concerns for social justice. Formal testing and assess-ment, usually designed for children, was not popular with eithertutors or adult learners. Learners were constructed as havingmissed out on educational opportunity and therefore disadvan-taged and stigmatised. But they were seen as eager to learn andresourceful in managing every day literacy demands (see Hamiltonand Hillier, 2006).

The next two decades were a period of pluralism, during whichprovision developed substantially, supported by Local EducationAuthority Adult Education Services and voluntary organizations,with leadership, training and development funding from a nationalagency (the Adult Literacy and Basic Skills Agency, ALBSU, later theBasic Skills Agency, BSA). The European Union was an importantsource of funding during this time, both directly through specialprojects financed by the social fund (especially for women andmigrant workers) and through the Manpower Services Commis-sion which channeled funding for literacy-related vocationalpreparation and training.

This phase was followed in the 1990s by a period of increasingcentralization as a result of broader shifts in social and economicpolicy nationally. Local authority funding and control was reduced;legislation gave basic skills provision (including Numeracy andESOL, English for Speakers of Other Languages) statutory status forthe first time. Most provision was moved into the more formalizedfurther education (FE) system. A national system of assessmentwas introduced and courses were supported by outcome relatedfunding through a national funding body, the Further EducationFunding Council (FEFC).

The most recent phase was the development for the first time ofa fully funded national Skills for Life strategy which developed anew infrastructure for adult literacy including a national test ofachievement, an adult core curriculum, close monitoring ofstudent progress and professional qualifications for teachers (DfES,2001). The New Labour administration of Tony Blair in 2001committed £1.5 billion to this strategy with achievement targetsset ahead for 2020. This strategy was justified by referring tointernational and national survey research including league tablesbased on the OECD’s International Adult Literacy Survey. The UKwas found to be low down in these league tables. Literacy wasincluded as one of the key indicators of social exclusion in annuallyrequired government reports to the European Union at the time,and progress on the strategy was therefore highly visible andmonitored directly by the cabinet office. A broad vision of LifelongLearning was part of the original policy but a narrowly focussedeconomic discourse has intensified over the recent years andliteracy is now funded and discussed almost entirely in terms ofemployability (Leitch, 2006; DIUS, 2009). The focus on adultstudents, especially those with most complex and extensivelearning needs, has been eroded with many participants inprogrammes currently being from the 14–19 year age group(see Appleby and Bathmaker, 2005; Bathmaker, 2007; Hamilton,2010:75–76).

As can be seen from this brief historical survey, adult literacy inUK policy has been malleable, with frequent changes in the scopeand goals of the field. At different points numeracy, digital

technologies and ESOL have been included with literacy as part ofbasic skills provision. Throughout this period, though, literacyinequality has been seen by policy-makers mainly – thoughimplicitly – in terms of socio-economic class. Gender, ethnicity,disability and minority language issues are treated as inflections ofthis which are frequently ignored or sidelined within nationalpolicy. ESOL with its very explicit links to migration, citizenshipagendas and cultural integration has a particularly ambiguousposition which is still changing as we write (NIACE, 2006;Rosenberg, 2008).

3.2. Analysing shifting discourses: two policy moments

The policy shifts described above can be tracked through ourdata by examining the ways in which particular views ofcitizenship are constructed within two key documents producedin the 1970s and in 2001: the Right to Read campaign documentand the New Labour Skills for Life Strategy document. Bothdocuments position those with literacy needs as an ‘‘underclass’’needing priority attention from the state. The notion of anunderclass presupposes an unequal society and those with unmetliteracy needs as disadvantaged within it (see Welshman, 2006).The nature of this disadvantage, and the remedy to it, however, aredifferently presented in the two documents produced within thedifferent national and global political and policy environments wehave outlined above.

In A Right to Read this positioning is achieved through afunctional literacy discourse and a subsidiary – and conflicting –activist discourse of social participation. In the Skills for Life

document the positioning is achieved through explicit definition ofthe priority social groups targeted for funding. The collocation ofliteracy with negative, stigmatised categories (unemployed, loneparent, benefit claimant, prisoner, low skilled, member of adisadvantaged community) has the effect of amplifying theimpression of deficit. A prominent discourse of social exclusionis focussed primarily on economic activity. In the discourse ofsocial exclusion, the notion of ‘‘literacy as a right’’ is transformedinto literacy learning as an ‘‘entitlement’’ conditional on fulfilmentof ‘‘duties’’ and the agency of the adult learner as citizen is changed.This discourse is a well-established part of wider discourses of neo-liberalism which currently frame national and international policy.

Both documents draw on a strong deficit discourse of adultliteracy learners while emphasising positive commitments toindividual change and participation.

Both use the device of individual adult profiles to reinforcethe messages of the general narrative text. In our analysis wehave looked closely at both the overall discursive construction ofeach document and at the profiles. We present our analysis inthe following sections but first we describe the documentsthemselves.

3.3. Overall description of the two documents

Both of our chosen documents aim to put a persuasive case forthe need for expenditure in the field of adult literacy to theirreaders. However, there are striking material and genericdifferences between them which reflect both technical and socialchanges in the presentation of public documents over this 30 yearspan.

A Right to Read is a modest 28 page A5 bounded booklet. Thetitle takes up most of the front cover and is boldly printed in red onblack. The rest of the booklet is unassuming. Like other policydocuments of the period it is plainly produced and text-heavy,giving considerable attention to rationale and research backgroundfor policy proposals followed by a list of recommendations. Theonly illustrations are black and white photographic reproductions

M. Hamilton, K. Pitt / International Journal of Educational Development 31 (2011) 596–605 599

of everyday texts such as newspaper articles and product labels.Some attention has been given to headline statements andsubheadings in the text but otherwise there is no overt designof the layout.

The first page lists the names of those individuals whowrote, designed and contributed to it with their organizationalaffiliations. This is followed by a one page forward attributed toGeoffrey Clarkson, Development Officer of the British Associa-tion of Settlements (BAS). The foreword explains the historyand mission of the BAS and locates the literacy campaignwithin that.

The main body of the document is divided into two parts: Part 1explains the notion of functional literacy, presents the researchbase for the campaigning claims and information about the adultsare who are the focus of the campaign, including a set of studentprofiles in the form of short written narratives to illustrate why‘‘illiteracy’’ is a problem. The first sentence of the main text is‘‘There are at least two million functionally illiterate adults inEngland and Wales’. Part 2 begins by repeating and elaborating theopening sentence from Part 1. It presents a remedial policy, in theform of a preamble and 17 recommendations ending with astatement of commitment from the BAS. Part 2 therefore providesa solution to the ‘problem’ set out in Part 1.

The Skills for Life strategy is a much longer and more complexdocument, containing a detailed policy rationale. It is materiallyvery different from A Right to Read. It is a carefully designed A4booklet that opens sideways, printed on stiff, high quality paperand illustrated with fold-out pages containing full colour portraitsof learners. The space is used liberally across its 58 pages with alarge, highly readable san serif font.

The document begins with a foreword by the Secretary of Statefor Education, David Blunkett followed by the first student profile,a table of contents and an executive summary. The main body ofthe report is divided into two sections containing numberedparagraphs: The first is ‘‘Our Priority Groups’’ which describes anddiscusses the adults in need of support; and the second ‘‘DeliveringHigher Standards’’ which focuses on the policy mechanismsthrough which the strategy will be delivered.

The Skills for Life document (like other New Labour texts)illustrates the broad move towards the marketisation of policydiscourse and what Fairclough argues is the ‘technologisation’ oflanguage practices over these decades (Fairclough, 1996). Al-though Skills for Life is written to present information about thenew strategy it also promotes it through packaging the strategylike a commercial company document. The design strongly echoesthe genre of corporate annual reports of this era.

3.4. Constructing Learners through Functional and Participatory

discourses in the Right to Read document

In his foreword to A Right to Read Clarkson starts with anassertion of the link between literacy, rights and activeparticipation

In order to participate, to exercise certain rights, to choosebetween alternatives and to solve problems, people needcertain basic skills: listening, talking, reading and writing. (BAS,1973, foreword: page 2).

However, after this opening statement, the dominant repre-sentation of adult literacy that constitutes this text is that offunctional literacy which at the time was being promotedinternationally by UNESCO and in the US (see Burgess et al.,2009). Indeed, this manifesto is one of the seminal texts thatintroduced this set of beliefs about adult literacy and educationpractices into the UK.

The term is introduced with the US National reading Centerdefinition on page 5:

A person is functionally literate when he has command ofreading skills that permit him to go about his daily activitiessuccessfully on the job or to move about society normally andwith comprehension of the usual printed expressions andmessages he encounters.

Literacy is represented here as everyday engagement with thewritten word, through the activity of reading. The discourse offunctional literacy argues that literacy is a necessary part of dailylife, and therefore there needs to be literacy teaching for thoseadults who have not reached the appropriate level so that they canaccess ‘normality’. This argument has the positive effect ofbringing the everyday world of the adult learner into theclassroom, but also potentially positions this learner as ‘abnormal’or in deficit; a position which is taken up in this text. So theconcept of functional literacy here introduces a ‘mild’ form ofexclusion by pointing to the necessity for mastery of the writtenlanguage within society.

The concept of functionality implies that the goal of literacyeducation is to enable individuals to fit into the status quo ratherthan challenging inequality or promoting social transformation. Itis also closely related to a reductionist version of literacy asvocational competencies. A functional interest has always been aparamount driver of policy in the British context and while this isexpressed in different ways at different times the appeals toemployers’ and tax payers’ interests made by activists 200 yearsago are instantly recognisable. Martha More, a pioneer in the UKSunday School movement at the end of the 18th century convincedfarmers to allow their employees to take part in reading classes byclaiming. . . ‘‘we had a little plan which we hoped would securetheir orchards from being robbed, their rabbits from being shot,their game from being stolen and which might lower the poor-rates’’ [quoted in Kelly, 1992:77].

Currently one of the expressions of the functional view ofliteracy is the desire to create frameworks for adult literacy,numeracy and ESOL which will integrate adult learners into wideropportunities for progression in education and training. Theinternational dimension of this is the effort at European level andbeyond, to establish parity of qualifications across countries (see,for example, European Union, 2006; Schleicher, 2008).

The dominance of the functional literacy discourse and itslimited view of literacy obscures considerable tensions between amore academic ‘‘school’’ version of literacy, a vocationally orientedview and the many purposes which individual adults may have forimproving their skills.

Six of the 25 pages in the Right to Read document are given overto the life stories of six individual learners. They are used aspersonalised examples of the need for, and the efficacy of, adultliteracy education, under the heading of ‘Illiterate Adults’. Thecontemporary expressions of the functional view of literacy andsome of the tensions and contradictions between this discourseand the everyday realities of adult learners in these can be seen inthese profiles.

Four men and two women are profiled: Brian, Tony, Mary, Keith,Susan and Andrew. It is stated at the beginning that these are nottheir real names out of respect for ‘their general wish for anonymity’(p. 11). Three of the four men are represented as having skilledwork. The youngest one, 17 year old Tony, is a painter anddecorator, considered as less skilled work. Both women aredescribed as ‘‘housewives’’ and the jobs they did before marriageand children are not specified. These gendered differentials inemployment patterns reflect the full employment and familypractices of the early 1970s (Hill, 2003:28–30).

M. Hamilton, K. Pitt / International Journal of Educational Development 31 (2011) 596–605600

Brian is a ‘‘skilled man’’ with a car and job and has been offeredpromotion.

Tony is employed, has girlfriends, goes on holidays.

Mary has worked, now is married and has children and survivedbeing orphaned and put in a home.

Keith is a ‘‘successful 45 year-old London shopkeeper’’ who wasgood at other things in school

Susan is a single mother with children who found work afterleaving school at 14.

Andrew works on a car assembly line, was an NCO in the armyand stood in for his supervisor in his previous job in a printer’s.

Each learner describes specific strategies they have developedto cope with their literacy difficulties and have welcomed thetuition offered to them to improve their daily lives – Keithreaffirms the implicit argumentation of the functional literacydiscourse:

I just want to be natural like anyone else. I just want to beordinary. (p. 16).

These profiles are edited and shaped by an anonymous authorwho summarises the interviews, juxtaposing the positive with thenegative in a way that highlights the deficit:

(Brian) is quite articulate but can neither read nor write

(Brian’s) a skilled man, but his reading difficulties haveprevented him (Brian, p.12)

(Keith) is quite sure he would have been a good deal moresuccessful if only he could have learned to read and write. (pp.14/15, our emphasis)

In the descriptions above the negative aspect is placed in the‘‘focus’’ position at the end of an English sentence. Compare themwith ‘although he has reading difficulties he is a skilled man’,where the positive is placed as the important piece of informationin the end slot. This choice of construction puts the focus on thenegative aspect of these lives, and is perhaps inevitable here as theaim of these stories is to persuade the reader of the importance ofthe problem, and their needs.

However, generous space is also given to the individual voicesof these ‘examples’ of people whose ‘ordinariness’ is marred bytheir lack of literacy, but who do not represent themselves astotally excluded from society. All six position themselves as beingfully involved in the workplace, family or local communities, notisolated by the struggles with the written language they all explainas part of their lives.

In summary, A Right to Read paints a generalized picture of ‘two

million functionally illiterate adults’ (p.4) as part of its introductionof the functional literacy discourse, and campaign for funding.These potential learners are not categorized in particular ways.There is no talk of economic prosperity or of adult citizens as beingdeserving or not. The rationale is in terms of rights and choices.Later the document does go on to distance adults with literacyneeds from those who are ‘‘mentally defective’’ (p 11) It also drawson other deficit discourses such as representing illiteracy as anindividual disability and one that people are ashamed of and try toconceal. ‘‘Only the most determined or the luckiest’’ are able to findhelp to address this disability (BAS, 1973, p.11). These discourses of

illiteracy as disability or disease were widespread at this time,especially in the US (Barton, 1997, Scribner, 1984, Taylor, 2008).

In the next section we look at how far these discourses arepresent in the later Skills for Life strategy document, using A Right to

Read as a reference point.

3.5. Constructing priority social groups in Skills for Life

By the time we get to the Skills for Life strategy new measures ofliteracy generated by national and international research haveincreased estimates of the need for adult literacy from 2 to 7million adults:

A shocking 7 million adults in England cannot read and write atthe level we would expect of an 11-year-old. Even more haveproblems with numbers. The cost to the country as a wholecould be as high as £10 billion a year. The cost to people’spersonal lives is incalculable. People with low basic skills earnan average £50,000 less over their working lives, are more likelyto have health problems, or to turn to crime.’’ (David Blunkett,Secretary of State for Education in his foreword to Skills for Life,DfES, 2001)

Here, the Secretary of State, David Blunkett, draws on theneoliberal economic discourse that equates literacy with employ-ability and earnings.

In the strategy specific groups of adults are targeted as a‘priority’ for literacy education, all of whom are characterised bynegative attributes. These include unemployed and low skilled,short-term workers; benefit claimants, especially lone parents;homeless and those living in disadvantaged communities; prison-ers and those on probation, those with drug and alcohol problems,mental health issue; refugees and other non native Englishspeakers. The specification of such groupings, and the newdiscourses associated with them mark struggles between govern-ments’ desires to control their unruly populations at times ofeconomic and social change, as well as to provide support for them.The groups represent the latest incarnation of an underclass thathas been constructed by successive governments (see Welshman,2006). Discourse theory argues that categorisations like this aresocial labels that bring into being and maintain certain kinds ofsubjectivity (Pitt, 2002, 2008, 2010; Rose, 1989; Smith, 2005). TheSkills for Life document introduces these new categories into thefield of adult education, obliging British providers to focus theirprogrammes on those who can be fitted into one of the groupsdescribed.

3.6. The discourse of social exclusion as economic exclusion

Levitas (2005) has pointed out the loosely defined way in whichthe term ‘‘social inclusion’’ has been used in both policy andresearch. She has distinguished three co-existing discourses ofsocial exclusion. These are firstly, a radical, transformative notionidentified with poverty of resources and a commitment toredistributing these. Secondly a discourse that identifies it as‘‘labour-market attachment’’ focused largely on integrating peopleinto paid work and thirdly, a moral underclass discourse thatidentifies problem groups, marginalised through a combination offactors including their own behaviour and attitudes. Levitassuggests that Blair’s New Labour vision was a mixture of thesecond and the third, incorporating a meritocratic view of the‘‘good society’’ where people were to be assured opportunities toadvance but then had to rely on their own efforts and responsibili-ties as citizens to become ‘‘included’’. As Macleavy points out,within this version of social exclusion ‘socially excluded individu-als [are] enabled to participate in society through policy

M. Hamilton, K. Pitt / International Journal of Educational Development 31 (2011) 596–605 601

endeavours that primarily [seek] to move them from welfare towork (Macleavy, 2008:1659).

Norman Fairclough has shown that the concept of socialexclusion offers opportunities to explore the social and economicprocesses that are causing this excluding. Who or what excludes?But, as he says, it can also be used as a noun to represent ‘exclusion’as a possible condition that people ‘suffer from’. He argues that thissecond usage is the one mainly drawn on in New Labour discourses(Fairclough, 2000). We can see this at work in this document,where the noun ‘exclusion’ dominates and is associated withillness. The word ‘exclusion’ appears 11 times in the text, forexample:

People with poor literacy, numeracy and language skills tend tobe on lower incomes or unemployed, and they are more proneto ill health and social exclusion. (Skills for Life, executivesummary, para.3).

‘Exclusion’ in itself is a negative concept, and this negativity isreinforced by its use with words that we usually use whendescribing states that are harmful, such as ‘suffer’, ‘prone to’ and ‘atrisk of’, as in the extract above. The phrase ‘at risk of exclusion’, forexample, occurs five times, and is used as a sub-heading: ‘Other

groups at risk of exclusion’. There is only one use of the verb‘exclude’ in this document. It is not, though, used to exploreeconomic causal forces such as new capitalist practices, but toconstruct those targeted (albeit in a hedged rather than strong way– may well) as the agents of their own misery:

Of course, people with these poor literacy and numeracy skillsget by, usually by relying on others for help or by avoidingsituations where they need to read, write or calculate. But,because they lack literacy and numeracy skills, they and their

families may well exclude themselves from advantages thatothers take for granted (Skills for Life, paragraph 2 of theIntroduction, our emphasis)

This argument of ‘self exclusion’, however, is absent from thecarefully presented profiles of individual learners included in thestrategy document, all of whom are presented as well-motivated tostudy. As in the earlier Right to Read document, Skills for Life includesprofiles of individual learners (5 men and 2 women) who illustratesome (but not all) of the target groups defined in the document. Asdescribed above, these individual profiles, accompanied by full-page colour photographs, are randomly distributed throughout theSkills for Life text. The text draws on a discourse of social exclusionabsent from A Right to Read. This discourse is set up strongly in theintroduction as an economic exclusion with serious collectiveconsequences. The profiles of individual learners are intended toillustrate and personalise this exclusion. However, as we will see,they also hint at the more complex circumstances that surroundthe learners’ stories.

In these profiles the focus is on positive transformation throughliteracy. There are no examples of ‘‘transgressive’’ individuals, suchas ex-offenders or drug users.

In contrast to the profiles introduced in the Right to Read

document, only Gary Hughes is presented as being in work in Skills

for Life. He is described as becoming a community tutor after hisown successful experiences of adult education, so staying withinthe public, government funded, workplace. There is also ethnicdiversity within this sample, which was not an explicit feature ofthe Right to Read profiles. Two of the individuals are described ascoming to the UK from other countries; Wayne Alphonso Richardsfrom Jamaica and Nasrin Sheikh from Kenya. Nasrin is studyingEnglish as an additional language (ESOL), a subject and languageneed that was also not part of the concerns of the earlier manifesto.

For another two of these learners, Angela Black and Paul Wragg,chronic illness is presented as a major obstacle to education andemployment.

Although all these individuals are described as being success-fully engaged on various Basic Skills, IT and vocational courses,their profiles suggest a mixture of many more factors that mayprevent full involvement in mainstream social life, than the sixlearners in A Right to Read. Unemployment, including thatexperienced by older workers displaced by changes in theemployment structure; migration; illness, low paid work linkedwith a lack of qualifications are aspects of daily UK life that the newstrategies presented in this document are addressing. They are alsopart of the actual lives of the individuals chosen for these profilesand indicators of the sources of social inequalities. Their diversedifficulties, though, are backgrounded in these profiles by thebrevity of the narratives and the focus on positive transformationthrough employment and education.

The discourses of exclusion and functional literacy also embedthe economic logic that an individual’s decision to learn new skillsis deeply connected to the prosperity and productivity of the wholenation. In paragraph 4 of the Introduction it is argued that peoplewith ‘low skills’ impact negatively on us all as a ‘nation’. Here ispart of that argument:

One in five employers reports a significant gap in their workers’skills. And over a third of those companies with a literacy andnumeracy skills gap say that they have lost business or orders tocompetitors because of it. (paragraph.4).

Here only the inadequate employees are represented asdamaging the British commercial sector, although it is theinanimate gap that is blamed rather than individuals. Thisargument consolidates the economic discourse Blunkett drawson in the foreword, and is repeated later in the document:

And up to half of the 7 million people are in jobs. Many are inlow-skilled or short-term employment. We must increase thesepeople’s earnings potential and the country’s wealth andproductivity by giving them the literacy and numeracy skillsthey need to participate in a global, knowledge-based economy.(paragraph 17)

Here again people with ‘low skills’ are linked directly withnational prosperity and identity. There is no exploration of anyother causes of low wages. The finger is pointed firmly at the lowwaged individual and their lack of skill. The neo-liberal discourseof the new knowledge economy that is woven in here has beendominant throughout this period, reaching back into the previousConservative government (see Fairclough, 2000). We will showhow it is part of the argument used in this document to justify thenotion of the good citizen’s duty to improve oneself.

3.7. Constructing Literacy as Unproblematic Transformation

The profiles of these selected adults carry a strong discourseemphasizing the transformative power of literacy. The profiles arecarefully crafted to present an optimistic view of the possibilitiesfor change and to downplay the problems and resistances to this.This is partly achieved through the verbal narrative and thepositive demeanour of the people themselves, but it is enhanced bythe careful construction of the visual images, making clever use ofthe possibilities offered by digital technologies. We will look atexamples of each of these discursive strategies in turn.

The verbal narrative of one of the learners, David Revell, is agood example of a ‘‘smoothed over’’ profile that does not tell thewhole story about economic participation. David is described as

M. Hamilton, K. Pitt / International Journal of Educational Development 31 (2011) 596–605602

being enrolled on one of the free training programmes, the NewDeal, available to those who are out of work, defined as’ a set ofprogrammes premised on the ideal of social inclusion through paidemployment (Macleavy, 2008):

He started his New Deal course at South Tyneside College inSeptember

Presumably he is on this course because he is claimingjobseeker benefits, although this is not explicitly stated in hisprofile. Those claimants who have been unemployed for a certainlength of time are offered relevant courses and encouraged by theJobcentre staff to participate in them. However, any suggestion ofobligation or ‘duty’ to take up literacy education is absent fromthese carefully constructed verbal stories, where the anonymousthird person narrator’s voice dominates over that of eachindividual

David’s school days were a struggle. He left without anyqualifications.

I’m not sure why, but however hard I tried, things didn’t seem toclick at school.

Following a period of being in and out of work, I realised that if Iwas to get on in life, I needed to get some new skills.

In this extract David’s description of his school days isimmediately followed by his description of his work experience,presumably taken from an interview, but selected and reposi-tioned here without explicit authorial comment.

The potential agency of government organisations arecompletely absent from David’s profile. The last two sentencestell the ‘story’ of David joining the New Deal course, one in his ownwords and the second that of the author:

Following a period of being in and out of work, I realised that if Iwas to get on in life, I needed to get some new skills.

He picked up a leaflet on New Deal and realised this was anopportunity to do just that

In the second sentence (and final one of the profile) the authoromits any explicit time scale, and, through the placing of thissentence after David’s account of his work experiences, theimpression is given that the discovery of information about atraining course followed seamlessly on from the emergence ofDavid’s perception of a particular need. Absent is any discussion ofpossible causal factors for David’s unsatisfactory employmentexperiences. Also left out is a description of the benefits pathwaythat brought him together with the New Deal leaflet (see McLeavy,2008). Time is telescoped and place and other people and pressuresinvolved in this change of direction are omitted. David is presentedas the sole agent of the actions ‘realised’ and ‘picked up’

Turning to the visual images of those profiled, these are highimpact: each photograph takes up twice the space allocated to theverbal account. Each individual is posed with specific props thatrelate to the written narrative. Each photograph includes a varietyof literacy artefacts such as books, newspapers, and a flip chartwith writing on it. Five of the photos have one or more computersin the foreground or background. This use of props as attributes toestablish individual identity is a typical convention of mediaphotographs (see Hamilton, 2000). The settings can be identifiedthrough the furniture as institutional; a classroom, a recordingstudio, an office. Each individual fills between half to three quartersof the frame, with a torso shot. All are photographed lookingconfidently and directly at the reader through the camera lens thatis pointed at them.

We use the photograph of Wayne Richards to show thedetailed construction of these images. He is posed smiling andsitting at a studio sound mixing board. There is a computermonitor in the background. He has headphones round hisneck and is holding out a CD to the camera lens, so that it is inthe foreground and the printed writing that is on it, in a circle,can be easily read. These props connect with his ambition tobecome a sound engineer, which we learn by reading the verbaltext.

On the disc are two sentences: I feel cool and calm, thinking

constructively. It has made me different. The first sentence is anexact reproduction of his quoted speech in the written text. Thesecond sentence seems to be a summary made by an anonymousauthor as in the verbal text he is reported as saying, ‘‘I think

coming on the course has changed me. It’s made me have a wide

open mind.’’. The sentence ‘‘It has made me different’’ is a shorterreformulation of this description, which fits into the small,circular space of the disc. In three of the other photographs someof the written text, or references to its content, is also insertedinto appropriate props, such as writing on a flip chart and as oneof the advertisements on the job vacancy page of a newspaper.These details, along with the careful choice of setting, showelaborate, professional attention has been paid to these visualrepresentations.

These images of learners work to authenticate the accompa-nying narratives through the embodied presence of theseindividual people. They also elaborate the message of confidence,inclusion and, transformation which is in direct opposition to thegeneralised discourses of deficit and exclusion that can be found inthe parts of this document that justify the need for these newstrategies. The visual discourses here, of literacy and technologyand work connect to the dominant government discourse of theknowledge economy.

Their professional design is part of the ‘technologised’approach to contemporary government documents mentionedabove (see Fairclough, 1996) and also adds a touch of colour andindividuality to a text that has no other visual image apartfrom the photograph of the Secretary of State for Education,David Blunkett. The reader can be further motivated andpersuaded of the truths and the optimism of these wordsby viewing these ‘real’ people, who physically embody thetestimony of change.

3.8. Redefining citizenship and rights

In A Right to Read we have shown how the dominant discourseof functional literacy is the main, indirect representation ofcitizenship. In this discourse, literacy is linked to ‘normal’ everydaylife both in and out of the workplace.

This focus on the roles and rights of all citizens was part of theactivist vision of the British Association of Settlements, whichinitiated this campaign and which is still promoted internationallyby UNESCO. In the foreword to Right to Read, the author draws on awider definition of literacy than that used in the rest of this textwhich positions the learner as enabled to become a fully activeagent in society (exercise rights, participate). This positioningcontrasts with the representation of action as individualized in theUS definition of the literacy used later in the document (to go about,

to move about), which does not carry this extra inflection of activecitizenship but focuses more on normality and being able to ‘‘fitin’’.

In Skills for Life the concept of individual rights as citizens issubtly changed to focus not just on rights but also theresponsibilities for learning: who should pay–who is entitledand what kind of literacy is appropriate through the use of anotherneo-liberal discourse that has a small, but significant presence in

M. Hamilton, K. Pitt / International Journal of Educational Development 31 (2011) 596–605 603

this document. This discourse articulates lifelong learning as ‘duty’.It is drawn on directly twice. In the section detailing the different‘priority groups’ the paragraph describing jobseekers introducesthis concept:

as we now regard it as a duty on government to take adultliteracy and numeracy seriously, so we will impose duties onthe relevant agencies–and in certain cases on the individualsthemselves–to do so too (paragraph 15 our emphasis).

Here, and in the second use in paragraph 33, ‘duty’ is attributedto institutional actions; what they, including the government, areobliged to do. In paragraph 33 it is the providers of education thatare legally bound to specific ‘new duties’ under the SpecialEducational Needs and Disability Bill. However, in paragraph 15above those who are the beneficiaries of these actions are addedinto this list. They are slipped in through the additional clause ‘and

in certain cases on the individuals themselves’.This concept of duty opposes previous liberal discourses of

education as a ‘right’ of all citizens, as encapsulated in the title ofour other text A Right to Read. The concept of rights is drawn ontwice in the Skills for Life document through the use of the word‘entitlement’. Firstly in a paragraph explaining governmentstrategies to ‘engage potential learners’:

Giving all adults who want to improve their literacy andnumeracy skills an entitlement to free training in a format thatreflects their individual needs and which is available when andwhere they need it. (paragraph 11)

And near the end of the document in a paragraph explainingmeasures the government will take within its own departments:

And it will give all its staff with literacy or numeracy difficultiesat Level 1 or below an entitlement to time off for training.(paragraph 41).

In both of these statements rights are not presented asbelonging to individual citizens, but as given by the government.The ‘automatic’ rights of citizens are transformed into entities thatgovernments can give or withhold, like government benefits(giving, will give, entitlement). Through the way these discourses aredrawn on in this document a right to education becomes a duty toretrain. This emphasis becomes even clearer in the followingstatement:

. . .we propose to go further and introduce a requirement thatthose unemployed people with literacy and numeracy defi-ciencies must address their needs. If they fail to do so they risklosing benefits. (paragraph 25)

Here duty to learn becomes an obligation (must address), and acondition for benefits. Dwyer (2004) has documented theprevalence of this discourse of conditionality across a wide areaof contemporary social policy, both national and international, andhe suggests that this signals an underlying shift in thinking aboutcitizenship. He distinguishes between the ‘‘negative’’ rights of thecitizen (protection against. . ..) and the ‘‘positive rights’’ such aswelfare payments, education and health services. He argues thatthe move to make these positive benefits conditional on variouskinds of behaviours from the recipients disproportionately affectspoor people and is not balanced by the promises of other rights andconditions such as equal opportunities.

4. Conclusion

According to our analysis of two key policy documents, thediscourses of adult literacy in the UK over the past 50 years show

both striking continuities and changes. Contradictory strands co-exist in the same document reflecting tensions between policygoals of equity and the desire of the state to regulate literacy in itsown perceived interest within a regional and global economy. Inthe second document, Skills for Life, regulatory discoursesdominate.

We have presented our analysis as a detailed illustration ofwider trends, drawing on arguments made by a range ofsocial and educational policy analysts about the ways inwhich global governance now functions to shape nationalpolicies (Rizvi and Lingard, 2009; Macleavy, 2008; Lawn andGrek, 2009; also Clarke and Newman, 2007). Our suggestion indoing so is that all countries feel (in different and local ways)the impact on their national policies and practices of thedominant neo-liberal discourses of the new knowledge econo-my. These have redefined notions of citizenship so that peopleare seen as being prepared for global as well as nationalcitizenship within a competitive market environment. Thusalthough we have used the example of the UK in this paperbecause it is the context we are most familiar with, we expectthat the issues it raises will resonate with experiences aroundthe ‘globe.

Our analysis shows that a pervasive set of discourses, deficitand functional, now directly links people with ‘low literacyskills’ with national prosperity in a simple cause and effectrelationship. Those positioned in this ‘‘underclass’’ are tightlydefined according to subgroups and funding criteria and seenalmost entirely in terms of economic productivity – reducingcomplex social inequalities to a simplistic lack of literacy.Citizens no longer have ‘‘a right to read’’ but a duty to improveand ‘‘include’’, and, indeed, transform themselves, by retraining.Entitlements are conditional on duties being fulfilled. This isespecially stark in the case of ESOL learners where the link withcitizenship, obligation and ‘‘deservingness’’ is now very directand contested (see Cooke and Simpson, 2009). This constructionof individualized social inclusion through vocational literacycontrasts with the earlier discourse by Clarkson in A Right to

Read ‘to bring about the maximum involvement of the group,

neighbourhood or community in solving the problems that concern

them’; a vision shared by Freirian pedagogies. The Skills for Life

profiles shift transformation from the wider community to theindividual future employee.

Detailed analysis of the individual profiles included in thepolicy documents also reveal that this reductive literacydiscourse presents policy makers with the dilemma of how tomake it a good fit with the daily realities and inequalitiesexperienced by people in their lives. This is vividly demonstrat-ed in the carefully constructed visual images of learners in theSkills for Life document in which the individual lives of thechosen learners are recontextualised into ‘wholesome’ butimpersonal learning spaces and presented as easy transforma-tions that suppress the complexities of their learning journeysand aspirations. The effect of these discourses and the framing oflearner voices is to smooth out the diverse detail and thecontradictions of adults’ lives to fit in with the goals of thepolicy, to background other causal factors and to remove theprofiles from the wider context within which people live andmake sense of their experience. The inconvenient time scalesnecessary for change to take place are hidden from view, as arethe larger contextual features such as the lack of jobs inrecessionary times.

This neo-liberal discourse is dangerous for literacy policy thataims to address inequalities since the discussion of individualcircumstances without a wider context reinforces a deficit discourse.It masks a structural positioning of adult literacy learners in adivided society and holds out a false promise of redistribution of

M. Hamilton, K. Pitt / International Journal of Educational Development 31 (2011) 596–605604

opportunity (as Graff and others have shown). It hides the fact thatliteracy is a manifestation of inequality as much as a cause of it andwe do not share the optimism of the policy authors thatliteracy skills, in isolation, can make a difference to suchinequalities or to the neoliberal positioning of social exclusion.

In revealing the dominance of individualised, vocationaldiscourses this article offers an understanding of the dominantvoices that critical literacy initiatives have to confront. Itsuggests some immediate lessons for policy activists. Firstly thatwe should take great care about the terms in which we advocatefor adult literacy so as not to further stigmatise those targetedby programmes designed to support them. As Lister (2004:103)has argued for poverty discourses and Chouliaraki (2006) forhumanitarian aid, this is not easy to get right but we need tokeep trying. Secondly, we need to be informed about the‘‘vertical pressures’’ of globalisation on national politiciansacross many countries that are pulling national policies intoalignment in order to better understand what is driving agendasand to pay attention to significant arenas where social orderingis taking place - for example the international testing activitiesthat are constructing and reifying categories for measurement.Finally, we should pay close attention to national programmes(like that in Scotland, see Scottish Executive, 2001) where effortsare being made to promote social justice as well as meetingeconomic aims by implementing a social practice model ofliteracy.

Literacy programmes are one among many forces of governancethat attempt to steer individual citizens onto particular pathwaysto somewhere. Recognising this, literacy practitioners andadvocates can look for spaces to contest the definitions ofcitizenship implicit within current policy. We can exploit thecontradictions and tensions revealed in the discourses which co-exist in the same document and use them to challenge thenaturalised assumptions and categories that underpin policy. Theaim is to develop alternative forms of expression by offeringexamples of learner diversity and reformulations of the policy‘‘problem’’ which can be followed through into assessmentstrategies and programme management.

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