£40m spend fails to raise literacy and numeracy standards

It has been revealed that significant numbers of Northern Ireland's children have not reached literacy and numeracy attainment targets set by the government.

A report to Parliament from John Dowdall, the Auditor General for Northern Ireland, stated that large numbers of school children, especially those in secondary level education, failed to reach adequate levels of attainment.

Since the mid 1990s, the Department of Education has invested almost £40 million on literacy and numeracy programmes, in addition to normal spending on the school curriculum.

However, according to today's report, improving these standards continues to be a major challenge for schools in Northern Ireland. The report also shows that boys have continued to lag significantly behind girls in performance, and in Belfast, two thirds of boys attending secondary schools fail to attain the basic level of literacy by the age of 14.

The report also said that the poor attainment situation was complicated by a decision to lower some targets and extend the timescale for their attainment.

It also found that literacy and numeracy proficiency levels compared very favourably at an international level and also with England.

But they had not reached levels proposed and showed up a huge difference between grammar and secondary school pupils.

After looking at the Key Stage 1 attainment by primary school pupils aged 8, the report said: "The Strategy's target of all children, excluding those with severe Special Educational Needs, meeting the standard level in literacy and numeracy by 2002 remains unfilled."

It also said that around 5% or 1,200 pupils fail to achieve the level 2 standard in both English and mathematics every year.

Looking at Stage 2, for pupils aged 11, the report stated that "while the revised literacy target has now been achieved, nearly 23% of children, around 2,000 girls and 3,500 boys, still leave the primary sector with under-developed skills and are therefore likely to struggle with the literacy demands of the post-primary curriculum."

It continued by saying that it is at this stage, across all of the Education and Library Boards, that girls consistently perform at around ten percentage points better than boys.

In mathematics, around 79% of children reached the standard level 4 by 2004 compared with the target of 80%. Nonetheless, this still means that 2,840 boys and 2,154 girls failed to achieve the standard level in 2004-05.

The revised target that, by 2005-06, 73% of all pupils in grammar and secondary schools would achieve the level 5 standard or above in English was achieved a year early.

In mathematics, the revised target of 72% achieving the level 5 standard or above, was achieved in 2003-04, however, performance fell back in 2004-05.

Behind these figures, the report found that there is considerable scope for improvement in the secondary school sector.

Around 6,000 pupils remain at risk of leaving secondary school at 16 years of age with a level of literacy below the standard level 5, while in mathematics almost 7,000 of the pupils tested 41% failed to achieve the standard level 5.

Across all Boards, boys in secondary schools are consistently an alarming 24 percentage of points behind girls in English, however this is understood to be a problem shared within the rest of the UK and on an international level.

The Department of Education is said to be particularly concerned with the lower performance levels of both boys and girls in the Belfast Board and the fact that the gender gap is 29% points.

The Department is planning to review its overall approach to literacy and numeracy in 2006 as part of a wider review of school improvement.

Against this background, the report calls on it to increase the momentum of change which will make teaching practices and approaches more responsive to the needs of pupils and begin to address the long-standing challenges facing schools in terms of literacy and numeracy attainment levels; reducing the disparity between higher and lower achieving pupils; between grammar and secondary school pupils; and ensuring equitable progress for both genders.

(EF/SP)