ABSTRACT
The Skills for Life (SfL) program in England is designed to improve the literacy, numeracy, and language skills of adults and of young people (aged sixteen to seventeen) who have left full-time education and who do not have a Level 21 qualifi cation in English or mathematics. The evaluation, commissioned by the Department for Education and Skills (now the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills), was undertaken jointly by the National Institute of Economic and Social Research and BMRB (British Market Research Bureau) Social Research. It has followed through a group of literacy and numeracy learners who were taking courses in further-education colleges leading to qualifi cations in 2002 or 2003 and compared their progress on a range of outcomes with a comparison group of people who also had low or no literacy or numeracy qualifi cations but who did not take an SfL2 course. Both groups were interviewed for the fi rst time when the learners were on their courses and were reinterviewed three times at roughly annual intervals. In the fi nal year of the project there was a qualitative study of a small subsample of the learners in order to gain a deeper understanding of what the course meant to them.
