ABSTRACT
Success for All (DfES, 2002a) followed by the government's White Paper Further Education: Raising Skills, Improving Life Chances (DfES, 2006a) committed all vocational and academic tutors to addressing the literacy, language and numeracy needs of their learners within specific programme settings. For this process to be successful, vocational and academic tutors need to work closely with specialist literacy tutors and the Adult Literacy Core Curriculum (DfES, 2001a) to help ensure that learners achieve their goals and aspirations. The Adult Literacy Core Curriculum provides a benchmark mapped to national standards and guidance for specialist Skills for Life staff. It is useful as a tool for identifying the levels at which different skills can be embedded in vocational and academic settings and as a reference point for identifying strategies to support literacy and language acquisition. Lifelong learning practitioners are not expected to make detailed use of the different curricula but should be able to access the information contained in them. It is important to remember, though, that successful embedding is about more than mapping language, literacy and numeracy within specific programme areas to the core curricula: it is about supporting skill development in an academic or vocational setting where learners are more likely to recognise their own ‘visible’ or ‘latent’ needs.
Best practice
‘The Skills for Life staff identify the opportunities for literacy, language and numeracy teaching; and vocational teachers ensure the materials are relevant to the subject areas. The development of good teaching materials comes from staff working together.’
