The sector must ensure that adult learners have greater access to excellent provision for basic skills, training for work and learning for personal development.
CURRENT ISSUES IN PROVISION FOR LEARNERS WITH LEARNING DIFFICULTIES AND/OR DISABILITIES
The role of Skills for Life provision for learners with learning difficulties and/or disabilities needs to be understood within the wider policy context of the learning and skills sector. Participation for these learners in post-16 education has increased significantly in recent years, and as the Learning and Skills Council’s (LSC’s) equality and diversity agenda is developed, demand will further increase. In addition, the LSC is currently undertaking a comprehensive and radical review of the provision that it makes for learners with learning difficulties and/or disabilities. This review will also take into consideration the impact of other major educational changes such as those arising from Success for All, the 14-19 Education and Skills White Paper and Every Child Matters.
Within the context of Skills for Life programmes, good practice when working with learners with learning difficulties and/or disabilities is centred on highly individualised learning programmes, based on sound initial assessment and clearly linked to learners’ long-term needs and aspirations. As such, good practice in this area has clear links with the Government’s agenda of personalised learning as well as to the recognising and recording progress and achievement (RARPA) initiative and measures of distance travelled.
Translating policy into practice is not easy. Teaching literacy, numeracy and communication is challenging. However, teaching literacy, numeracy and communication to learners who have learning difficulties and/or disabilities is considerably more challenging! Teachers require skill, creativity and patience. They also need a good understanding of the impact that learners’ difficulties have on their ability to learn, and the ability to devise activities and tasks to help learners realise their potential in this area of learning.
All those teaching young people and adults with learning difficulties agree that improving learners’ oral communication skills enhances the quality of their lives. It follows that literacy and language programmes for these learners should include speaking and listening, signing and responding to Sign, vocalisation, gesture and the use of objects.
Good teachers recognise that not all learners with learning difficulties can make sustainable progress in reading, writing and numeracy. Providers need to give careful thought to the appropriateness, relevance and value of continuing to teach reading, writing and more formal numeracy to adults who have made little or no progress in these areas throughout their schooling or in previous post-school literacy or numeracy programmes. The challenge for teachers is how to achieve a balance between enabling those learners who can make useful progress in reading, writing and numeracy to do so, while not continuing to put those who can make little or no progress in these areas through meaningless activities which can never result in the achievement of improved skills. The key to success is identifying each learner’s needs and their individual capacity for learning in literacy, numeracy and language prior to, or on entry to the organisation and then devising programmes of learning that match these needs.
THE SCOPE OF THIS GUIDE
This Guide is designed to help providers achieve excellence in their literacy, numeracy and ESOL provision learners with learning difficulties and/or disabilities. By taking each of the five questions in the Common Inspection Framework in turn, it is designed to help providers interpret the requirements of the Common Inspection Framework and the adult basic skills curricula for provision in communication, reading, writing and numeracy.
The Guide also sets out the characteristics of best practice in literacy, numeracy and ESOL provision for learners with learning difficulties and/or disabilities, in particular by drawing on real examples. The examples are designed to give staff practical help and ideas for improving their literacy, numeracy and ESOL provision.
We wanted this series of guides to offer practical help to providers and practitioners – a ‘How to’ guide that would really focus on what works. For that reason, as well as providing sample materials that can be adapted for different learning environments, the guides illustrate what success might look like. For example, how do we know when a learner has made an important new step in their learning? What might be the outcomes of a successful initial assessment? The short descriptions of the progress made by real learners in real situations help to answer such questions.
Finally, the guides all highlight comments from inspectors on this area of work in inspection reports and other documents. These extracts are included to help readers gain an insight into how Ofsted and the ALI evaluate and report on this context for learning.
Throughout this Guide, ‘learning difficulties’ is used to mean a cognitive impairment which results in major difficulties in all aspects of learning and significantly greater limits to learning than those experienced by other adults. The Guide also makes reference to the teaching of literacy, numeracy and language to learners who have sensory impairments, physical impairments and specific learning difficulties such as dyslexia, dyspraxia or dyscalculia. The Guide does not attempt to cover the wider range of learning disabilities.
WHAT IS SUCCESS IN THE LEARNING DIFFICULTIES AND/OR DISABILITIES CONTEXT?
Where teaching and learning are practical and skills are taught through activities relevant to the learner, success can be dramatic. All learners with learning difficulties and/or disabilities make more progress in developing their literacy, numeracy and language skills when they have the opportunity to learn and apply them in real, practical environments.
Improvements in initial assessments, planning learning on an individual basis and using learners’ own needs (including vocational needs), interests and experience as the basis for learning, have also resulted in faster progress and higher levels of achievement. However, too many teachers still focus exclusively on paper-based activities which centre on exercises or subjects of little relevance to learners.
Misinterpretation of the core curricula for literacy and numeracy has resulted in too many sterile lessons in which the core curricula skills are taught without any context, and without reference to what learners need or want to learn.
Adults with learning difficulties who have been taught specific reading and numeracy skills to enable them to get and keep specific jobs have achieved many successes. For example, a young man on a work preparation course was taught to record stock by counting through tallying which enabled him to work in a well-known store. Similarly, a woman learned to ‘read’ the major signs in the hospital where she worked and could then move from work experience to a paid job. Their successes were the result of careful assessment and planning as well as effective teaching.
