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Since the publication of the Moser Report in 1999, improving the basic skills of adults has been a major priority for all of the UK's governments. There has been a particular interest in building up workplace provision, because of the assumed relationship between the basic skills of the employed population and productivity. A longitudinal study tracked 53 workplaces which hosted subsidised basic skills courses, and examined the impact on the enterprises themselves as well as on learners. It established that employers were not, contrary to policy-makers' expectations, concerned about employees' literacy levels, and supported provision largely as a way of providing general development opportunities. Learners, who made small literacy gains at best, did not change their behaviour in ways which were likely to affect productivity. Once subsidies ended, employers were unwilling to support further provision at full cost. This provides further evidence that basic skills tuition does not have an immediate impact on performance. Overall the subsidised programmes used an extremely costly approach, and left no lasting legacy. The findings have major implications for the organisation of effective educational provision for less-skilled employees and suggest that the current approach to subsidising workplace training is seriously defective. (Contains 3 figures and 12 notes.)

This paper describes the process of designing and administering a sufficiently valid and reliable assessment instrument to measure the progress in attainment of adult learners studying numeracy, and discusses some of the inherent difficulties that were involved. The fieldwork took place during 2003-2005 and involved a sample of 34 teachers and 412 learners aged post-16. The paper details how the lack of a range of suitable instruments, the heterogeneous nature of adult numeracy teaching, the remit and requirements of the research project and other practical factors, made it difficult to produce an instrument capable of measuring learners' progress accurately, and hence to produce robust and reliable conclusions, generalisable across the whole sector. Having said this, and despite all the problems faced, the researchers still believe that the test has a "sufficient" degree of validity for the purposes of the study. The paper ends with some recommendations that may benefit other researchers when it comes to designing future numeracy assessments. (Contains 4 tables and 1 figure.)

In this paper we review the literature on the impact of workplace basic skills training on individuals, as measured by their effects on wages and employment probability. In addition, we also examine studies on the returns to individuals of general training at the workplace. On the whole, the evidence suggests that better numeracy and literacy skills have a strong positive effect on individuals' earnings and employment stability, even when other relevant factors, such as qualifications levels, are taken into account. There is also good evidence to suggest that general training provided at the workplace has a positive impact on individuals' wages, particularly when this training is employer provided rather than off the job. However, the literature also suggests that improvement of basic skills levels in adults has very small or even no positive effects on wages and employment probability. We discuss the implications of these findings on the formation of government policy on basic skills provision. We also propose that there is a real need for more research in this area, not only in terms of longitudinal quantitative studies tracking the effects of basic skills programmes on firms and individuals but also in terms of detailed case studies focusing on specific training programmes and their impact at the level of the individual and firm.

School bullying has become the focus of attention in many countries in the last 20 years, in part as a result of systematic academic research on the problem, and sometimes extensive media publicity. One of the outcomes of this attention has been an effort on the part of governments and educational authorities in many countries to tackle the problem through various initiatives, including the setting up of anti-bullying legal guidelines that schools must observe. In this article we discuss definitional issues and summarize recent research on school bullying; and then present information on the legal guidelines/requirements against bullying produced by Ministries of Education or equivalent government departments in all EU member states and four associated or candidate states. In addition, we summarize information on anti-bullying materials distributed to schools on a large (national/regional) scale. Our findings show that only a few European countries have specific legal requirements against bullying, although more have requirements on the more general problem of violence at schools. Many countries have produced and distributed anti-bullying materials to schools, although the content and format of these vary considerably. A few European countries still have no anti-bullying actions at a national level. We discuss the policy implications of these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]