Please can you supply the latest literacy rates for adults and for children in Devon. Please can you state the criteria used for literacy, and please can you state the year the data was gathered.”
Devon County Council does not hold any information about specific literacy rates for children in education. However, the Department for Education publish statistics on educational attainment at each Key Stage, which includes:
This information is publicly available on the Department for Education webpages for 2016/17 outcomes. Each webpage contains an ‘LA tables’ spreadsheet and ‘methodology’ document.
In addition, DCC does not hold specific data on literacy rates amongst adults within Devon, as there is no standard data set for literacy alone at local authority level.
In lieu of the above we use information from the ONS National Population Survey on the proportion of resident adults between the age of 16-64 who hold no formal qualifications, benchmarked against National Vocational Qualifications (NVQ). The latest information available, for January to December 2016, found that 5.7% of the working age population in Devon did not hold an NVQ Level 1 qualification or equivalent during the year, compared to an average of 8% across Great Britain.
The last survey of overall English literacy was undertaken by the Department of Business, Innovation and Skills in 2011, with 14.9% of the working age population failing to achieve a literacy related NVQ Level 1 or above at that point.