46% of Australian adults struggle with illiteracy.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics surveyed the literacy levels of adult Australians and found that 46% of adults do not have “the literacy to cope with the increasing and complex demands of modern life and work”. Click to download from Australian Bureau of Statistics

How the ABS measured literacy The modern definition of literacy – is a level of reading ability to perform everyday tasks, such as “read a bus timetable, use a tape measure, read the directions on a medicine bottle, or read a newspaper”.

In the ABS “Literacy and Life Skills” report, the population is divided into five “Bands”, with Bands 1 & 2 considered under the minimum threshold of job-competent reading. Those two groups constitute an average of 46% across all States.

The focus was on correct comprehension – not whether individual words can be read in isolation, but whether the adults could correctly answer questions about the meaning of a paragraph of text.  

Together, Band 1 & 2 adults represent 46% of the Australian workforce. Causes of reading problems. The research tells us that the main cause of reading problems is the "inability to independently decode text", generally caused by sight reading. Deep Red provides tailored reading and numeracy programs for specific Industries which use Fantastic Phonics to teach decoding.