Literacy and Life Skills for Māori Adults: Results from the Adult Literacy and Life Skills (ALL) Survey

9. Conclusion

For the adult Māori population, the relationships between skills and socio-economic attributes show several different patterns.

Strong relationships exist between skills and both education level and employment variables. Māori adults with higher education levels have higher skills, and Māori adults who are working have higher skills than those not working. Moreover, people working as managers, professionals or technicians have stronger skills, on average, than those in other occupations. Those working in the industry groups including Finance, Real Estate, Health and Education Services also have stronger skills than those in other industries. Those in the highest income quintile have stronger skills than those with lower incomes. Those whose income source is wages or self-employment have higher skills than those who have benefit income.

Māori adults aged 25-44 have stronger skills than those either younger or older.

Māori women have slightly higher skills, on average, than Māori men in prose and document literacy, but in numeracy Māori men have the advantage. The proportion of Māori women with very low prose and document literacy skills decreased substantially between 1996 and 2006, but this effect was much less marked for Māori men.

These findings illustrate some of the connections between skills and education, work, income. Patterns of participation in education and work and receipt of income change both over time, and also over individual people’s life cycles. Many of these patterns of course apply not just to the Māori adult population but to both non-Māori in New Zealand, and also internationally.

Education, work and income – and also gender and age – are closely connected across an adult population. So these findings raise questions about what we could learn by analysing more variables together, rather than separately. For example, what does the association between skills and education look like when we take employment, occupation and income into account? Literacy and Life Skills for Māori Adults – Further Investigation takes a first step at addressing these questions.