Summary

Overview

• How are literacy and numeracy skills distributed within New Zealand's adult population?
• How are literacy and numeracy skills distributed according to gender and age of New Zealand's adult population?
• How do participation in education and training vary with age within New Zealand's adult population?
• Were there any changes in these distributions over the past 10 years?

The Adult Literacy and Life Skills (ALL) survey conducted in 2006 was designed to answer these and other questions.

Why do we need these answers? The labour-force demands of a modern economy are becoming increasingly complex. If New Zealand is to improve (or even maintain) its position in the world economy it must develop a workforce with high levels of generic and technical skills. The ALL survey provides an insight into our current skill levels. This insight is essential for the development of initiatives to enhance (and maintain) these levels. In the longer term, data sets from the 1996 International Adult Literacy Survey (IALS) and ALL give us a baseline against which to measure gain (and loss) in national levels of skill development.

This report is the fourth in a series of four that investigate the initial results of the ALL survey. It presents an overview of New Zealanders' skills in relation to age, and any changes since 1996.

Key findings

Age

• Results for each ALL skill domain showed a strong age effect: 25−54-year-olds had, on average, stronger skills compared to 16−24-year-olds and 55−65-year-olds.
• In prose and document literacy, 16−24-year-olds in 2006 on average did not improve their performance compared to 16−24-year-olds in 1996.  However, the performance of older age groups did improve, particularly that of 55−65-year-olds in document literacy.
• From a cohort perspective, the cohort aged 25−34 in 2006 improved their performance in prose and document literacy compared with when they were aged 16−24 in 1996.  This finding may indicate that the skills of 2006's 16−24-year-olds will increase in coming years as their life and work experience grow.

Age and gender

• On average, women had higher prose literacy skills than men across all age groups.
• On average, men and women had similar document literacy across all ages, with 16−24-year-old women performing slightly better than 16−24-year-old men, and 45−65-year-old men performing slightly better than 45−65-year-old women.
• On average, men performed better than women in numeracy skills across all age groups.
• On average, the performance of men and women in problem-solving skills across all ages was very similar.

Age and up-skilling

• As might be expected, young people aged 16−24 years participated in formal education at a much higher rate than older people.  Over 25-year-olds participated in informal education at higher rates than younger people.
• Young people aged 16−24 year with higher document literacy skill participated in formal education and training activities at a much higher rate than those with low document literacy skill.