Designed for Adults | Supporting Tutors | Empowering Learners: Total Literacy

Designed for Adults

The Citizen Literacy programme is designed to help adults who can speak English, to improve their reading and writing skills. We have created learning resources in printed and digital formats to support tutors and organisations involved in adult literacy education. These include our revolutionary free learner web app and the groundbreaking Tutor Hub Service – the first of its kind in adult literacy. The programme is adult-centric, designed and developed by adult literacy specialists with feedback from learners and tutors around the world. Crucially, the content is not childish in appearance, which can be very demotivating for adults. Our resources are a good fit with the ideas connected to the Science of Reading, but use very different methods to those used with children.
Read more about: Adult Learners, Widely Used, Programme Design, Total Literacy for Adults, Stereotypes and Inequality.

Supporting Tutors

Adult community education is overlooked, undervalued and underfunded in our society, with literacy tutors being particularly poorly supported. Our programme with its printed and digital resources is a response to these challenges and uses methods connected to the Science of Reading. The programme consists of 90 lessons split into 3 Parts, each Part having 30 lessons with every fifth lesson being a formative assessment. In Part 1 of the programme, the 44 phonemes of the English language are introduced with different ways of spelling them in words. By the end of Part 1, lesson 2, learners are starting to read and write simple sentences.
Read more about: The Challenges, Our Aims, Programme Overview, Tutor Training, Instructional Resources, Training Resources

Empowering Learners: Total Literacy

We call our approach ‘Total Literacy’ because it takes learners forwards across a broad number of literacy skills to quickly build confidence and provide practical application of the useful functional skills that adults need in their daily lives. The programme has been designed and developed to offer learners a route into adult education that has not existed for them before. Learning how to read and write not only builds skills but also opens many doors by replacing guesswork with structure and stigma with confidence, empowering learners to embed these skills in every part of their lives.
Read more about: Adult learners, Empowering Learners, Total Literacy, Flexibility, Caring, the Science of Reading, Inequality and Power