For this reason, the development of national, regional or local literacy policy cannot be effective if considered simply as one specific area of concern to be dealt with in a single dimension. The finding that a quarter or more of the populations surveyed as part of the IALS demonstrate poor literacy skills poses a large challenge to governments and entire societies; meeting that challenge requires a strategy that cuts across domains of public policy that have conventionally been considered separately.
The inexorable conclusion is that literacy issues require not only appropriate literacy policies, important though they be. The acquisition, maintenance and enhancement of literacy skills should feature as an integral concern also in the framing of other public policies. Literacy is one of the fundamental social and economic issues on which policy making must converge. True cultures of life-long learning can only be achieved if literacy awareness permeates the development not only of education policy but also of social, economic, political and cultural policies.
But cultures of life-long learning and literacy cannot be imposed; they must depend and thrive on a great variety of initiatives taken by different actors in many spheres of life and work. In seeking to promote such cultures the government, both federal and state, employers, social partners, the voluntary sector and whole communities should work together and consider literacy issues in multiple dimensions. Neither federal nor state governments can take it upon themselves to invent, manage and pay for flourishing local cultures of literacy and learning; rather their role should be to promote learning in both life-long and life-wide dimensions and to steer developments and allocate resources so that learning opportunities are distributed equitably and efficiently. Since public resources are best directed towards those policy domains where the social return on public investment is the greatest, sound policy would see the targeting of public funds to improving family literacy and foundation learning, including early childhood education and care programs, adult basic education, and workplace literacy programs.