2. Objectives

The ALL study is, by design, meant to inform public policy in a number of related areas including education, labour market policy, human resource development and social development. The policy aims and objectives of the ALL study are extensively documented by Giddings and Barr-Telford (Statistics Canada 2000).

Put succinctly the Adult Literacy and Life-skills (ALL) Survey was designed to serve several sets of related objectives.

First, the study hoped to:

• Profile the distribution of prose literacy and document literacy in the adult population.

One of the key policy concerns raised through analysis of IALS data was the putative existence of significant levels of skill loss in adulthood. In response the ALL study was designed to shed light on the social and economic factors that determine or underlie change in the observed skill profile over time. In order to shed empirical light on this concern, the prose literacy and document literacy domains to be measured in ALL will be linked to the original IALS scales through the administration of common items. For those countries that fielded IALS, such item-level linkage will provide a powerful means of exploring trends in the evolution of skill profiles. This information is crucial for judging the relative priority of policies related to basic adult skills and for identifying where policy might best focus itself - on skill demand, on skill supply, on the efficiency of markets for skill or on some combination of the three.

Second, the study sought to:

• Profile the distribution of numeracy, and problem-solving, in the adult population, and determine the inter-relationship of these skills to prose literacy and document literacy.

The IALS data collection has yielded an empirical data set of some 100,000 observations, providing researchers with a substantial amount of information with which to explore the social and economic causes and consequences of the observed skill data.

A basic objective of the ALL will be to build on this understanding by adopting a design which will allow an empirical appreciation of how performance on each of the newly tested skills relates to the skills tested in the original IALS study. The rapid rate of technological innovation and the globalization of markets have led to high rates of structural adjustment in many OECD economies. This, in turn, has quickened the pace at which disadvantaged individuals become marginalised. In many cases, the very structure of educational systems and the labour market work against rapid adjustment and the interests of the marginal workers because the systems for signalling skill seek to divide the workforce into discrete, non-transferable categories. The ALL seeks to empirically establish the existence of generic skill clusters that transcend industry, occupation, educational qualifications and age-based experience.

Thirdly, the ALL study attempted to:

• Determine the relationship of each of the tested skills to individual economic and social success.