A standard assessment and referral system across the country would be great. We don't want a person to be reassessed when he or she is already assessed elsewhere.

A standard assessment used across Canada would be very helpful to those moving from one province to another to determine actual levels of an individual's ability in each subject area.

Frontline literacy workers should work together to come up with tools all of them could use to create uniformity among the agencies and ensure the flow of learners from one program to another without going through the reassessment process.

Programs are using very different assessment materials and using different measuring tools and language, which causes unnecessary retesting when the learner is referred to a lower or higher literacy agency.

The assumption behind these quotations is that a seamless educational system would reduce the need to reassess students who are transferred to another program. In other words, the student's assessment protocol could be forwarded to his/her new program. The staff in the new program could use the assessment results from the student's former program for the purposes of placement and instruction. This sounds plausible, but is it? The survey findings indicated that only 47 percent of the respondents administer exit assessments. This means that initial and/or ongoing assessment protocols from the student's former program would be forwarded to his/her new program; these protocols would be outdated and would not be suitable for the purposes of placement or instruction. This, in turn, means that the student would need to be reassessed in order to have an accurate assessment of his/her current skills. Therefore, the assumption that a seamless educational system would reduce the need to reassess students appears to be faulty.