Learner-centred and community-oriented programming requires staff-student ratios low enough that the needs of individuals can be attended to, and that programs can be shaped to help develop their communities. In classroom instruction in schools and community colleges, there are attempts to keep the size of literacy classes below 10 or 12 students, or classes for beginning readers below eight. A majority of college adult basic education programs in a recent survey had 20 or fewer students per class.154 Basic upgrading classes in New Brunswick community colleges enrol between four and eight learners per instructor.155 These conditions need to be standardized.

To be effective, volunteers must enter a secure program that can provide initial training, ongoing contact between program co-ordinators and tutors, and continuous training and discussion in which tutors can learn new methods, and can work collaboratively to solve problems that arise in the tutoring process. If inadequate funding forces the use of volunteers, independent of any principled decision to use them, programs will be weakened. And if inadequate funding for co-ordination of volunteer programs forces high ratios of co-ordinator's time to volunteers' time (co-ordinators may oversee a hundred or more tutor-student pairs), programs will be weakened again. Although there is not an established consensus, discussions often suggest that 20-50 tutors per full-time co-ordinator is a reasonable ratio. Too often, co-ordinators of tutoring programs oversee such large numbers of tutors and students, and deal with so many other administrative tasks, that they cannot interview all tutors, or maintain ongoing contact with pairs.156

In thinking about the training and development of literacy workers, some focus must be on training programs themselves. There should of course be exchange of experience in the range of developing training ventures (discussed above in Chapter I, Section 2). Among universities in particular, there should be constructive discussion of the content and extent of training, and of practitioner involvement in program planning.

154 Association of Canadian Community Colleges, Literacy in the Colleges and Institutes ....
155 New Brunswick Advanced Education and Training, Literacy Awareness ....
156 Overburdened co-ordinators are often discussed in meetings of literacy workers. They are documented, for example, in Hindle, Literacy Learning in Saskatchewan; their relationship to the image of literacy work as a charitable endeavour is discussed by John MacLaughlin, "Feel Good Literacy: Changing the Message," Literacy on the Move (Ontario Literacy Coalition), November, 1990, 15-17.