Citizen Literacy

Our vision is: “Every citizen in society should have the right to be able to learn to read and write, as a matter of social justice.” The scale of low literacy in the English-speaking world is so large and has its roots in such structural and systemic factors, that no single organisation can hope to solve it alone. Research in the UK and the USA has identified an acute lack of instructional resources specifically designed for adults and training materials for tutors to help improve adult literacy. Our Mission:"Create an adult literacy programme of digital and printed instructional resources and tutor training materials. Designed so that others can adopt it, use it at scale or at micro levels, adapt it and deliver it in their own varied contexts." To do this we collaborate with the international community of literacy educators around the world to design and create our resources in both digital and printed forms, getting regular feedback from the front lines of adult literacy. Our resources are specially designed to be used by tutors in the varied and often challenging contexts of adult literacy education – working with some of the hardest-to-reach learners in society. The educational design of the programme is a good fit with the ideas connected to the Science of Reading and the use of phonics, but with very different methods to those used with children. Where possible we make the resources free (e.g. the free learner web app and downloads for tutors to use in ‘class’) or we make them available as economically as we can e.g. the printed Tutor Handbooks, Learner Workbooks, or the online Tutor Hub service. Citizen Literacy is a wholly independent Community Interest Company (CIC) a non-profit organisation dedicated to helping improve adult literacy in the English language, based and registered in Scotland (SC671958).