The Rural Youth and Adult Literacy Trust lift literacy levels throughout the Greater Waikato region
There is a huge need for literacy assistance in New Zealand, however, many New Zealanders are unaware there is such a need.
Rural Youth and Adult Literacy running a literacy camp
Rural Youth and Adult Literacy Trust (RYALT) is a non-profit charitable trust which provides free reading and writing tuition to rural/isolated teenagers and adults throughout New Zealand, with an emphasis on the Greater Waikato region, in which they are located.
The mission of RYALT is ‘Changing the lives of the most vulnerable members of our community (and their children) by giving free reading and writing training to isolated/rural teens and adults’. The Rural Youth and Adult Literacy Trust provides free literacy tuition to isolated rural teenagers and adults who missed out on these skills at school; and those who cannot get to other adult literacy centres.
Rural Youth and Adult Literacy Trust runs five literacy camps as part of their youth literacy programme for high school students who struggle with basic reading and writing and who are in remote areas of New Zealand. They do not want cost to be a barrier for students to get the help they may need, so provide a free service.
Four of the camps (two girls’ camps and two boys’ camps) are based in the Waikato and one is a national virtual camp for rural teenagers, first developed in response to COVID-19 lockdowns.
Jo Poland is the Manager for the Rural Youth and Adult Literacy Trust and says that when an English speaking first world economy has a literacy problem it is worth being reflected upon to mitigate efficiently.
“These kids need your help to survive school and have a chance at a better life,” she says. “Our main purpose is literacy assistance and we continue to cater to the need of the community through our remote learning solutions. The camps are just a way to make sure we reach the rangatahi effectively and offer our services before it’s too late” says Jo.
Jo says that RYALT’s overall purpose is to help isolated rural adults and teenagers to improve their literacy levels, which in turn increases their confidence, their ability to gain employment or get better paid work and their ability to help their children with homework.
“People with improved literacy are more likely to support the community and less likely to cause social damage. This is a complex dynamic, of course, but there is ample evidence that learning literacy is accompanied by increased self-esteem, greater autonomy, less violence and frustration, and children's increased success at school” says Jo.
“We believe that literacy tuition helps generations, not just the individual, and that it creates a ripple effect, with other low literacy friends and relations feeling encouraged to seek help as well” says Jo.
“The students RYALT deals with often start from such a low place that they do not register on the government Literacy and Numeracy Assessment Tool (LNAT), or their improvement – which may have changed their lives spectacularly and given them confidence - may not register as a change on LNAT because LNAT is not finely enough calibrated at the lower end, where we work” Jo says.
For these reasons RYALT assessment is student-centred rather than assessment-centred, with the initial assessment focused more on looking at the gaps in a particular students’ skills, and what the student goals are – for literacy and for life in general, then formative and final assessment is based on student’s own learning records, the skills learned, and the goals achieved. Online literacy software gives further objective information about where students are struggling, as well as progress reports and teaching suggestions for the volunteer coaches.
RYALT receives no government funding. Jo says that organisations getting government funding tend to teach to the assessment rather than to the needs of the individual.
“That doesn’t work with the very needy people at the bottom of the heap. If it did, it is likely that school would have worked for them too. Low-literate teenagers and adults have different, very individual gaps in their knowledge so teaching cannot be as sequential as it is for children” says Jo.
Consequently, the Trust believes that the most needy people with low literacy skills, a very difficult demographic to work with, are not getting the encouragement they need in order to take what must feel like an enormous risk to them, to seek help in something which they have failed at all of their lives. This is particularly the case in rural areas.
The Trust has found video-conferencing methods a highly effective medium for teaching literacy. It is also fun for both tutors and learners. However, they have also learned that often mail and phone are the best technologies.
RYALT saves money thanks to the generosity of many volunteers and by operating from a sleepout-office provided by one of our trustees.
To find out more about the Rural Youth and Adult Literacy Trust visit https://www.adultliteracy.ac.nz/
Kim Cable
Marketing and Communications Manager