New Light on Adult Literacy and Numeracy in Scotland: Evidence from the 2004 survey of the 1970 British Cohort Study (BCS70)

This report gives the results of a separate analysis for Scotland of literacy and numeracy data collected in the 1970 British Cohort Study at age 34. It relates performance in these skills to a wide range of other features of Scottish cohort members' lives.


Acknowledgements

We give special thanks to Gareth Hughes in the Centre for Longitudinal Studies ( CLS) for his advice and assistance in linking geographic information to the BCS70 data. This allowed us to compare the experiences of men and women living within and outside of the Central Belt areas of Scotland.

We would like to acknowledge all members of the research team at the National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) involved with the 2004 BCS70 survey, without whom this report could not have been produced. Our special thanks to Carli Lessof, Liz Fuller, Nadine Simmonds and Vanessa Foudouli. We would also like to express our gratitude to the NatCen interviewers whose feedback and enthusiasm throughout the main fieldwork was of vital importance to the success of the survey. The cohort studies support team led by Peter Shepherd again played a vital role in all stages of the survey, as did Neville Butler, the founder of BCS70, whose extensive knowledge and experience of the earlier stages of the cohort study was critical to its success. The CLS tracing team put in tremendous work to maximise response rates. Our biggest thanks are, of course, to the BCS70 cohort members who took part in the 2004 survey. They freely gave up some of their precious time to take part in our assessments and to provide us once again with vital information about their lives.

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