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Results from the Adult Literacy and Life Skills Survey conducted by the Australian Bureau of Statistics have been used to suggest there is a crisis in the literacy and numeracy skills of Australian adults. This study challenges this current view by looking at the issue from a worker's perspective. Production workers, together with their managers and trainers, from three manufacturing companies were interviewed and observed. Little evidence of a direct link between increasing literacy and numeracy skills of workers and improved productivity was found.

Lots of data here about the UK's comparative numeracy and literacy performance in this just-released OECD report.

New employees too infrequently "possess habits of discipline, ready obedience, self-help, and pride in good work for its own sake". Thus a 1906 Board of Education report. So "for as long as we have evidence, employers have been critical of the ability of the education system to provide the workers they need." Concluding para: ".... the world's most efficient and effective education systems, from Finland to Singapore, have some strikingly common characteristics: they are unremitting in their focus on the core skills of literacy and numeracy, but they set those skills in the wider context of developing higher-order complex thinking. Most of all, they take equality seriously: they focus, in a way which education systems historically did not, on ensuring that all - not just a privileged few - develop the higher-order skills needed to use and analyse information, and that they have access to rewarding higher-level training. Put at its crudest, conventional subjects still matter, but they need to be taught and learnt in innovative ways."

An depth analysis of the OECD skills report by the Independent's Richard Garner.