‘There’s help out there’: Adults struggling with literacy get new start with tailored supports

With the help of his wife Siobhán, Brian O’Donnell had ducked and dived his way to about the halfway point in his working life without anyone ever realising he had trouble reading and writing. When, aged 45, he finally had no option but to confide in a manager, he was startled when they sat him down and said: “Don’t worry, there’s help out there.” That help, which came in the form of classes at the Carlow Education and Training Board (ETB), to which he was referred by the National Adult Literacy Agency (Nala), dramatically changed his life, he says enthusiastically a decade later.At the age of seven, O’Donnell spent a year in hospital with a hip problem and then had a couple of years struggling to get about. Though probably well intentioned, the decision not to keep him back a year in school meant he suddenly found himself trailing his schoolmates in class. READ MORE“I think now they’d have found I was dyslexic but there was no such thing back then. I’d be trying to take something down and then suddenly the board would be wiped clean,” he remembers. “I just fell farther behind and the problems carried on into secondary and in the end I just sort of became the class clown because I didn’t want to be disturbing things all the time with my hand up to ask questions.”When the Inter Cert (now the Junior Cycle) came around, he recalls, “I walked into the first exam, put an X on the answer book and walked out”. He was 14 and that was his last day in school.O’Donnell got work in a local Teagasc store, where being unable to read well was not an issue until his manager died suddenly and he was thrust into a front-of-house role. He managed by laying the catalogue out in front of customers and then walking away so they would have to call out their orders. Stints followed in manufacturing and contract cleaning and he worked away for spells, too, in the United States and Australia.When he returned and looked for something more permanent, Siobhán filled out the application for a porter’s job in the UPMC Aut Even Hospital in Kilkenny. When he went for the interview, one of the nurses who had cared for him as a seven-year-old was in charge of hiring. “She gave me the job on the spot.” Things generally went well and, apart from having to make excuses to get out of meetings when it was his turn to take minutes for a health and safety committee, his secret remained safe. That was until an opportunity for 10 of the hospital’s staff to attend a course at University of Limerick came up a decade ago and a manager put his name forward. “I was selected and thought: ‘Oh my God, I have to do it.’ I had to go back to the stores manager and tell him: ‘Look, I’m struggling with reading here.’ He was the first person outside of my wife and family to know. He sat me down and said: ‘Look there’s help out there, you’re a good candidate for this.’”A few months later, with the support of his employer, he walked anxiously into an adult literacy class at Carlow ETB. “Within 10 minutes it was like being wrapped in a warm blanket. It changed my life ... the sleepless nights, the sweats, the panic attacks ... they were all put to bed.”On the home front, he says, he was able to help his three sons with their homework for the first time, something that had always previously fallen to Siobhán.“I’ve never looked back,” he says. Linda Waldron from Dublin, and now living in Mountmellick, Co Laois, with her partner Brendan, echoes many of O’Donnell’s experiences. Her issues first arose in school where she did not seek help and none was really offered, and she carried on into adulthood and her working life.Like O’Donnell, she worked from a young age and felt more at home in that environment than in education. When she got a job in a nursing home after a spell on work experience during her Leaving Cert Applied, she survived because she had a good head for the names of conditions and medications and got on well with people. “It all came kind of naturally and if I was stuck with a form or something, I’d always get help at home from my parents or family,” she says.What pushed her to return to learning was her niece’s surprise that she did not know what a word was on a leaflet when the pair were in a GP’s surgery one day. “She asked me what it meant and I told her I didn’t know and she was saying, ‘you should know, you’re an adult’. She was only five or six. But that really haunted me.”Her relationship with her 12 nieces and two nephews was affected by the problem, she recalls. “If they were playing board games, I’d distance myself and I couldn’t help them with homework,” she says. That spurred her on, “and I wanted to do it for myself”.Of getting help, she says: “It was amazing, it changed so many things for me. It was during the pandemic so they [Nala] sent me out workbooks and a tutor would ring me every day and she would go through the spellings, the reading of sentences and all that. It was brilliant.” Later she attended classes at Laois and Offaly ETB.She continues: “I went back to college for two years to do a course in healthcare and there were people there to help you but I didn’t need it. The support from the people in your class was brilliant, though.”It has, she says, changed every aspect of her life.Nala chief executive Colleen Dube says the organisation gets about 500 calls a year from people who, like Waldron or O’Donnell, have decided to tackle long-standing literacy issues. They are offered help with finding classes, often run in local ETBs, while the Learn with Nala programme also includes online or tutor-assisted courses currently supporting more than 3,500 people, all provided for free. [ Prisoner literacy: ‘When you pick up a book you’re not thinking of being locked in the cell’Opens in new window ]Much of the funding is provided by Solas although its public funding has not increased since 2022 and it has been, like so many other organisations, making the case for more in recent weeks.About one in five Irish adults lacks basic literacy skills with one in four having similar issues with numeracy. Those figures include many people who are holding down jobs, particularly older workers. With full employment that is more manageable, but few are available to take courses while working full-time and Dube says Nala wants to see more employers supporting their staff through available initiatives.“For many people, the courses are a gateway to work, further education, apprenticeship programmes, but for many others it is about building confidence,” she says.Those taking the courses come from all walks of life, she suggests, but numbers have been driven in recent years by remote working during and since Covid with its greater emphasis on written communication and the increases prevalence of online training and certification required in many workplaces.[ Finn McRedmond: The cause of the great reading crisis is unknown. But the solution is obviousOpens in new window ]“You have people working on construction sites and they’d be told to do an online safety course but they can’t read. It’s all sorts of people: civil servants, office workers ... But a lot of our focus would be on the farthest behind first, providing level-one to -three courses, meeting people where they are and seeking to maximise the opportunities available to them.”