A FOCUS on early childhood education is already starting to show improvements in literacy among the state's youngest pupils according to Education Minister Nick McKim.
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A day after the Australian Education Union and the Tasmanian State School Parents and Friends said it was important to tackle the problem of Tasmania's low adult literacy rate before children started school, Mr McKim said the government was focusing strongly on that.
For the past 16 years Tasmania has had the lowest adult literacy rate in the country _ 49 per cent.
This leaves many adults struggling with the basic literacy skills to understand information in a newspaper or magazine.
Mr McKim said the program Launching into Learning, which is now in all schools, was showing good results.
``We've done longitudinal studies on Launching into Learning so some of the early transits of students that came through those schools, we've compared their progress with non-Launching into Learning students from the same years, and there's a significant improvement in the literacy and numeracy that's been demonstrated by those longitudinal studies,'' Mr McKim said.
He said the government's programs we're aimed at engaging parents just as much as children.
He said although a number of other programs had been established to try to address the issue, such as Raising the Bar Closing the Gap, employing literacy coordinators and continued funding of the Adult Literacy Action Plan, the government would ``have to work really hard over a long period of time to deliver improvements''.
He said ideally, more should have been done to address low literacy levels years ago.
Mr McKim said schools made the decisions where to spend their budget, so he hoped any staff or programs cut would be decided upon as a school community decision.
He said contrary to what has been reported previously, more than 70 per cent of schools had budget increases this year.