The New Zealand Herald reports that more than 500 adults in basic literacy and numeracy classes have had their funding cut from the end of this year, despite assurances that literacy and numeracy skills would be spared from budget cuts.

The country’s main literacy organisation, Literacy Aotearoa, has lost all its funding for community classes in Auckland, the Waikato, Wellington and Dunedin. Family literacy programmes run by the City of Manukau Education Trust (Comet) and decile 1 school Finlayson Park School in Manurewa have also been cut.

Education minister Anne Tolley has argued that this year’s budget prioritises money for literacy, numeracy and foundation skills over other education initiatives because these offered the highest likelihood of helping participants go on to tertiary study or into the workforce.

The Government has increased existing workplace-based literacy funding from $11.2 million in the past year to just under $17 million a year in the next two years before it drops back to $12 million. But the intensive literacy and numeracy fund has been cut from $15.3 million to $13.9 million this year and will drop further to $10.9 million by 2012-13.

TEU president Tom Ryan believes that the government is playing a dangerous game letting its rhetoric drift from its policies.

“The government has been very clear that it wants to focus its limited education spending on things that it thinks are most valuable; literacy and numeracy, at the expense of many other proven tertiary, adult and community education courses.”  So when we see one of New Zealand’s largest national adult literacy providers closing programmes in our biggest cities we have to question the rhetoric.”