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Education and Skills Bill

I am grateful for that intervention, but if we take only the Leitch figures, which are that 15 per cent. of the population are functionally illiterate and 21 per cent. are functionally innumerate—his target was to reduce that to 5 per cent.—it is a huge group. Evidence that we heard recently in the Work and Pensions Committee suggested that, if a person's mother cannot read and write, they are more likely to have problems because they are not getting the back-up at home. We have generations of families without proper reading, writing and arithmetic skills, who have not worked.