Final Report: Impacts

The project aimed to impact on both practitioner and policy communities. We have had high interest in the project from practitioners throughout and have engaged with them through the data collection, the ESRC seminar series, the Lancaster MA in ALLN, and a variety of conference presentations and publications. The first book from the project is aimed specifically at practitioners and we are designing other innovative format materials for professional development courses (see Dissemination section of End of Project form).

Our website is being maintained by Lancaster University as a resource for the field, together with access to the online archive catalogue and will contribute to a permanent record of a key period of policy-making in the field. We have already started to receive requests for access to our interview transcripts and other materials. For example a new ESRC project looking at language and literacy use among AfroCaribbean Youth in Manchester will be using our material to contextualise their research data.

The National Research and Development Centre for Adult Literacy and Numeracy (NRDC) is an important channel for communicating with the policy community. We have been invited to do a workshop at the NRDC Skills for Life conference in London in November 2004, indicating interest in the project from both the policy and research communities.

International interest has been stimulated through the ESRC Seminar Series, and by Mary Hamilton’s visits to Australia and Canada in 2002/3 and to the US in 2004. Yvonne Hillier will build on this interest through her sabbatical trip to Australia this coming winter.