Only 3.6% of Scots ‘face serious challenges’ in literacy but BBC Scotland and Prof Paterson lie to all UK viewers that it’s 26%!

On BBC Breakfast at 06:25 this morning, the Reporting Scotland team were allowed to share with the rest of the UK, their disgracefully inaccurate report claiming that 26% of Scots were illiterate and that meant 1.9 million! The claim was supported by Professor Lindsay Paterson. It’s a lie. The facts: From the University of Glasgow’s full report, in 2009: around one-quarter of the Scottish population (26.7%) may face occasional challenges and constrained opportunities due to their literacies difficulties, but will generally cope with their day-to-day lives; and within this quarter of the population, 3.6% (one person in 28) face serious challenges in … Continue reading Only 3.6% of Scots ‘face serious challenges’ in literacy but BBC Scotland and Prof Paterson lie to all UK viewers that it’s 26%!

Far fewer in Scotland have ‘serious’ or ‘very poor’ literacy problems than across the UK

The appearance of Prof Lindsay Paterson on Reporting Scotland today is, once more, fraught with the kind of misunderstandings this statistician with zero experience of teaching regularly brings. Prompted by the numbers-obsessed prof’s strop on the fact that Scotland doesn’t take part in an international study of no use, like Pisa, to compare our adult illiteracy with theirs, they claim: The last Scottish government survey was in 2009 and put the number of people in Scotland who have problems with literacy at around 26%. As with drug deaths, they desperately hope they have found the only kind of whitabootery that … Continue reading Far fewer in Scotland have ‘serious’ or ‘very poor’ literacy problems than across the UK