Sarah Dingle: There are many things we do every day without thinking, like reading a road sign or the mail, or checking prices at the shops. But for some, these simple acts are terrifyingly difficult.

Don McKenzie: What I was afraid of was going into the shop, saying I'm going to go and get something, and then I can't understand what the labels are and stuff like that and I'd get the wrong thing and stuff, and I'd think well I'm not going to do that just in case I'm getting the wrong thing and I could end up poisoning someone.

Sarah Dingle: Australia has a surprising number of adults with low literacy and numeracy skills.

Nationwide, more than 40% of adults have inadequate skills, below the level considered necessary for normal day to day activities. But there is one state that stands out. Half of all Tasmanians aged 15 to 74 are, for practical purposes, innumerate and illiterate.

Brian Charity: I couldn't tell you what the alphabet is now. And unfortunately, as bizarre and almost as terrible as it sounds, coming up now 40 years that I've been married and I still don't necessarily spell my wife's name right.

Sarah Dingle: Together with Australia's highest rates of illiteracy and innumeracy, Tasmania has by far the highest unemployment rate in the country. And the state's education system is failing students, says leading economist, Saul Eslake.

Saul Eslake: The sad thing is that Tasmanian students appear to fall further behind their mainland counterparts the longer they remain in the education system, at least up to year 9, and then sadly far too many of them drop out at year 10.

Sarah Dingle: Half a century of poor adult literacy has created an intergenerational problem.

Head of the Tasmanian State School Parents and Friends Organisation, Jen Eddington.

Jenny Eddington: We're quite aware that for a number of our parents their literacy levels are not such that they can read and understand their students' school reports, that they can participate and engage as parents.

Sarah Dingle: It's a cycle that's extremely hard to break, says community worker Anne Harrison.

Anne Harrison: I have had a young boy here and he's 16, and he has come in to me and he said, 'I've just had a baby and I'm now a dad', and I went, 'Oh right, congratulations, that's great,' but he said, 'I now need to learn to read and write.'

Sarah Dingle: Generations of people have learned to live with their low literacy skills, and some have even managed to forge successful careers despite this disadvantage.

Hello I'm Sarah Dingle, and today on Background Briefing, the secret lives of people who've grown up without being able to read or write, and the outdated education system which is still letting many students slip through the cracks.

[Audio: Adult literacy class]

Sarah Dingle: In the seaside hamlet of Sorell, east of Hobart, Don McKenzie is getting back to basics.

Don McKenzie: My reading and writing before I came to these classes was totally crap. I never used to be able to pronounce real long words. When I used to write, it just looked like a scribble to me.

Sarah Dingle: And your maths?

Don McKenzie: Maths, well, I knew the basics of maths but I still need a hell of a lot of work to do on that and that's why I'm here, to try and get that help off the tutors and stuff, which is good because maths is really important these days I think.

Sarah Dingle: 49-year-old Don McKenzie grew up in Hobart. He left school for good when he was in year 8. It was very easy for Don McKenzie to drop out of the entire education system.

Don McKenzie: I just said I'm leaving school, I don't like school. They didn't even bother saying why don't you stay at school and stuff like that, they just let you go. It just seemed to me back them days they weren't really interested in education wise, only the ones they really wanted to, sort of thing.

Sarah Dingle: Until eight months ago, Don McKenzie was functionally illiterate, and that had a devastating impact on his everyday life.

Don McKenzie: I never used to hardly speak to anyone, I never used to look at anything or anything like that, just in case I did the wrong thing. I used to lock myself up a fair bit inside and I never used to hardly go shopping or anything like that with my partner. When we used to go shopping I used to just sit in the car.

Sarah Dingle: In Australia, literacy and numeracy are defined by five levels of skill. Level three is deemed the minimum necessary for getting by in the modern world. For example, as Don's literacy tutor Chris Oriel explains, being able to read the paper.

Chris Oriel: And not just to read the newspaper but understand the context of the newspaper and understand the difference between the editorial and also the advertisements and the classifieds and the reason that they're there. Simple things such as being able to go along to a chemist and get a script and be able to read and understand what the script is.

Sarah Dingle: For years the state's poor education outcomes have held back half its adult population, and its economy.

Saul Eslake: I think the low level of educational attainment of Tasmanian workers is probably the single most important reason why productivity in Tasmania is significantly below levels on the mainland.

Sarah Dingle: Tasmanian-born Bank of America Merrill Lynch chief economist, Saul Eslake.

Saul Eslake: I think, although this is harder to prove, that Tasmanians' lower level of educational attainment is also a contributor to the fact that fewer Tasmanians work at all than is the case on the mainland.

Sarah Dingle: The Tasmanian government is seriously worried about the situation. Late last year it launched a major program to dramatically boost adult literacy and numeracy. Free classes are being conducted by hundreds of volunteer tutors around the state. Tutor Chris Oriel is a schoolteacher by trade, which can be off-putting for some of his clients.

Chris Oriel: Certainly I've got some clients who take a bit of a step backwards when they know I'm a schoolteacher because of how they feel about how their schooling was. People have what I would see as misplaced feelings of shame and embarrassment about their literacy levels. If the school or the way that we're taught doesn't engage them or doesn't catch them, they can become isolated and this notion of 'I'm silly' can actually be a self-fulfilling prophecy in their mind.

Sarah Dingle: A high proportion of Tasmanians live in rural areas or small towns. Given many literacy clients want to keep their classes a secret, it can be very hard to find a tutor who's not also their neighbour.

Chris Oriel: Certainly in this region we have some tutors and students who travel 40-50 kilometres to meet each other and do tutoring, which I think is pretty special.

Sarah Dingle: Traditionally, Tasmania's main employers have been from the labour-intensive agriculture and resource industries, where in the past illiteracy hasn't been a barrier to getting a job. That's been the experience of Kaye Fox, who's also in the Sorell literacy class. Kaye is 69.

Kaye Fox: I left school in grade 9. I did apple packing, I did scallop splitting, and then I went cleaning at the school for I think 20 years. I clean at the Tasman Districts High School.

Sarah Dingle: Kaye started literacy classes about four months ago, after she met tutor Chris at her local civic centre.

Kaye Fox: So I went up and saw him and asked would he like to teach me how to spell.

Sarah Dingle: What made you take that step?

Kaye Fox: Well, I've been a bad speller all my life just about.

Sarah Dingle: Despite this, for the last 25 years Kaye Fox has been volunteering with the state's ambulance service, going out on call with paramedics.

Kaye Fox: If I'm in the back of an ambulance with a paramedic and you've got to write something down, that's where I find it a bit hard. I just write it down how I think and hope for the best. And then I just say to the paramedic, well, if you can understand it, good, if you can't you'd better ask me. It's a lot of medical words and things like that. And words…if you get sick, there's words for it, and that's where I foul up.

Sarah Dingle: Has anyone at HQ ever come back to you with a form and said, 'What does this mean, what happened to this person?'

Kaye Fox: No, they haven't. [laughs]

Sarah Dingle: On the other side of Hobart, in a buzzing Kingston cafe, Background Briefing met a man who has gone to extraordinary lengths to hide the fact he can't read or write.

Brian Charity: I'm 60 now. Only a couple of years ago there would have been half a dozen people in the world that knew, that was it.

Sarah Dingle: Brian Charity is a successful businessman. For more than four and a half decades of his life, he was also a great pretender.

Brian Charity: It's not really the right word, but you become a very good conperson in the right sense, not conning people for anything but conning them into a belief that you know what you're doing.

Sarah Dingle: Brian left school at 14, when his parents and the headmaster decided education wasn't for him. He went straight into a job at a tile company, and then moved to a cement works.

Brian Charity: I basically couldn't read or write really. If anyone had ever asked me to write something down, I'd make a quick exit to the toilet or wherever and spend some time until it passed on. It was awkward in that respect.

Sarah Dingle: Despite low literacy skills, Brian had the drive to rise through the ranks of the company, coming up with ever more elaborate fixes to make sure no one ever guessed his secret.

Brian Charity: We used to have a lot of problems throughout Malaysia and Indonesia ordering equipment. So I ended up setting up a system where I faxed over photographs of everything, everything that I ever needed to buy I had a photograph of, which took all that away immediately and we always got what we wanted, which everyone thought was very clever but of course it was my way of doing it because I didn't know how to write the paperwork out, so I just sent photographs and said, 'Two of these, one of those.'

Sarah Dingle: Brian moved on to another company, which specialised in oil refineries. Soon he was travelling for them throughout Asia and the Middle East.

Brian Charity: Some of these places, the refineries and what have you are actually owned by princes, and these are the people you're going into a meeting with. And what I did right from the start was I got myself a little recorder. And I'd sit my official briefcase up on the table like I knew what I was doing, leave it a little bit ajar and record it. Then what I'd do when I got back to my hotel at night, I'd play it back, and then ring them in the States or whatever and say this is what happened. And that's how it would go on.

Sarah Dingle: So you were like a spy?

Brian Charity: Well, yeah [laughs]. I suppose it's the sort of thing that probably shouldn't have been done, but it was the only way I could cope.

Sarah Dingle: Did you get really stressed about hiding this?

Brian Charity: I was fine with it until things like that would happen, and that was very, very stressful, to the extent that I don't mind admitting that the night before I might've shed the odd tear thinking here I am in a foreign country, completely on my own, and I'm going to meet all these multimillionaires and what have you that are going want to know about things.

Sarah Dingle: Poor literacy is not just a problem for the older generations. Right now, Tasmania has the lowest rate of year 12 completion of all the states and territories. Government high schools only go to year 10. After that, colleges offer year 11 and 12. There are just eight state colleges, and they're all in the main centres.

25-year-old Cameron Munro grew up in the Huon Valley. He finished year 12 at Hobart College, but just three years later was told his literacy and numeracy skills were well below year 12 levels.

Cameron Munro: When you go to write stuff down, what it should be, it was scrappy and couldn't read it, and me maths was dodge because of the education that I had, the levels, it was so down. I was told from a case manager that my spelling and stuff was probably around a grade four level instead of being probably at a grade 10 level or something, so without it I was pretty well in the lower jobs.

Sarah Dingle: Cameron began to realise the importance of literacy and numeracy in the workplace, and he wasn't alone.

Cameron Munro: I was going to Kyle's Gardening, which is cucumbers and tomatoes, and you've got to work out your maths for that, work out how many bundles you need or how many containers of tomatoes would fill a truck. Yes, there was a team of four, so if you couldn't work it out you'd ask the next team member and if they couldn't' work it out they asked the next one

Sarah Dingle: Was that pretty common?

Cameron Munro: Yeah.

Sarah Dingle: Once labour-intensive industries are changing, requiring their workers to have more training and qualifications. Cameron went back to school, spending two years in adult literacy classes in between jobs.

Cameron Munro: Skills are going good. They're back to normal, what they was, say, six years ago. Now they're back up to that good education standard.

Sarah Dingle: But he wants to keep learning because there's room for improvement.

Cameron Munro: I need improvement in spelling because I can't spell most words or difficult pronouncing of words. I can't spell properly. I've sort of got a bit of a problem with me times tables in the higher end, and divides are useless.

Sarah Dingle: Cameron's just started his own gardening and maintenance business. Six years after finishing school, he has split from most of his old mates.

Cameron Munro: What they do is basically sit on the streets seven days a week and do nothing. So they sit on Centrelink, get the $540 a fortnight, go to the bottle shop, buy bottles of scotch, or go down to the local dealers and get the good stuff.

Sarah Dingle: Cameron doesn't feel he has much in common with them anymore, and they lack his motivation.

Cameron Munro: And it's hard. It's like you talk to them every now and then. They ring you up and they say, 'What's going on,' and you know they're under the influence because their speech is slurred and stuff, and they tell you F-that and F-this and you're an idiot doing that, and stay away from the workforce and come back and join us. You get up to a certain level in life and then they want to pull it away from underneath you.

Sarah Dingle: More than a third of all Tasmanians live on welfare payments. The state has by far the nation's worst unemployment rate, of 8.6%.

Saul Eslake: And that's not accounting for the fact that Tasmania's participation rate is significantly lower than that of the mainland states, that is there's a much higher incidence of hidden unemployment in Tasmania than in other parts of the country.

Sarah Dingle: There's no official definition of what constitutes a recession at a state level, but to Bank of America Merrill Lynch chief economist Saul Eslake, there's no other word for what's going on in Tasmania.

Saul Eslake: Tasmania has just experienced its seventh consecutive quarter of contracting final state demand. That's the sum of spending by governments, businesses and households within the state of Tasmania. That's the longest run of consecutive contractions in that measure of total spending since this series began in the mid 1980s. In other words, it's worse than during the recession of the early 1990s.

Sarah Dingle: In terms of government spending, Tasmania spends a greater proportion of its budget on its schools than any other state. But although the government is spending more, it's receiving less in return in terms of educational outcomes.

Five years ago all Australian students began sitting standardised tests under the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy, or NAPLAN. Saul Eslake says Tasmania's NAPLAN scores paint a dismal picture.

Saul Eslake: Indeed the sad thing is that Tasmanian students appear to fall further behind their mainland counterparts the longer they remain in the education system. At least up to year 9 and then sadly far too many of them drop out at year 10.

Sarah Dingle: So where is the money going? Dr Ben Jensen has spent years analysing education policy internationally with the OECD. He's now director of the School Education program at think-tank The Grattan Institute.

Ben Jensen: When you look at figures around where do we spend the most per student in school education across the country, we're not spending the most on disadvantaged students or with some disabilities, what we're spending the most on is students in small schools, because they are totally inefficient.

Sarah Dingle: Figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show that nationally the average government school has around 350 students. In Tasmania, the average government school has less than 290.

Dr Jensen says smaller schools still have to employ the same range of teaching and non-teaching staff, and that money could be better spent.

Ben Jensen: If we were to close down these smaller schools, move the students into better, larger schools, then you could start to afford having specialist literacy and numeracy teachers that would benefit all students in Tasmania.

Sarah Dingle: Dr Jensen argues the situation has reached the point where there should be specialist literacy and numeracy teachers in every single school in Tasmania. But shutting schools, even to fund others, is tantamount to political suicide.

Tightly-knit communities in both urban and rural areas are closely attached to their small local schools and defend them fiercely.

Two years ago, Tasmania's Labor-Greens state government announced that 20 state schools had been earmarked for closure, with the students to be incorporated into bigger facilities. The response was uproar.

ABC news [archival]:

Protester: Read that sign, that says Glenora District High School, it's a high school! If you close that, that sign has to change, kids' uniforms have to change…

Nick McKim: I mean, I could decide to close no schools in Tasmania…

Protester: That'd be the best option.

Protester: Yes, good. Be creative.

Sarah Dingle: The resistance was so strong the Education Minister Nick McKim dropped the idea of shutting schools down and instead gave individual communities the opportunity to decide for themselves.

Nick McKim: So we've actually put some money and resources on the table as an opportunity if school communities voluntarily decide they can change the way they provide education in their community through an amalgamation or a closure or a merge with another school.

Sarah Dingle: So far half the schools on the list have taken up the offer, but the rest have refused. None illustrate the standoff so well as Geilston Bay High School, in Hobart.

When it first opened, Geilston Bay catered for 700 students from years 7 to 10, but in recent decades it's declined to around 300. Last year the official enrolment was 159 students. The head of the school's association, Les Burbury, says the community didn't want the school to close.

Les Burbury: We still have a very strong community that wants to remain there and that would be disadvantaged if they were obliged to move to another school. A lot of them wouldn't move.

Sarah Dingle: So they just wouldn't go to school?

Les Burbury: No, they'd just disconnect.

Sarah Dingle: Now the school's population is closer to about 115 students. Geilston Bay's pupils are some of the most well funded in Australia, receiving almost $20,000 from a state and federal governments per student in 2011, which is almost twice the national average.

The students attract more funding partly because the school's population is mostly drawn from the neighbouring suburb of Risdon Vale, which is one of the most disadvantaged suburbs in Hobart.

Anne Harrison from the Risdon Vale community centre:

Anne Harrison: Risdon Vale was built back in the early '60s as a housing department area so it's a low socio-economic area and the people here have got it pretty hard. You know, you can buy a house in Risdon Vale for under $200,000, which is cheap housing. So the community's always stayed as a disadvantaged area and we have quite a large unemployment component of the community.

Sarah Dingle: Geilston Bay had 16 options on the table, including merging with a much bigger high school just five minutes' drive down the road, which parents rejected. Other merger and co-location options were knocked back by the other schools, who weren't keen on aligning themselves with Geilston Bay, says Les Burbury.

Les Burbury: We think there is an underlying feeling of that , that people think we're bogans, if you like, to use the word straight. We don't know how strong that is and it's very hard to measure and it's very hard to fight against it.

Sarah Dingle: Geilston Bay caters largely for disadvantaged students, and the school has struggled to serve those students well.

Three years ago, Tate Westbury started year 7 at Geilston Bay.

Tate Westbury: You had the teachers that helped you, and then you had the teachers that, like, wouldn't help you at all. Like, if I got in trouble they wouldn't try and help, they would just send me straight out.

Sarah Dingle: Did you spend a lot of the time out of the classroom for being sent out?

Tate Westbury: Yeah.

Sarah Dingle: Tate's mother Natalie was worried that he was spending more time out of the classroom than in it, which eventually led to Tate roaming the streets.

Natalie Westbury: Well I was getting phone calls from the school all the time and I'd go in and say, 'Why can't you put him into a room on his own and do one-on-one work?' And they said that they didn't have time to do that, they've got other kids to teach as well.

Sarah Dingle: Tate's behaviour was at least partly influenced by what was going on at home. Natalie was going through a rough patch, battling depression.

Natalie Westbury: We had the loss of my son, a nine-month-old little brother. We lost him through SIDS and I sort of went downhill from there. And he's seen a lot, seen me go through a fair bit and that put him under a lot of stress as well.

Sarah Dingle: A couple of years ago, Anne Harrison noticed that a lot of Geilston Bay students who were enrolled had actually dropped out. Some were on the streets, but others like Tate were hanging out at the Risdon Vale community centre, using the internet and occasionally getting a free meal.

Anne Harrison: When we first got Tate he had some attitude, had a chip on his shoulder, knew better than everyone else, didn't think he needed to learn about reading and writing, so he used to come and we started off doing some creative things with him.

Sarah Dingle: Anne Harrison convinced Geilston Bay to send a teacher to her centre one day a week to teach literacy through activities like cooking. It got to the point where a significant proportion of the school's small student body were actually being taught literacy and numeracy at the neighbourhood centre.

Anne Harrison: We'd have, say, 32 come in during the day. Majority of them were students at Geilston Bay High School. They wouldn't be able to spell. They'd struggle putting a sentence together.

Sarah Dingle: When Geilston Bay High said it could no longer afford to send the teacher out, most of the group were reabsorbed into classes, thanks to Anne Harrison's efforts.

Tate declined to go back. Through the neighbourhood centre he's completed a number of training qualifications, and at 15 he's well on track to gain an apprenticeship. Natalie says instead of Tate being in trouble with the police, she now gets complimented on her son.

Natalie Westbury: A lot of people have come up to me and said how proud, I ought to be proud of him, he's come a long way. And that's what I am, I'm proud.

Sarah Dingle: But Geilston Bay High struggles on. Saul Eslake says the school is the perfect example of what Tasmania should not do.

Saul Eslake: The idea that Tasmanian taxpayers should be paying substantially more to keep a school of barely more than 100 students open at high school really illustrates what's wrong with the structure and funding of the Tasmanian education system.

Sarah Dingle: Wary of community outrage, both the state government and the opposition have pledged to keep the school open.

At the annual conference of the Tasmanian State School Parents and Friends Association in Devonport, questioner Nigel Jones from the Geilston Bay High Association told the group the school was dying a slow death.

Nigel Jones: Geilston Bay High's enrolments for next year will be approximately around 118, from the meeting I attended on Friday. There is no more extra resources for children who may need extra help, and also there is no extra resources if we have children running amok through the school at Geilston Bay High. The principal's leaving, all the senior teachers have announced that they're leaving as well. We have a major dilemma…

Sarah Dingle: The questioner asked education Minister Nick McKim what he was going to do about it.

Nigel Jones: The question is, will you intervene, because we have a major dilemma here which is getting very ugly.

Nick McKim: By 'intervene' do you mean force the school to close, Nigel? Because the answer is no, I won't. The school had a choice. Now the school's writing to me or the school association asking for a whole lot more resources. Okay, no. I'm not going to take resources off every other school in Tasmania to support a choice that the Geilston Bay school community made.

Sarah Dingle: Without the political will from either side to make the tough decisions, Saul Eslake says the Tasmanian school system will remain stuck in the past.

Saul Eslake: The structure of the Tasmanian school system hasn't really changed all that much from, if I can put it this way, the horse and buggy era, when it was much more difficult for children to travel long distances to attend school, so there tended to be a lot more smaller schools. In Tasmania people seemed to think that there's some kind of constitutional right for every small town in the state to have its own primary school and that there's something wrong with children having to travel more than about five or ten minutes to school.

Sarah Dingle: Instead of closing schools, the state opposition wants to expand them.

Local high schools in Tasmania only go to year 10. Those who want to go on to year 11 and 12 have to go to college in the main city centres, with the result that going to college plus travel for some rural students means a ten-hour day.

Excerpt from 1200 Hours: For us Valley kids who want to go to college, there are still at least 1200 hours of travelling to school and back each year, and that's a lot of early mornings.

Sarah Dingle: 1200 Hours is a short film made by two high school students in the Huon Valley about the barriers they face in physically attending year 11 and 12. Only 15% of all Huon Valley students go on to university. The filmmakers interview their friends, teachers, and even their dads.

Excerpt from 1200 Hours: It would be such an advantage to have year 11 and 12 here to break that economic cycle of poverty, you know, the fact that it's an economically depressed area or it can be, for a lot of people it can be anyway.

Sarah Dingle: The state government has taken some steps towards introducing a few year 11 and 12 subjects into regional areas, many with a focus on trades. The state opposition says given less than half of Tasmania's students finish year 12, that's nowhere near good enough.

Tasmania is set to go to the polls by March. Shadow education spokesman, Michael Ferguson:

Michael Ferguson: Our policy is to extend all Tasmanian high schools to year 12 over a decade because we recognise that's a fairly major reform for the Tasmanian community. We will focus our efforts entirely on rural and regional areas of Tasmania where the disadvantage is the greatest, and that's obvious because they're the farthest away from the city based senior secondary colleges. It is a vote winner, but more importantly we think it's the right thing to do for Tasmania. It's not new anywhere else in the country, it's normal.

Sarah Dingle: Background Briefing put this idea to the Education Minister, Nick McKim.

Why not just make all high schools offer year 11 and 12 to ensure that children don't fall through the gaps?

Nick McKim: Well, doing that would mean destroying our college system, and I'm a product of the public education system…

Sarah Dingle: Surely you could just shift some of that knowledge though, you wouldn't have to lose the teachers or the expertise?

Nick McKim: No, but you would lose the economies of scale our college system gives.

Sarah Dingle: The politics of reforming Tasmania's education system are fraught, but the Grattan Institute's Ben Jensen agrees extending secondary schools to year 11 and 12 would increase numbers of ongoing students simply by shifting attitudes.

Ben Jensen: As it stands at the moment you have students who finish at year 10, they're given a graduation party and a graduation ceremony as though they've somehow finished their school education. Clearly in Tasmania that environment pushes…or at least if it doesn't push then it's definitely a lot more encouraging than other areas of students dropping out of school. Expectations are seen from an individual level, a school level and in some cases a system level as being very deterministic in terms of outcomes. It's definitely not in all schools, but if you look at the history of Tasmanian education, it is a history of low expectations.

Jess: High school…I started working in grade 9. So in grade 10 I slipped in my grades in grade 10. I only just graduated high school and that was through working, taking care of Nan, plus school, all at the same time. So then when it got to college I then realised what type of work college was, I was like, no sorry, I can't come here any more. And they were okay with that, they said that's fine, as long as you're working.

Sarah Dingle: In northern Hobart, I meet 21-year-old Jess. Starting from when she was in year 9, Jess worked for almost three years at Woolworths, until she had to leave there too.

Jess: Both my nans got real ill, that's when I left and said I can't do it anymore. And now it's all just based on the family.

Sarah Dingle: Since then, Jess has been on a pension.

Jess: I'm on a disability because of anxiety, depression and everything like that. So I'm not allowed to work.

Sarah Dingle: Jess says her time is now taken up with caring for various members of her family, which is how we've met this morning. We're at a playgroup at Windermere Primary School, a free government program called Launching into Learning, which is run in primary schools across the state. Jess is here with her three-year-old sister Leah.

Jess: There's nine of us all up, so five girls four boys. I'm the third eldest, Leah is the youngest. We brought her here for the simple fact being that there was no one at home around her age for her to hang out with or play with or anything.

Sarah Dingle: Launching into Learning is for children up to the age of four. The program aims to model learning activities for parents, and also to get parents and children into a school community from the start.

The principal of Windermere Primary School, Jenny Leppard, says it's already making a huge difference.

Jenny Leppard: And they cover things like pre-literacy skills, pre-numeracy skills, social skills, growth and fine motor development, so all those early skills that are really important for students' learning when they're beginning school basically.

Sarah Dingle: The program has been running since 2007. When children enter kindergarten, they're assessed against the Kindergarten Development Outcomes, or KDC.

Jenny Leppard: The year before we received the Launching into Learning funding, we had only 37.5% of our kinder students achieving the outcomes for the KDC, which is really poor, so that means there were 62.5% of students at risk. That was, as I say, of huge concern for us. Then you can see the next year in 2007 that we then had 81.1% of students achieve, with only 18.2% at risk.

Sarah Dingle: Jess has been bringing Leah every Friday for six weeks, and it's already paying off.

Jess: Since she's been coming here she's learned her colours, learned how to count from 1 to 20. She goes home and cuts shapes out, goes through her colours at home, has made a lot of friends, which she never used to do, always wants to hang out with them, you take her home from here and she cries. She does have a bit of trouble with talking still, like getting sentences, but she'll just put her hand on her forehead and start over and take a deep breath.

Sarah Dingle: Jess says the learning play at school and at home has made Leah calmer and more focused.

Around the state, Launching into Learning is delivering results, and it's not just the children who are benefiting. Jenny Leppard says Windermere Primary is based in a poor area, with a high-needs community.

Jenny Leppard: And so it's about setting up those experiences, and demonstrating for parents and modelling and connecting with parents.

Sarah Dingle: Do you find with Launching into Learning there are any parents who come along with their kids who themselves are reconnecting with education through this program?

Jenny Leppard: Yes, they've built their own confidence and are now able to support their own children's learning much better. For some I do know of cases where they have gone on and then pursued their own education and taken on further study and courses.

Sarah Dingle: At a playgroup session, Jess realised her little sister was learning skills she herself didn't have.

Jess: That class there that day made me realise that with Leah running around talking to everyone I couldn't do that off the bat. I had a lot of problems with self-confidence and everything like that and self-independence because I have lived with the family and been a family orientated person for so long.

Sarah Dingle: At 21, Jess is going to move away from her family and into a share house for the first time. She's hopeful her depression will lift and she'll be reassessed as fit to work.

For adults struggling with low literacy, children are a powerful incentive to do something about it.

In Risdon Vale, Anne Harrison says it's near impossible to get teenagers to admit they can't read or write, unless they have to think about someone other than themselves.

Anne Harrison: Because I have a young boy here he's 16 and his girlfriend's 16, they've just had a young baby, he has big literacy and numeracy problems. He come in to me and he said, 'I've just had a baby and I'm now a dad,' and I went, 'Oh right, congratulations, that's great,' but he said, 'I now need to learn to read and write,' because he's a dad now so he needs to be able to teach his child about reading and writing.

Sarah Dingle: Back in Sorell, just outside Hobart, Don McKenzie says the best part about taking adult literacy classes is being able to help his kids. He has 12 children who range in age from 13 to 30, some of whom also have literacy problems.

Don McKenzie: I've got one that's really high-needs, she's a 13-year-old. She never used to like reading books and stuff, and I said, 'I'm going back to school now and I'm learning how to read and write, how about you come and sit down next to me and read a book with me and have a go with me?' She said, 'Yeah, that'll be good Dad.' And now she loves it, she loves all the time we spend together, we grab a book and read it together. So it's really happy, it's helping her and it's also helping me.

Sarah Dingle: Have you noticed an improvement in her skills as well as yours?

Don McKenzie: Oh yeah, I've noticed a real lot of improvement in her reading, it's excellent. Even with her writing, she can actually write her name now where she never used to. So yeah, I'm really happy that I can do that.

Sarah Dingle: Don McKenzie says as well as helping his 13 year old daughter, it's also helped his 16-year-old son re-focus on his year 10 schoolwork, and Don's trying to get one of his adult sons to come to literacy classes with him.

Don McKenzie: I've got a 27-year-old, he's got the sort of same situation I'm going through and I'm encouraging him to come and do this too with us. He's got a few things he's got to sort out in himself first. And he's said yeah, he's prepared to give it a go.

Sarah Dingle: For Don himself, the future is looking up. He's on a disability pension for depression and arthritis, but he says getting on top of reading and writing has alleviated a major part of the depression at least. And while he used to lock himself up inside and not even use the phone, now he has the confidence to get out of the car.

Sarah Dingle: So we're in a shopping mall heading towards Woollies.

Don has come shopping with his wife Julie.

Don McKenzie: Yeah, I never used to come in here because I used to get paranoid and stuff like that, but now I feel real good about it, I can read what I want.

Sarah Dingle: What are you planning for tea tonight?

Julie McKenzie: It's chicken…what's it called?

Don McKenzie: Mongolian.

Julie McKenzie: Chicken Mongolian, it's Chinese.

Don McKenzie: Baby corn?

Julie McKenzie: It's $1.29 a tin, it's in a black tin.

Don McKenzie: Black tin. Yep. See, 'baby corn', see I never used to be able to read that.

Sarah Dingle: In a beachside town south of Hobart, businessman Brian Charity has in recent years turned his hand to running cafes. His eateries have won awards. But Brian does wonder what he could have achieved if he was literate.

Brian Charity: It made me feel a lot happier and comfortable in myself. It's only been the reading and writing that has set me back at any stage whatsoever, so I can't begin to imagine life if I'd been able to do all those things.

Sarah Dingle: Brian Charity also attended adult literacy classes, but he says they didn't help his skills. He doesn't think he'll ever learn to read and write.

Brian Charity: Because I don't retain it. Why that is I don't know. So I don't think it'll ever change for me, this is the way it is.

Sarah Dingle: At a personal level though, Brian Charity says the classes were of huge benefit.

Brian Charity: It made me feel a lot happier and comfortable in myself. It was like coming out if you were gay or something, it's a coming out to find all these people in the same boat.

Sarah Dingle: Background Briefing's coordinating producer is Linda McGinness, research by Anna Whitfeld, technical production by Andrei Shabunov, the executive producer is Chris Bullock, and I'm Sarah Dingle.