National Literacy Report: 89% of middle school students have a non-functional and minimally functional level of literacy

The second edition of the “Report on the literacy level of Romanian students”, launched by BRIO with the support of AVE, shows that only 11% of students in Romania from grades I-VIII obtained the “functional” score for literacy skills, i.e. they have the ability to locate, understand and synthesize information from a written text. Of the students tested, 42% fell into the “non-functional” level, which places them in the position of functional illiteracy, while approximately 47% of them are in the “minimum functional” category.

The report was made on the basis of approximately 15,000 valid tests taken by students from grades I-VIII, between April 2022 and March 2023, from all regions of the country. The results show that the level of literacy is generally uniform for the age groups between 6-14 years. Thus, if the percentage of non-functional 6-year-old students is 44.34%, it reaches 40.39% among 14-year-old students, so the level of non-functionality decreases by only 3.95% after completing primary and secondary school.

“What we see in this study can be read in terms of percentages, neat data, or it can be read by always thinking about the children in these statistics. I would like to see in these percentages children who need our help, all of us, to be able to function in society in 8, 10, 12 or 20 years. Not the data, not the percentages must decrease or, as the case may be, increase, but the ability of these children, the first 42% and then the next 47%, to understand what they read, to be able to relate to the written text. Functional illiteracy does not disappear when the child leaves the formal education system, it is a shadow that accompanies him all his life and that covers a large part of his life, preventing him from progressing in any way as an individual”, said Gabi Bartic, CEO of BRIO .

In the last 12 months, through the BRIO platform, students in Romania had the opportunity to test their literacy level for free, by evaluating three components, namely locating information, understanding it, and evaluating and reflecting on it. Students who fell into the “functional” level for literacy demonstrated that they can interpret and integrate ideas and information from a given text, can deduce cause-effect relationships, hypotheses, can establish similarities and differences between characters, facts, events or concepts and can draw the overall conclusion of the text.

“One of the objectives of the Educated Romania project, a project transposed into the Education Laws, is to reduce functional illiteracy. In this sense, the draft of the Pre-University Education Law provides concrete measures, the most important being the National Teacher Training Program in order to increase the functional literacy level of students. It includes the Functional Literacy Platform, which will contain tests performed according to the functional literacy standards that will be applied annually, to substantiate the intervention measures necessary for each student to reach their potential. The target of these measures is to reduce the functional illiteracy rate by 50% by 2030,” said Ligia Deca, Minister of Education.

Minister Deca also said that what can be concretely done in order to stop seeing the weak figures in this report is that “in all subjects there should be portions in class where the statements are read aloud and discussed together with the students, because reading doubled by fixation and synthesis activities of what has been read helps us to overcome these deficiencies in terms of literacy”.