Literacy Overview
What is Life Literacy?
Life literacy signals the importance of lifelong and life-wide literacy and learning. It’s the literacy skills you need to live your life fully and the new skills you need to acquire throughout your life. Having adequate literacy skills means being able to understand, evaluate, use and engage with written texts. It also means being able to participate in society, achieve your goals, and develop your knowledge and potential.
Literacy touches all aspects of our lives. We need literacy to be able to communicate with friends and family, hold down a job, and contribute to and engage with our community.
By developing your literacy skills, you can have a productive and more successful life experience. Research shows that adults who have inadequate literacy skills are more likely to have poorer overall health, lower salaries, and lower levels of participation in their community.
Types of Literacy
Facts & Statistics
Download literacy facts and infographic for use in your organization’s communications, as well as for personal use.
49% of adult Canadians have literacy skills that fall below a high school level, which negatively affects their ability to function at work and in their personal lives.
19% function at the lowest level, where they may, for example, be unable to read the dosage instructions on a medicine bottle.
Just over half (51%) of adult Canadians score in the three lowest skill levels in numeracy, down from 54% in 2012.
Adults who are employed demonstrate higher literacy and numeracy levels than Canadians who are unemployed or out of the labour force.
Survey of Adults Skills 2023: Canada – OECD, 2024
Canada ranked 10th out of the 31 OECD countries evaluated by the PIAAC (The Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies) on the percentage of adults with suitable literacy skills.
Adults who score at the highest levels of the proficiency scale were significantly more likely to report high levels of life satisfaction and being in very good or excellent health than adults who score at or below Level 1, in Canada as well as on average across OECD countries.
Survey of Adults Skills 2023: Canada – OECD, 2024
