In 1999 it was estimated that one in three adults in England could not work out the area of a room and one in five adults could not find a plumber in the yellow pages. (See BBC 1999 ). In 2009 little had changed (See BBC 2009 and charts at Department for Children Literacy and Numeracy site ). The discussion of this problem revolved entirely around the quality of education. However, perhaps someone should ask why the problem has not improved over the past 10 years. A great deal of money has been spent on adult literacy so either adult literacy training is hopeless or vast numbers of new illiterate adults are entering society from schools or abroad or both. In fact the adult literacy programmes have done quite well. Around 7% of the population of England arrived over the past 10 years from overseas (See Origins of the English ) and a minimum of about 2 million of these new arrivals in England do not have English as a first language. In reality the adult literacy schemes have alm...