The Trust’s students can also suffer from difficult socio-economic lifestyles and this also impacts upon their learning at times. For these reasons, one of the Trust’s primary goals is to get students to attend a minimum of 10 hours (20 lessons), in order to create more positive learning experiences and learning habits.  Once this goal has been achieved, many students continue with their learning, either with the Trust or by moving on to achieve other educational goals.

Various means of delivery are employed to educate RYALT students; this includes one-to-one face-to-face tuition, distance learning via phone and mail or by video conferencing, and online literacy practice exercises. 

RYALT offers their online ‘bootcamp’ training free to anyone wanting to teach literacy within the framework of their own organisation. This includes teacher aides in secondary schools, REAPs, PTEs, businesses and community organisations.

The majority of RYALT’s youth students have left school – either officially or unofficially. Nonetheless RYALT is keen to work with students as young as 13 in order to give them a fighting chance when they reach NCEA at age 15. Early support can change what happens to youth once they leave school.

Why does RYALT work with youth when schools can do it? Because schools can’t. The numbers arriving at secondary school with low literacy skills have overwhelmed the system. Most rural schools are smaller and they simply do not get enough funding to deal with the large numbers of students arriving at secondary school with low literacy skills. Added to that, schools often report that although they have programmes in place, many teens with poor literacy skills avoid the remedial programmes for fear of being mocked by peers. There is a label given to these programmes – ‘pull-out programmes’. The trouble is that a teenager who is struggling with literacy needs specific teaching of reading and writing skills, not embedded literacy.

Literacy tuition not only improves a person’s ability to read and write but also dramatically increases their self-esteem, employment and financial prospects, and general happiness.  The Rural Youth and Adult Literacy Trust is dedicated to what it has set out to do and both trustees and staff look forward to further serving the community to improve the lives of many by improving their basic literacy skills.