Functional illiteracy in Europe

Many young people leave school before they have developed the literacy skills they require to participate fully in society. Functional illiteracy, unlike illiteracy, can be hard to spot. Decoding and reading aloud the text can be so mentally demanding on the individual, that he or she has no spare capacity to access the meaning of the text. So, someone may well be able to read a text aloud, but still be unable to understand what they have read and extract meaning from it. This means that those who are not functionally literate can often be quite invisible in our societies. They often manage to do this and sometimes even prosper, but their poor reading and writing means that there are limits to their engagement with the world around them.

It is important to distinguish here between illiteracy – not being able to read and write at all, and functional literacy – being able to read and write, but not well enough to meet the demands of everyday life. https://epale.ec.europa.eu/en/blog/functional-literacy-and-early-school-leaving