They are quoting a book called 'Education and the State' by EG West. The figures have not, as far as I am aware, been queried even by the people who viciously attacked West on its release (for which they were forced to apologise).
I shall quote a little more fully from West
"The pre-1870 record of educational outputs such as literacy was
even more impressive than the numbers of children in school, and
this presents an even more serious problem to typical authors of
social histories. Professor Mark Blaug (1975: 595) has observed
that ‘Conventional histories of education neatly dispose of the
problem by simply ignoring the literacy evidence.’
R. K. Webb, a specialist historian of literacy, offers the following
conclusions about conditions in Britain in the late 1830s: ‘in so far as
one dare generalize about a national average in an extraordinarily
varied situation, the fi gure would seem to run between two-thirds
and three-quarters of the working classes as literate, a group which
included most of the respectable poor who were the great political
potential in English life’.2
There was, moreover, an appreciable rate of growth in literacy.
This is refl ected in the fact that young persons were more and more
accomplished than their elders. Thus a return of the educational
requirements of men in the navy and marines in 1865 showed that 99
per cent of the boys could read compared with seamen (89 per cent),
marines (80 per cent) and petty offi cers (94 per cent).3
It is not surprising that with such evidence of literacy growth
among young people, the levels had become even more substantial
by 1870. On my calculations (West, 1978), in 1880, when national
compulsion was enacted, over 95 per cent of fi fteen-year-olds were
literate. This should be compared to the fact that over a century later
40 per cent of 21-year-olds in the UK admit to diffi culties with writing
and spelling (Central Statistical Offi ce, 1995: 58)."
