New research shows that adults with the lowest literacy and numeracy skills are likely to have experienced substantial disadvantage from early childhood. As the journeys of many adult learners attest, education can transform opportunity. What is more likely to motivate them to take up an educational offer is a life course transition or a new challenge, such as having a child start school, getting divorced, facing redundancy or wanting to get promoted. Learning may then be seen as the means of solving a problem that previously was unrecognised. Drawing on the 1970 British Cohort Study, which tracked people who were born in a single week in 1970 until aged 34, the author describes new insights into the origins of poor literacy and numeracy and the impact this can have on people's lives.