International symposium on Literacy as Numbers: Researching the Politics and Practices of Literacy Assessment Regimes Institute of Education, London. 17th June 2013 Large-scale enumerative projects of literacy assessment are increasingly global in scope and impacting on educational policy and practice. This symposium on ‘Literacy as Numbers' brought together academics, research students and policy makers who apply critical policy, ethnographic and sociological research perspectives to investigate the politics and practices of literacy assessment regimes. The presentations and discussions were structured around themes including: • The politics of literacy measurement regimes: globalisation, closed and open politics, transparency and public deliberation, numbers in policy discourse; local responses to global policy agendas. • Approaching literacy assessment through ethnographic and socio-material enquiry: multi-sited and institutional ethnography, Actor Network Theory; networks, flows of ideas and resources. • The politics and practices of cross-cultural literacy assessment: test item adaptation, translation and Differential Item Functioning (DIF), and the ideologies of test items and constructs. • Enumerative, ideological and semiotic politics and practices: including common scales, levels and thresholds, ranking and comparison.