We argue that one of our purposes in literacy and numeracy (LN) embedding is to align the activities of this particular value chain so that we may benefit optimally from the New Zealand Tertiary Education Commission’s (TEC) investment and achieve a sector-wide objective of equipping foundation-level learners with the skills, knowledge, attitudes and values needed to manage the complex demands of their future worlds of work. More specifically, we look at the primary tasks of the LN-embedding project as clusters of activities which are not independent; rather, they have to be purposely aligned, if not integrated, on both the horizontal and the vertical planes.

To illustrate horizontal alignment, we mapped the steps and activities for one of our primary tasks, namely, to devise programme-specific literacy and numeracy surveys at Wintec to meet TEC funding requirements. To illustrate the internal consistency of the steps and activities within a primary task, we outline how we selected constructs from the TEC’s Learning Progressions as a basis for formulating test specifications, selecting item types, devising the surveys, gathering and processing trial data, as well as collecting and processing beginning- and end-of-course results to show progress. We also include item facility values and Cronbach alpha coefficients as measures of how reliable the surveys were and how these findings prompted us to reflect on how we could develop and use them in future. We argue that the internal collaborative survey design process within the institute paved the way for the mandatory use of the TEC’s assessment tool in 2011. To illustrate vertical alignment (between activity sets across primary tasks), we show that higher-order linkages between these activities allow us to extract additional value from the LN-embedding value chain.

We conclude that these two forms of alignment are important in extracting optimal value from government investments and achieving more with less in tertiary education provision.