The aim of this article is to show the importance of literacy practices in the implementation of education policy, using as an example the system of student assessment in adult literacy education. The author reports on an ethnographic study of the practice of planning learning and recording progress through the use of individual learning plans (ILPs) in one classroom in order to show how teachers and students are co-opted as active agents into the processes of Skills for Life policy. She aims to show how some concepts from literacy studies, in particular the relationship between literacy practices and literacy events, can fruitfully be brought together with ideas about the temporal dimensions of the local and the global to uncover how policy is instantiated in classroom practice and how the ILP mediates power and control. She argues that by sanctioning some definitions of literacy and learning whilst excluding others, ILPs construct the identities of teachers and learners by specifying desirable abilities. She suggests that discussion of the nature of ILPs and of their function within systems of performance measurement should become part of the explicit content of literacy education. (Contains 3 figures, 3 tables and 1 note.)