Filling in Census Forms

I often see discussions on genealogy message boards about misunderstandings occurring between householders and census enumerators when census forms were completed, especially due to problems with literacy.

I'm just indexing some parish magazines from 1881 for Burwash in Sussex, and there is an interesting article about the 1881 census results there.

The article includes the following ....

"In1871 .... 490 schedules were used, and of these the enumerators had to fill up 132, the persons with whom they were left not feeling competent to fill them up themselves. Among the younger part of our population however, a great improvement since 1871 is reported in the number of scheduled filled up by the householders personally."

I'm not sure how literacy levels in Burwash compared to elsewhere, but this statistic gives an interesting insight into the possible reason for the strange things we sometimes find on the census pages!