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A major challenge for comparing literacy (or illiteracy) rates across time or different countries is that the measurements are very different. In US, "functionally illiterate" means you can cipher and sound it out, but if it's a sufficiently complex sentence you can't understand it. (For example, some instructions on tax forms.) In developing countries, "illiterate" means you cannot cipher the alphabet (or kanji, as the case may be).
A while back, a student in my Liberal Arts Math class did a deep dive comparing the literacy statistics for US vs. Bangladesh, because some statistics she found suggested that US was doing worse. Turned out that the US stats were for "functional illiteracy" while the study in Bangladesh asked its participants to sound out a few written words.
Not the same thing.
The way it is explained in the UK context is that "functional literacy" is the ability to read a story in a "quality" newspaper like The Times or The Guardian and understand it well enough to answer questions about what happened. That is a much higher standard than just being able to read.
Back in the day, literacy was assessed by self-report. The census taker would ask you "Can you read?" and write down the answer.
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