‘How the Learning and Skills Council can best support local providers in making learning provision which addresses social exclusion and neighbourhood renewal’

Good morning and can I say first of all thank you for inviting the Learning and Skills Council to this conference. Our Chief Executive John Harwood has had to attend the second meeting of the Council today and has asked me to share our views on lifelong learning and neighbourhood renewal with you.

I’ve been asked to speak about how the Learning and Skills Council can best support local providers in addressing social exclusion and contributing to neighbourhood renewal.

To some extent what I have to say will be speculative, as the Learning and Skills Council will not begin to fund providers until April next year. Nonetheless, what I can say is that I expect social inclusion, including community capacity building and widening participation, to be at the heart of the Council’s mission in planning and funding further education and training.

Many of you will have already seen the remit letter from the secretary of state in which he sets out clearly the role that he expects the Learning and Skills Council to play in the renewal of deprived areas.

Indeed, the secretary of state wants us to ensure that learning plays a major contribution in sustaining a civilised and cohesive society. In this, learning plays a key role in delivering the government’s objective for the renewal of deprived neighbourhoods.

Many of you will have heard John Prescott launching the recent white paper on urban renewal. He said that: ‘people must come first. There is no "one size fits all" solution. Our policies are based on engaging local people in a partnership for change designed to meet their needs.’ All these sentiments would, be fully endorsed by the new Learning and Skills Council.

There are four themes running through the While paper and the Policy Action Team Report which I would like to develop - individuality; locality, partnership and opportunity.

Individuality

Funding learning is clearly the key task for the Council. The Council is working with the Department for Education and Employment to develop a funding system which responds to the needs of all learners.

We also believe that the provision we fund should take account of feedback from individual learners and provide appropriate learning support.

The new national funding system will include an element for disadvantage, to provide access and support for those who have not recently engaged in any structured learning activity.

We plan to stimulate demand from these new learners by providing funding for more ‘first rung learning’, for programmes that do not necessarily offer full qualifications.

The remit letter contains some key messages from the government about quality, qualifications and direct links to other forms of learning programme, and I’d like to return to these at the end.

We also need to ensure that learners have access to good quality advice and guidance to help shape their choices. There will be a clear expectation that providers funded by the Council will each have a responsibility to enable their learners to have access to information advice and guidance.

Locality

If I turn for a moment to the theme of ‘locality’. One of the key messages of the Policy Action Team report on ‘Skills for Neighbourhood Renewal’ was that learning delivered locally, that is directly relevant to people’s needs can have wider benefits than just an improvement in skills.

Whilst the Learning and Skills Council will have a national funding system, with rates determined nationally, volumes of learning will be determined locally and it will be for each Local Learning and Skills Council to apply its resources to raise participation and skill levels in the areas it serves.

Our expectation is that the Local Learning and Skills Councils will also use their local initiative fund to support the development of learning within local communities. Local funding can be used: to build on existing good practice; to support social entrepreneurial activity and to provide support and training for community leaders.

There is already a wealth of good practice on community outreach from which we can learn about improving access and from which we can build to help promote local learning in a local setting. For example, a recent report from the FEFC inspectorate identified the ‘critical success factors’ in widening participation and raising standards [Widening Participation and Raising Standards: Colleges’ case studies, FEFC May 2000]. Key amongst these factors for engaging new learners in off-site or outreach provision was the effective use of information technology.

Many Colleges have provided this through innovative means for instance:

Partnership

And if I now turn to partnership, I’m sure we’d all agree that this is at the core of making things work. And yet the organisation of learning and the funding of learning has up to now encouraged competition not co-operation.

The Government has created the Learning and Skills Council to bring together all the different, and often competing, providers of lifelong learning; to level the playing field for funding and to promote and encourage partnership.

This is an area where the Learning and Skills Council can make a real difference. It will not be easy to change the culture of competition but the mechanisms for change are being created.

The Council will work with Learning Partnerships and others to encourage collaboration between providers, to identify unmet needs, and to promote good practice. Local LSCs will need to listen to both local providers and community groups to hear what neighbourhoods need and decide how best we can respond to those needs.

Our aim is to purchase high quality provision that will target help where it is needed most. Local councils will be consulting the Learning Partnerships on their plans, and they will want to work with partnerships and to take into account the views of learners and potential learners. We need to create pathways of learning so as to continue to stimulate demand for a wider range of learning.

Learning Partnerships will want to benchmark performance between similar localities and families of providers in order to spread best practice.

And finally, on the theme of partnership, I’d like to say here that we fully recognise the role of Local Education Authorities in providing for many disadvantaged learners. We will work together with local authorities so that we may reach out to even more, new learners.

Opportunity

The development of effective citizenship is a cornerstone of fostering involvement within the local community. The Learning and Skills Council will be working on a programme of active citizenship for young people and I also think there is significant potential for promoting the concept amongst adults.

And of course citizenship is important as an issue in sustainable development - how we make the best of the environment in which we live and to sustain it for future generations.

Poor basic skills can have a powerful and far reaching effect on quality of life, not just for the individual but for their children and for other members of their immediate family.

The government’s aim is to reduce by half the number of functionally illiterate adults by 2010. The Learning and Skills Council plans to work closely with the Basic Skills Unit, and other agencies working in this area, to secure imaginative and creative learning opportunities that will draw in people who are unused to learning or who see learning in institutions as not for them.

And we can work to ensure that the setting for learning is the most appropriate one. Literacy and numeracy need to be delivered in the broadest possible range of settings, such as the workplace, through trade unions and in neighbourhood learning centres.

Key messages

I said that I would say something about the key messages for the Learning and Skills Council contained in the Secretary of State’s remit letter.

Meeting the national learning targets is a key priority for the Learning and Skills Council.

To achieve the targets we need to raise the general standards of provision and the quality of teaching. We also need to reduce drop out from courses and increase achievement levels. With help from the Government we plan to use a wide range of measures to achieve these goals.

However achieving more from those already in the system will not by itself be enough. The Learning and Skills Council will have to raise participation.

Our challenge is to increase the number of new learners, rather than ‘recycling’ those learners already in the system. The post-16 national targets for 2004 should guide us towards securing greater participation from all age groups, including both adults and young people.

Our challenge is also to provide ‘first rung learning’ to encourage people to start learning and to provide a stepping stone to further learning. Many providers extol the value of ‘taster courses’ and feedback from individuals is often positive. The Council will need to understand the extent of take up of these courses and how they prompt individuals to pursue further learning.

Many learners, for example, 54% of those funded through the FEFC’s non schedule 2 pilots, cited confidence building as a key outcome. The Learning and Skills Council will want to ensure the development of people’s confidence as learners. This is the route to establishing a learning culture.

The current FE funding system is based on a notion of direct progression, of providing pathways to link initial learning experiences to further learning and maybe to qualifications.

Experience, and the work of NIACE, teaches us that this type of vertical progression is not for everyone. There are still many people for whom qualification routes are not immediately relevant and where an increased breadth of learning is important. For example where these relate to the skills needs of the local community and the local labour market.

We also need to provide training to meet the skills needs of the workforce and to provide them in such a way as to sustain and build local economies. And we need to provide support to improve the necessary infrastructure for the labour market, through childcare and other means.

And in the drive to raise standards, we need to have a funding system that can recognise different sizes and types of provider and the particular and valuable contributions they make, from the very large employer to the very small voluntary group. These providers will be measured in terms of quality and meeting local demand for training and for skills.

Final Thoughts

I hope that what I’ve said, however speculative, has been encouraging.

The Learning and Skills Council will be the first agency to have responsibility for funding lifelong learning. The Council will not be a centralised organisation. 90% of its staff will work locally and will be accountable to its local Council and its local community. It will not represent provider interests.

The Council’s remit is to foster partnership and collaboration and to increase participation in learning. It can only do this by working together with local partners and by ensuring it meets the needs of individuals.

We all have a role in addressing social exclusion and the regeneration of local economies. We can multiply the impact we each make by working together.

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