Improving Service delivery for disadvantaged adults

A NIACE response to the Social Exclusion Unit Consultation

Published: February  2005

1. The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) welcomes the opportunity to comment on the Social Exclusion Unit (SEU)’s project ‘Improvinf Service Delivery for disadvantaged adults’. The aim of this work is to make mainstream public services more effective for socially and economically excluded communities in order to change the complex causes and consequences of poverty and disadvantage. NIACE strongly supports the policy aspirations behind the project.

2. NIACE works to encourage more and different adults to engage in learning of all kinds. It is an independent non-governmental organisation and registered charity. Its corporate and individual members come from all sectors concerned with adult learning and include FE colleges; universities; local authority and voluntary and community learning providers; work-based learning providers; churches; broadcasters, employers and unions. NIACE is currently the only organisation to have a formal voluntary sector compact agreement with the Department for Education and Skills.

3. The SEU consultation paper itself is aimed at people who either use or deliver services, or who belong to organisations that represent the interests of the three groups highlighted by the SEU initiative: “people with poor basic skills”, “disabled people and people with long term health conditions”, and “people from certain ethnic minority groups.” As the leading NGO for adult learning, NIACE works with providers and learners across all parts of the learning and skills sector, and with Government departments and agencies. As such, we do not fit the respondent categories and have therefore not completed the questionnaire. However, the main thrust of the SEU’s initiative, and some of its specific aspects, are of central importance to NIACE work, and therefore we would like to offer a number of comments. These are grouped under two headings: the consultation process; and the role of adult learning in supporting the work of public services in combating social exclusion.

4. NIACE welcomes the intention of the SEU to include locally-based activities in the consultation process. This should extend the reach of the research and help to secure the views of frontline workers and service users. However, we are concerned that if these are limited to focus groups and discussions with clients as part of visits to service providers, the emerging picture will reflect the thoughts of people who have overcome access barriers but may fail to include those of people who remain excluded.

5. NIACE recommends, therefore, that the process also includes participative community-based meetings, perhaps hosted by voluntary or community organisations, and using community development facilitators. These will contribute to a more inclusive picture of the issues, enable local people to identify feasible solutions, and support their greater ‘ownership’ of the process – all of which are critical components of any strategy to achieve more appropriate service development and delivery. These events would have the additional advantage of raising the profile of the services themselves.

6. The consultation process around ‘Working Together’, the Learning and Skills Council’s (LSC) national strategy for the voluntary and community sector (VCS), might offer an interesting model. As part of the process, the LSC allocated funds to support consultation meetings arranged by VCS organisations. The money was used to cover various costs (accommodation, childcare, refreshments, publicity, ‘back fill’) and dispersal of the funding and support for recipient organisations was managed by NIACE. This relatively modest investment significantly increased the scope of the consultation, particularly amongst smaller, more local bodies, and raised awareness of the strategy within the sector.

7. NIACE recognises that the consultation paper includes a definition of its use of the phrase “people with poor basic skills” which mentions basic numeracy, literacy and wider communication skills. We feel that it can be unhelpful to a proper understanding of the issues if these areas of work are conflated too frequently and urge that during the consultation process, clear distinctions are made between literacy, numeracy and language (and wider communication) needs, recognising their differences and particular requirements, and that these distinctions are reflected in the articulation of the research outcomes and recommendations.

8. NIACE agrees with the focus upon specific minority ethnic groups. The research underpinning Light and Shade: Participation in adult learning by minority ethnic adults (NIACE 2003) makes it clear that certain communities, notably Pakistani and Bangladeshi groups, are particularly under-represented in adult learning. The project’s findings and recommendations will be relevant to the SEU’s research. We also welcome the intention to explore the experience of exclusion for different faith groups.

9. NIACE believes strongly that the SEU, through its interpretation of the consultation outcomes, should counter any tendency to use deficit models of individuals and communities (for example, locating the problem in a lack of skills and understanding amongst local people) to explain the issues and frame the solutions. On the contrary, we believe the analysis must be based on an understanding of the structural inequalities underlying social exclusion, and of the impact of poverty, social class inequalities, and discrimination.

10. In the view of NIACE, the education and training system does not yet adequately address the needs of socially disadvantaged adults – and the way the system is structured (particularly the way in which it is dominated by centrally-set targets) makes it hard to build genuinely local capacity and secure local engagement. This is especially true when seeking to stimulate demand for learning among people whose experience of initial education may have been negative.

11. NIACE recommends that learner-centred (user-centred) principles and practices should apply to the task of reforming public services in this context, and that providers need to be encouraged and enabled to consult more effectively with their users and potential users. Good outreach and community-development methods could contribute significantly to more responsive, accessible and efficient services. For example, using trusted intermediaries and community representatives and participative planning techniques would help ensure services are more attuned to local requirements. Health champions, financial services champions and learning champions could support new and potential users, offering information (in community languages where appropriate), and advocacy between providers and users.

12. Action research undertaken jointly by NIACE, LSDA and Skill on enabling services to function more inclusively in relation to the Disability Discrimination Act might be helpful in this context. The work has a strong emphasis on including learners and takes account of cultural definitions of disability in relation to adults with disabilities from minority ethnic communities. Experience gained from developing financial education/literacy as well as the growing concept of health literacy, is also relevant – these are two substantial service areas where people from the three target groups are often missing. The work of NIACE and the Basic Skills Agency in financial education, and of NIACE and the NHSU on health literacy, may also be useful (see: www.niace.org.uk).

13. The DfES ‘Skills for Life’ (SfL) strategy for the development of literacy, language and numeracy, has prioritised particular groups of learners, many of whom fall within the three groups identified by the SEU. Developmental projects and initiatives, including research, have generated insights, information, approaches, methods, curricula and materials appropriate to learners and potential learners from these groups. Current work, funded by the DfES and led by NIACE, on literacy, language and numeracy development amongst people with learning difficulties and disabilities, is particularly relevant. Links between the outcomes of the SEU consultation and work undertaken under the SfL strategy would enrich responses and make these more coherent across key areas of Government policy.

14. Concerns about insufficiently effective or poor public services were also a feature of the Government’s ‘National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal’. This acknowledged that the many ways in which people are disadvantaged – through poverty, poor health, poor housing, inadequate education, disability, racism – are interconnected, and that consequently, lasting solutions must be founded on coherent, cross-service planning. The Strategy sought to encourage such partnership working, particularly within Local Authorities. NIACE has argued consistently that learning has a key role to play in developing these more supple and holistic responses. Turning activities into learning – whether these sit within housing, health, employment or benefit services – and linking them to other learning opportunities, is a key to ensuring services are more responsive and have a lasting impact on social exclusion. NIACE has developed materials specifically to support such cross-service working in the context of neighbourhood renewal which could be helpful to the SEU’s overarching ambition (see: Learning for the Future: neighbourhood renewal and adult an community learning (NIACE, 2003). We also believe that the core messages that the Skills Policy Action Team report, published by the SEU in 2000, remain valid and valuable.

15. NIACE would welcome the opportunity to expand upon any aspect of this response or to assist the work of the project in other ways. Please contact Cheryl.Turner@niace.org.uk in the first instance

Top of page