I am delighted to have been asked to speak today and to contribute to your discussions on the role of the Learning and Skills Council in the renewal of disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

We have made an enormous amount of progress in establishing the LSC in recent months. We have issued a remit letter, which crystallises the role we will expect the Council to play. We have announced in broad terms the resources that will be available to the Council. And we have made a good start in making the key appointments – at national and local level – that the LSC will need. There is a great deal more to do over the coming months if the LSC is going to meet all the expectations that have been placed on it. We are on track, but I hope you will bear with us if progress in some areas is not always as rapid as we would all like.

I wanted to start by paying tribute to the role NIACE has played so far in helping us get the arrangements for the LSC right. You are the champions for individual adult learners and for the view that learning policy needs to be informed by social and cultural priorities as well as economic ones. I hope you will agree that those perspectives are fully reflected in the remit letter we have sent to the LSC. I also hope that you will continue to play the role of "critical friend" with my Department – and with the LSC directly – over the months to come.

Today, I wanted to try to answer three questions:

Neighbourhood renewal

The best starting point for understanding the Government’s approach to neighbourhood renewal remains, I think, Bringing Britain Together, the ground-breaking report published by the Social Exclusion Unit more than two years ago.

It is the kind of report Sir Humphrey Appleby would have described as "courageous" - and it does not mince its words. It emphasises first of all both the extent and the concentration of social disadvantage in our poorest communities. For example, the report compared the 44 local authority districts with the highest incidence of disadvantage with the national average. It found that the poorer areas had:

a quarter more adults with poor literacy and numeracy;

two thirds more unemployment;

mortality rates that were 30% higher;

five times as many secondary schools on special measures.

At least as important as the report’s anatomization of social disadvantage, though, was its very frank acknowledgement that many previous Government attempts to help solve the problems of disadvantaged neighbourhoods had simply not worked. They had been too fragmented and too short-term and – perhaps above all – too "top-down". Regeneration policy was something that was done to local communities, rather than with them. The report argued that a completely new approach was needed, based on clear evidence and on a much better understanding of what life was like in disadvantaged neighbourhoods and of what local communities really needed.

Following the publication of the Social Exclusion Unit’s report, 18 Policy Action Teams have done a great deal of work on the details of this new approach to neighbourhood renewal. It has been a huge collective enterprise involving a large number of people from outside Government, as well as Whitehall Departments. Some have compared it to a Victorian Royal Commission, though that is perhaps a little too grand. The PATs represented a serious attempt by Government to see the problems of disadvantaged neighbourhoods as they are and to come up with solutions that are workable and that will command local support.

All of this work will be crystallised in the National Strategy for Neighbourhood Renewal. We consulted on an outline of the strategy earlier in the year and a final version will be published shortly. It will set out a genuine long-term strategy for the renewal of disadvantaged neighbourhoods which goes with the grain of local communities and which is based on evidence.

I do not have time to sketch out all the details of the National Strategy. It would in any case be wrong for me to pre-empt what it will say. However, to provide a wider context for what I want to say later about adult learning and the LSC, I want to pick out three key themes which encapsulate the new approach to neighbourhood renewal that we want to pursue. Those themes are:

"top-down" solutions don’t work;

joined-up problems need joined-up solutions;

public policy needs to be based on evidence – and a clear sense of "what works".

To go with the grain of Government policy on neighbourhood renewal, we need an approach to adult learning which reflects those themes. I want to say a little more later about how that needs to happen.

Adult learning and neighbourhood renewal

The second question I said I would try to answer was what contribution adult learning had to make to the renewal of disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

I am sure that this audience will not need persuading that the role of adult learning is critical. And as an Education Minister, it is naturally not a view that I have a problem with.

What is more important is that others now agree with us. There is widespread recognition that past regeneration policy has focused too much on bricks and mortar – on making improvements to physical infrastructure - and not enough on people. And I think it was striking that improving adult learning and skills made it as "Key Idea Number One" in the consultation document on the overall National Strategy published earlier in the year.

I think the main reason why adult learning is so critical is that the barriers people who live in disadvantaged communities face are at least as much psychological as they are physical.

Of course there are real problems related to for example the dilapidated state of local housing or poor transport links. And those need to be tackled too.

But at least as important is the fact that the residents of disadvantaged neighbourhoods often have a limited sense of what it is possible for them to achieve, low levels of self-confidence and a sense of disconnection from the world outside their estate.

It is not surprising that this should be so. People in many areas have had a very poor experience of compulsory schooling. They have few if any formal qualifications and often have serious difficulties with literacy and numeracy. The experience of inter-generational unemployment in many communities – particularly where a single industry has been dominant but has now disappeared – has not helped people to develop the skills and attitudes they need to make their way in the world.

Nevertheless, getting adults involved in learning can be the key to unlocking these problems. By building people’s self-confidence and broadening their horizons– and helping them develop the skills they need to participate in the labour market – learning can give disadvantaged people a greatly enhanced sense of possibility. Getting that right is a crucial component of neighbourhood renewal that works, not least because local people who have been energised by learning can play a much more effective role in developing and managing projects in their own communities.

The Secretary of State’s remit letter to the LSC refers to the importance of reviving the great traditions of adult education in this country. I know that one of the traditions he had in mind was the role of adult education in helping disadvantaged people to improve their knowledge and skills in later life – the tradition of the Workers’ Educational Association, of Mechanics’ Institutes, of the local public library, of the whole network of local and accessible organisations which can help to provide the initial bridge for adults into learning.

Over the past three years, we have placed a great deal of emphasis on providing more and more accessible opportunities for adult learners. Examples include:

Widening Participation in Further Education, which has given colleges a strong incentive to engage with local disadvantaged communities and to recruit more learners from those areas;

the Adult and Community Learning Fund, which is no supporting more than 300 community-based projects aimed at disadvantaged learners – and in which NIACE has of course had a prominent role;

the "non-Schedule 2 pilots" launched by the FEFC;

the ICT Learning Centres supported through the Capital Modernisation Fund.

Those initiatives have each in their own way been important landmarks. The advent of the LSC, however, means there is an opportunity to broaden and deepen our approach to learning for neighbourhood renewal. I now want to turn to our thinking about the LSC’s specific role in this area.

The LSC and neighbourhood renewal

As David Russell has already said, tackling social exclusion and making an effective contribution to neighbourhood renewal will be key priorities for the LSC.

Almost all of the LSC’s learning programmes will benefit disadvantaged neighbourhoods in varying degrees.

That is most obviously the case with the Adult Learning Plans which the LSC will be supporting through LEAs. There will, I hope, be a strong emphasis in those plans on community-based learning – providing learning where people live – on outreach and on engaging disadvantaged learners. I am pleased that we have been able to re-affirm our commitment to LEAs’ very important role in these areas.

But obviously enough, almost all of the LSC’s activity – including the work of FE colleges supported through the national funding formula and work-based training - will also affect disadvantaged neighbourhoods.

So perhaps what is most important is that all of the LSC’s work in disadvantaged communities reflects the new approach to neighbourhood renewal that I sketched out earlier. I picked out three themes which typify that approach:

How are these themes going to be reflected in the LSC’s work?

On the first point, we have been clear that the LSC will need to design solutions which take account of the wishes of individual learners and communities, as well as the priorities of national Government. The fact that we are going to have 47 local LSCs, each with a Local Initiatives Fund with which they can respond to local priorities will obviously help here. Learning Partnerships will of course have a crucial role in ensuring that the perspectives of local people are fed into the LSC’s decisions about what learning to fund –and how. And I hope that local LSCs will make real efforts to build real and lasting contacts with residents and practitioners in the most disadvantaged communities on their patch – who are most in need of their help.

On the second point, the establishment of the LSC is in itself a major exercise in joined-up Government. For the first time, we will have a single organisation responsible for planning and overseeing post-16 learning in each community. No longer will we have learning programmes run by different public agencies in the same area which are not co-ordinated and which do not fit. It will be the LSC’s job to ensure that they do.

However, integrating learning programmes better with each other is only one side of the coin. We also need to ensure that these programmes work better with wider initiatives designed to help renew disadvantaged neighbourhoods. So it will be vitally important that local LSCs engage with the new and more community-based infrastructure for managing neighbourhood renewal that is emerging from the national strategy – for example Local Strategic Partnerships and new arrangements for neighbourhood management. I would like to see local LSCs taking a holistic view with these local partners of what disadvantaged communities need and working with them to ensure that it happens.

Finally, we need to ensure that the LSC’s approach to its work in disadvantaged neighbourhoods is based on evidence about what works. My view is that there is no need to re-invent the wheel here. We have a mass of evidence – from the Adult and Community Learning Fund, the non-Schedule 2 pilots and the Policy Action Team on Skills – about which approaches work and which don’t. The main points I would pick out are:

There is I believe now a strong consensus around these key points. We will be working with the LSC to ensure they are embedded in future approaches to supporting learning in disadvantaged communities.

Peroration

We are setting up the LSC at the same time as the Government is developing a genuine long-term strategy to regenerate our most disadvantaged estates. There is a golden opportunity, which we must not lose, to ensure that the two work in close harmony. That adult learning is at the heart of the Government’s approach to neighbourhood renewal. And that a "joined-up" approach to providing learning for the most disadvantaged in our society is at the heart of the LSC’s concerns.

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