‘Seminar on wheels’ for Community Cohesion Monday, November 30, 2009 - 18:50

A ‘seminar on wheels', looking at inner-city community cohesion, where managers got to meet the people they serve, was held across Leicester, on Tuesday 1 December 2009. Organised by NIACE and Leicester City Council, delegates at the Learning to Drive seminar visited community centres across the city and had the opportunity to see what is happening in one of the leading authorities for community cohesion in the country.

The main discussions on the day focussed on:

• why community cohesion is so often about race and faith, when other inequalities and issues affect cohesion as well;
• how much intolerance is growing in our society as recent research suggests;
• the impact the recession is having on the cohesion agenda - does it reinforce the gaps or is it an opportunityor society to pull together?;
• why preventing violent extremism has tended to dominate the agenda to the exclusion of other, perhaps more relevant, topics;
• how cohesion relates to health, safety and crime and how might adult learning respond;
• what the impact of demographic change, including migration, will have on cohesion; and
• what we mean by community and cohesion - what does a cohesive community looks like and would anyone want to live there?

The centres visited included:

• the African Caribbean Centre, which acts as a focal point for activities and links to the annual Carnival which is one of the biggest carnivals in Britain. The community has highlighted several key challenges for the city to tackle including the "invisibleness and underdevelopment of black people in the city'; the ‘poverty of skills, knowledge and awareness in the community' and the investment in children and young people;
• the Belgrave Centre is in the heart of Leicester's ‘Golden Mile' - a major shopping and business centre for Indian businesses. The Belgrave Centre hosts a wide range of learning and skills and community activities aimed at the Gujerati citizens of Leicester who make up 28 per cent of the city's population. The annual Diwali celebrations are the biggest in the UK; and
• the Brite Centre is in the middle of Braunstone, a white working-class estate and New Deal for Communities area. The Brite Centre co-locates services around a library and IT centre along with a café and other training rooms. The centre provides many opportunities for local residents to improve their skills and chances of employment with a strong spirit of learning and self-improvement at its core.

Jane Watts, a Programme Director at NIACE, said:

"While there have been years of work on community cohesion there is still disagreement about what cohesion means, who it applies to and why, and what we should do about it. Even though some answers have been found - solutions are often not shared. It's all too often a case of wheels being reinvented."

"This is the first time NIACE has held a seminar of this kind, where delegates will be able to get to the heart of the issue and see, first hand, examples of community cohesion at work. We want to stimulate a coherent debate as to how best to implement measures which support the nationwide development of community cohesion in a way which meets needs and makes sense to local people. Managers don't often get to meet the people they serve at seminars. While NIACE has been getting more service users involved in conferences this is the next step - meeting real people in real settings. We feel this is a simple but powerful innovation in partnership with local communities."

Chris Minter, Head of Adult Skills and Learning from Leicester City Council, said:

"Community Cohesion is at the heart of all of the services that the public sector provides and in tackling inequalities that exist in all areas of the UK. All public sector organisations therefore need to put it at the centre of what they do. We are all working with many diverse communities and, whilst we don't have all the answers, Leicester is a great melting pot to explore how this can be tackled."

"On the day, we will cover the strategic approach to community cohesion and how this can be worked through in practice with adult skills and learning being a vital part of making it happen. Those who take part in learning are more likely to know a broader cross section of people and are less likely to be intolerant of others. Everyone who comes on the day will bring their own experience and we hope that from this we can all learn together how to tackle this complex issue in all our diverse areas."