Workplace Basic Skills in the UK

FIONA FRANK

AS I MOVE ON FROM THE Workplace Basic Skills Network, to carry out research into the not unrelated issues of education and immigration,(1) I’ve spent some time looking back at the last twelve years of working in this area.

It’s obvious to anyone who’s been around in workplace basic skills in the UK over the past twelve — or ten — or even three years that there have been a lot of changes in this field. When I started doing research into the topic in 1991, the landscape was rather deserted — with excellent work being done by Workbase around the country, and with a basis to work on left by the Industrial Language Training Units, but with very little else going on apart from a few pockets of activity run by some training providers around the country. One was Jane Mace at Goldsmiths College, who was delivering training to the University cleaners and wrote about this in the seminal book Time Off to Learn (Mace & Yarnit, 1987). In 1992, in what we then thought was an influx of untold wealth, twenty pilot projects were funded by the government as part of a £6 million “Basic Skills at Work” initiative.

New Projects, New Visibility, More Commitment

Now, of course, we have massive Government commitment, an adoption of this issue by every Local Learning and Skills Council (LLSC) in England — and new projects and new commitment in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland — and new visibility of this previously obscure topic in the media everywhere you turn. Excellent press, focused particularly on the Union Learning Fund model workplace basic skills programs, has raised awareness, in probably every sector, of the usefulness of this type of training both to the organisation and the individual. The Employer Toolkit has been sent out by the government Adult Basic Skills Strategy Unit to thousands of employers over the country, providing a useful “peg” for them to hang any number of new projects on. New targets for basic skills achievement are being adopted by Local Learning and Skills Councils in every region of England; and several sources are saying that in many regions 50 per cent of these targets will be reached by learners in the workplace.

All the generic agencies who have an association with this work have taken on new staff and new commitment to engage with the workplace basic skills agenda. The National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE), representing the adult learner, has an enormous engagement with the National Health Service University. The Learning and Skills Development Agency (LSDA), supporting all training providers, commissioned John Payne to carry out a large project charting research in workplace basic skills (Payne & Grief, 2002). The Basic Skills Agency (which has of course been involved in workplace basic skills for many years) has been running the Broker scheme and the National Training Organisation mapping project and is delivering several new regional and national projects.