Workplace Basic Skills — Elusive Statistics and Real Change(1)

FIONA FRANK

Workplace Change Approach

The Workplace Basic Skills Network in the UK has paid particular attention, throughout the last ten years, to ensuring that the message coming through its professional development programs, its publications and its events, is one of a “non-deficit” and a “workplace change” approach to workplace basic skills. It is interesting that the UK Government Adult Basic Skills Strategy Unit, in their contribution to the latest Workplace Basic Skills Network bulletin talks about the fact that “basic skills” has a stigma attached to it where alternatives such as “enhancing employability” and “business skills” do not. It’s illuminating to stress that they feel that the ‘headline figures’ such as “the cost to industry of poor basic skills could be as high as £4.8 billion a year” do not register with employers.

The Network’s approach of workplace change means that we have encouraged practitioners approaching companies to relate the connections that can be made between workplace basic skills programs and those exact concepts of employability and business benefit quoted by the Strategy Unit. We feel that focusing on the negative statistics of loss, mistakes and inaccuracies which might be caused by workers with literacy problems, unnecessarily targets those workers as potentially being drains on the company’s balance sheet — rather than being useful members of staff with relevant skills in other areas, who need some brush-up training to help them to contribute to the new language, literacy and numeracy demands of the changing workplace.

Where Do the Figures Come From?

It’s time, then, to draw attention to where that £4.8 billion figure actually comes from. Too many publications — and too many practitioners — are using secondary sources for this, and other, figures in their reports and publicity, with no knowledge of their origins. For example, the following statistics were quoted in Lifelong Learning News, Spring 2002, Issue 5 — a government publication distributed to “workers and practitioners in the field of lifelong learning.” The source for all this information was given as “the Department for Education and Skills’ Skills for Life strategy, 2001.”

• Poor literacy and numeracy levels cost the UK £10 billion per year.

• The cost to industry specifically is £4.8 billion per year. A company employing fewer than 100 employees could be losing £86,000 per year. For organisations employing 1,000 employees or more, the cost could be as high as £500,000 per year.