North West Telephone Survey

The North West figures come from closer to home. They are taken from a telephone survey I carried out, as part of a research project I undertook here at the Centre for the Study of Education and Training (CSET) at Lancaster University with Mary Hamilton between 1991 and 1993 (Frank & Hamilton, 1993).(5) To me, the importance of the statistics quoted above (“though 94 per cent of companies in the north-west said that reading and writing skills were important in manual tasks, ‘only 61 per cent’ [my emphasis] saw a need to train workers in these skills”) is the relatively high proportion of employers who understood the issues I was talking about, once I took the time to relate them to their particular situation. Many of the employers I talked to about literacy said “No, we don’t have a problem.” But once I talked about workplace change they often said something like: “Oh, you mean John? Well, we wanted to put him up for promotion but we had to change the nature of his job so he could do it. Oh, yes, we could do with some training for him!”

It certainly illuminated, for me, the lack of interest and understanding by employers of the vocabulary of literacy deficits compared with their full engagement with business benefits of this kind of training. When asked, they were all able to come up with benefits that they could see workplace basic skills training would bring to their companies. These benefits ranged from greater accuracy and an improvement in the company’s image, through facilitation of change and improved communication (organisational benefits), to improved promotion prospects, job enrichment, personal development and, of course, confidence building (individual benefits).

It was this research project, plus a Commonwealth Scholarship Fund visit to workplace basic skills providers in the UK by Chris Holland, in fact, which led to the setting up of the Workplace Basic Skills Network in late 1993 (See “Workplace Basic Skills in the UK” in Section I).

ALBSU. (1993). The Cost to Industry: Basic Skills and the UK Workforce. London: ALBSU (now BSA).

Frank, F. & Hamilton, M. (1993). Not Just a Number: The Role of Workplace Basic Skills Programs in the Changing Workforce: A Report to the Leverhulme Trust. Lancaster: CSET, Lancaster University. (Available from the Workplace Basic Skills Network at £10.00 plus £2.00 p&p — cheques with order please, payable to Lancaster University.)

O’Mahony, M. & De Boer, W. (2002). Britain’s Relative Productivity Performance: Updates to 1999. London: NIESR. — http://www.niesr.ac.uk

Payne, J & Grief, S. (2002). Workplace Basic Skills: A Research Review. London: LSDA

Robinson, P. (1997). Literacy, Numeracy and Economic Performance. London: LSE Centre for Economic Performance.

Fiona Frank is Honorary Research Fellow, Centre for the Study of Education and Training, Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University and the former Executive Director, Workplace Basic Skills Network.