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Workshop C
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Workshop A |
Workshop B |
Workshop C |
Workshop D
Workshop C - Session 3 - Questions and Contributions
Q: (Jane Black, Manchester City Council) I would like to ask the speakers to talk about partnerships with other agencies, particularly agencies from the non-education world. It is clear to me that we cannot solve any of these problems just by working as education providers without partners in the private and public sector. Q: (Jerry Rodgers, ILO, Geneva) One of the real problems as I see it is that we have moved to an ethos of the individual and it is now up to the individual to correct the structural problems of the past, which have led to the inequalities that we see in the educational system and the capabilities of people to day. I have sat through some of the other sessions this morning when we were talking about learning organisations and individual responsibility. There seems to be a gulf between the rhetoric of those sessions and the real life problems that excluded people actually face in terms of the capabilities that they actually have to acquire, the skills to acquire the basic skills in which employers will not invest because the returns for employers are much higher to invest in those who are already better endowed Q: (Sara Perman, Trade Union Congress, UK) The figures that Allan Wells produced showing the UK's performance of basic skills compared to Canada and Sweden was particularly shocking. I understand it is not the fact that other countries are doing outstanding well, and we are the norm. It is the fact that the UK is doing particularly badly and that we become bottom of lots of international surveys that are carried out. What is it that the UK have done so badly wrong, and how far do you think that the government here, with their strategy directed at schools, will address the issues for people who are going through the compulsory education system at the moment? What is it that other countries like Canada and Sweden are doing particularly well? Alan Wells: I think the strategy in schools currently in the UK may very well work. I hope it does. The problem is it will be very late for a lot of people. Family literacy programmes could be one of the most successful ways of motivating people, I think. On partnership, I was fascinated to read something recently and to talk to the Minister for Welfare Reform in this country, Frank Field, who saw basic skills issues and under- education as the fundamental issue in terms of welfare reform, along with all sorts of other issues about housing and homelessness. I actually think that you cannot attack social exclusion by just thinking lifelong learning will be the answer to that. You have got to work with other agencies. I would like to see conferences in the future where you saw those agencies, where you saw people from housing and homelessness and health and social economic regeneration. We tend to convince ourselves that we are the answer and I think that sometimes they think they are the answer, and probably altogether we might have some hope of at least offering some kind of answer. Causation Isabel Garcia-Longoria: We have extensive research now on causation because we follow these groups. What you find is that people who end up with poor basic skills come largely from poverty, from traditional white working class families, so many of them went to schools where lots of other children failed as well. That says something I think, if you look back over the long term about the devisiveness for many years of our school system which separated people into the succeeders and the failures very very early on. That kind of devisiveness of a school system has a lot to answer for. Q: Well the basic problem we face at the moment is that finance is always short and although many companies or enterprises are willing to help, nobody wants to invest in the long term. Q: I did carry out research which showed a very strong correlation between illiteracy and accidents in the workplace. When you talk about public building works, that this has a direct effect on productivity; you can get through to people I think on that basis. Q: (Liz Millman, Bilston Community College, Wolverhampton, UK) We have been doing some work with companies. We surveyed a very large company - Cadbury's the chocolate making company - who were very concerned about issues where they felt that their employees were not able to take an active part in discussion meetings, or able to read the safety notices. Now we work with them and they think that it is worthwhile paying us to manage and administer a project and we have a learning centre right in the canteen in the main firm in Bourneville. Subsidy Tom Schuller: I think that while that is encouraging my experiences here and in Canada and in the United States is that once the subsidy from the state is withdrawn from employers generally they do not want to do it anymore, because the bottom line in terms of making money means there are all sorts of other things to do instead. The other problem is when we talk about SMEs we should really talk about TSMEs, tiny, small and medium-sized companies, because there are lots of people working for companies where you are talking about perhaps under 10 employees. I think the University for Industry has got a major role to play there. Q: (Marie Duval, Department for Education and Employment) I just wondered if the word hierarchy is something that we ought to be focusing discussions around because people with poor basic skills and indeed those that are socially excluded, are likely to be at the bottom of the heap in employment terms. That means that they are not going to be getting much training anyway. It is not just a question of having poor basic skills; they are simply going to be excluded from the way in which most employers think about their training strategies. It occurred to me in management terms: we think about a hierarchy of need and I think that when we talk about socially excluded people, that we should think about their hierarchy of needs. One of the ways in which certainly the new British government is beginning to move is to try and put the the individual learner first. In particular there is a very strong message coming through from ministers about the importance of initiatives like family literacy and other family learning initiatives. Tom Schuller: I have put 4 points that I am going to take back and just leave with the people responsible for synthesising all this
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