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Dialogue
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Maria Helena André, Secretary of the European Trade Union Confederation Francis Smith, European Commission Paul Bochu, European Public Sector Employers Confederation Bob Fryer, Principal, Northern College, UK
John Humphrys: What I would like to do during this round table session is to try to talk practically, with ideally as little jargon as possible. Let us deal with 3 or 4 areas that we ought to concentrate on for the first part of this discussion. These are: considering people in work, who pays for and who supplies the education and training, whatever you want to call it, that everybody agrees is needed in any organisation. Bob let me kick off with you. Whose broad responsibility ought that to be? Bob Fryer: The easiest way to answer this is to think of the different kinds of learning. If we are talking about learning at work, which is about very specific skills, which are particular to a given employer, then there is no doubt in my mind that is an employer's responsibility. And indeed many employers would see it as their responsibility. It is about adding value to the product or the processes and the services. There cannot be much doubt about that, and indeed many employers do invest in that kind of learning already. John Humphrys: Big and small? Bob Fryer: Big and small, all over the country, and as somebody said rightly this morning, not all of that learning is formal, it is not "education". It involves problem solving, practical activity, and employers do support that. We need more of it, but there is no question in my mind that that is an employer's responsibility. At the other end of the scale if you think about those kinds of basic and core and transferable skills, particularly the learning to learn skills that we all need throughout our life, there is no doubt in my mind that is a public responsibility. That is a matter for the public terrain and we have to get our public policy right. Those of us who are engaged in delivery have to get the highest possible quality of delivery, so that anybody that goes through the education system comes out with those skills. John Humphrys: When you say 'a public responsibility' do you mean specifically the taxpayers responsibility, that we the taxpayer should be footing the bill for that? Fryer: Yes. - In the middle then, between those two poles, there is a very much more interesting area and that is where the partnership issue comes in. I think we have other responsibilities throughout our own lives, first of all, for our own learning. Some people will be able to pay for that because they have the wherewithal, the material wherewithal, and there is no question that we should encourage more and more people to take an interest in their own learning and to invest in it. We can stimulate that by brilliant ideas like the Individual Learning Accounts. Of course the employers must share in that broader learning to put people in a position to anticipate what we don't yet know will come up, in work and around work: new jobs, new skills, new moments, new problems. The third party to this will be the community, of which the state and the taxpayer is only one part. Voluntary organisations, community groups, charitable bodies, foundations, we've got to bring many more funders into learning so that we can begin to look like other countries that spend very much more of their GNP on learning than we do. But we must not assume that all of that has to come from the taxpayer. We have got to share that responsibility between individuals, companies and the state and bring in the community at large much more to invest in learning. John Humphrys: Who do you mean, by the community at large specifically? Bob Fryer: Let me give you 2 quite different examples. Take a tenants organisation, very important part of active citizenship, learning how to run and manage and organise your own housing, a fundamentally important thing in everybody's life. We want to encourage practical engagement in learning activities, devoting some of their resources to making transformational differences in voluntary organisations. Those resources are not always cash. They can be often be time, or facilities, or access, bits and pieces of transport, small amounts of money. Trade Unions That's one example, I could go to a very different one and think about campaigning voluntary organisations, like shall we say Age Concern. If Age Concern doesn't have lifelong learning at its heart, I don't know why it exists, because through learning we can give people that possibility of independent living. Even when people are frail and some parts of the body are giving up a bit, they can have the life of the mind which gives them intellectual independence, a sense of dignity. John Humphrys: Marie Helena from a trade union perspective, what's the trade unions role in this? Marie Helena André: We have spoken a lot about partnership, but we have not spoken enough about partnership inside the company and about the shared responsibility that trade unions and employers also have in relation to public authorities. If we want to have a serious debate on this specific topic, if we want to motivate people, employers, - because everyone needs to be motivated - , we need to develop this culture of lifelong learning. We need to have a clear definition of responsibilities and, as Bob was saying, this has different levels, from a trade union perspective and from a company perspective. It is quite clear that if the training is to be developed just for the sake of the company then it is the first responsibility of the employer, that's very clear, and the employer should pay for it. We have also spoken a lot about the need to diversify the organisation of work and I think that could be a contribution from the employees' side. New forms of work organisation, new forms of organising time inside the company, could imply a contribution from the employee to the learning inside the company. You have to see what the other priorities are. Trade unions are fully open to negotiating different flexible and adaptable ways to incorporate learning inside the company. It also implies that within the framework of what we now seem to call the learning organisation, there has to be a motivation inside the company, there has to be a shared objective and I think that this is the right way forward, inside the company. John Humphrys: You said earlier that employers were playing their part and there was no need for a levy, but I mean, the fact is that if you ask the chairman or chief executive of a company what his priority is, he will say, if he is speaking to you honestly, the share price, that's the first thing he'll talk about, the value of the company as far as the shareholders are concerned. And then he'll say, 'But of course, we cannot achieve a satisfactory share price unless the company operates successfully, and in order for it to operate successfully you have to have a fully trained workforce and so on.' That is how he is going to categorise things. Marie Helena André: I think employers today recognise that people are the key to their organisations. A lot of people might have said that 10 years ago and that might have been a cliché. I think now the reality is coming home and they are doing things about it. You asked what are the practical things that can be done. My definition of the responsibility of employers actually goes a bit beyond Bob's, because I think employers must be responsible for all the learning and training and development that is necessary for that organisation to meet its business needs and think about the future, and the future of the organisation. I mentioned at one of the sessions yesterday that some research has been done looking at the financial services sector. Five years ago the window of opportunity to make an input and to earn a profit, was about 20 months, that research shows that today the window of opportunity is reduced to about 8 months. John Humphrys: Could you define the window of opportunity? Frightening Timescale Tony Webb: I will. It is the time in which a business can get into that market with its own particular product, create an opportunity, and make some profit. Within the opportunity, 80% of profit comes in the first half of that window and those who relate into it, but we are fighting for the remaining 20% in the second half. So we have got to be in a situation where we can react very quickly to change, and that is why there have been some major changes in structure of organisations in the UK and other parts of the world, in order to respond to this sort of challenge. I think that timescale is quite frightening and I do not think many of us are geared up to deal with it. In the UK we have a standard called Investors in People standard, which 75% of the largest organisations employing over 200 people are committed to. It has interested about 40% of organisations employing more than 50 employees and so there is a very real interest amongst organisations in improving their performance by relating it to the best practice at the standard shows. This standard does not relate only to businesses, because I think one of the false dichotomies here is that somehow the business interest is different to the interests of other organisations. In the UK we have mapped out an education and training infrastructure which is relevant to all organisations, and schools, the public sector, voluntary groups have been seizing these instruments as much as the business sector, and I think that is one of the strengths of our system. But a last point if I may, I think there is in existence at the moment a lot of confusion about the meaning of employability and we all use it. The CBI is going to produce a document, a discussion document next month, which really addresses the issue that you've been raising about who is responsible for what, who pays, who supports, what is the relative contributions of the all the different partners? Employability as a concept, I think, has to be individually centred. It has to be the individual. But no individual can make it on their own; they are going to need tremendous support from the education service, from employers, from trade unions, from government, from a whole range of professional bodies, support organisations, the national training organisations, the training and enterprise councils. No one is good enough to make it on their own and we need to formalise this partnership in a way that people formally understand their responsibilities. Informally there are lots of good examples of best practice where this already happens, we need to recognise this explicitly. I think that will be a major change. To pick up a quick thought on what Marie Helena was talking about, the relationship with the trade unions. I see two things happening, in my own experience there is the private relationship as it were, and the public relationship. The public relationship: there is no difficulty nowadays getting trade unionists talking very warmly about partnerships and all the rest of it, because they think frequently that is the kind of language you want to hear. Privately you get a very different message, as often as not, and the old relationship, the old antagonistic relationship still very often applies. Where we are agreed with the trade unions completely is on objectives, on competitiveness, on providing jobs, and that means the infrastructure, the NVQs, the Investors in People. All these things have been developed with trade union involvement and that is a very important part of the process. John Humphrys: But if you went to a trades union leader and said, 'Look, we reckon that your guys in this particular industry should give up 4 hours of their week or add 4 hours onto their working week in order to do whatever training we have in mind', I think you'd get a fairly dusty response, wouldn't you? Bargaining for Opportunities Paul Bochu: I mean if it is a shared responsibility, you can't simply say to employees 'to add value to this company we are going to extend your working week.' Of course there is conflict between trade unions and employers, there always will be, but let us get learning at the centre of that bargaining relationship, so that people are bargaining about opportunities for learning, opportunities to extend their skills, opportunities to develop their creativity, opportunities to become full people. Raymond Williams once wrote a brilliant essay about the unemployed self being at the heart of our problems in our country. Thirty years ago your fellow countryman wrote that. So let us have that at the heart of conflict, at the heart of the distributional debate between employers and employees and their representatives, so that precisely what Tony said can become a reality. Maria Helena André: It's not just a question of time because, as we said in the beginning, Bob and I, if it is for the sole benefit of the company, that is in company time, full stop. But it is not just training. There are other things that you have to put in place inside the company. You have to monitor quality of the training; you have to monitor access to the training; you have to monitor the possibility of certifying the qualifications you acquire, even if it is informal. So there are a number of other issues inside the company which employers and trade unions have to discuss, and it is not just a question of delivering training in itself but everything that can be associated to that. John Humphrys: What about the role of the European Commission in this? Frances Smith: I think the European Commission's role is very much one of a facilitator, of bringing together people who would not necessarily always speak to each other. It is a role of promoting exchange of ideas, sharing of good practice. This has been said from the outset of this conference, that what we should all be doing is sharing. It is not always easy to share things when you think somebody may have a competitive interest in not sharing. I think one of our roles is very much that of trying, with certain financial incentives, to provide a platform in which people can tell each other what they are doing and not only tell each other what they are doing, but together work on perhaps spreading it a little bit further. The programme for which I work the LEONARDO Programme finances about 700 or so projects per year, what we call - excuse me if I start speaking a little bit of Eurospeak - transnational multi-partner projects. That means that the projects must involve several European countries and must not simply be training providers getting together, or trade unions getting together, or employers getting together, but a mixture of all of those. Lots of the projects also do involve the people who are going to be the beneficiaries of training. I think we frequently forget that. They are not in the room here today on the whole. We promote research at European level, so we try and bring together the best experience, for example, if certain countries have an experience and certain firms have an experience of how funding can be provided in a way that is acceptable. The projects have improved industrial relations; the trade unions and the employers are working effectively together. We try and spread the word about those sort of ideas. John Humphrys:But in the real world there is competition between companies, between countries. Mobility Frances Smith: There is, but, as several people have said here over the last two days, you have to bear in mind that we are no longer working in isolated national context. I'm not saying national boundaries collapse, but I think there is an increasing amount of mobility between countries, firms trading between countries throughout Europe, and therefore a need to understand the different cultures, the different languages of Europe. I think that is the kind of thing we are promoting. John Humphrys: Paul, European Public Sector employee, is there a difference in your experience between what happens in the public sector where, in theory in any rate, there is not competition and in the private sector? Too Expensive Paul Bochu: First of all, at the European Centre we represent companies which have public participation; they are not public companies, which is very different. In terms of financing I must say that we should not be ashamed of what we are doing in France. I refer now to the legislation which was mentioned this morning. A problem now is that training expenses become too big. The effort which is shared between the employee and the employer, co-investment as it is called, is really a problem. We would like to have such training which is encouraged, but training expenses are now excessive and the effort must now be shared. The company is going to be the facilitator, will encourage, will give up time, will give rewards if a diploma is obtained, for example, but we have to make sure that the cost of training does not become excessive, we have now reached a limit that we must not overstep. Between the training plan which is financed completely by the company and other schemes, for example, time off for training, there are possibilities of funding by the employee and by the company. The company gives the incentive and of course is interested in the general level of employees getting better, but the employee takes time off from his free time. It is the time which is very costly for a company so the time is shared -part of it is time off work and part of it is time off free time. There is also training and general culture and not just professional based training. When it is professional based we are taking into account in the company itself. Everything which is training, which is vocational based, is taken on by the company within its training. But anything which is going to develop your career opportunities is considered as part of co-investment, the company will benefit from it, because if you need to add on professional qualifications to it, it will cost less because it will be shorter of course. Obligation Bob Fryer: It may well be on this debate about obligation on employers that under certain conditions obligation works. In the United Kingdom, you still do have some levy systems, because they do work in some industries, but in many industries they don't. But I am against the levy system because it seems to me first of all to introduce now, to get this cultural change that we are all talking about, a system about obligation and compulsion runs three dangers. First, it runs entirely against that idea of individual and corporate and collective commitment for the pleasures and benefits of learning that we heard about this morning. You actually cannot force anybody to learn, that's one thing that we understand. Secondly, I think we would have a whole army of people, both on the side of companies and on the side of the state, that were going round auditing. In the new learning age that we are talking about measuring what counts as learning isn't simply about old fashioned kinds of qualifications always - sometimes it is - but there is all sorts of new learning in the new agenda. The third reason I'm against a levy system is that it really does not take us to the heart of the issue. The heart of the issue is in small companies with high labour turnover, living at the edge of competitiveness and innovation. We are talking about small or medium sized, - I wish we'd stop that; let us talk about small and tiny. 30% of employees in this country work in companies of less than 20. Six million of our fellow citizens work 16 or 17 hours a week and less. So what we now need is a practical way, between absolute voluntarism and rhetoric and exhortation on the one hand, and the narrow and old fashioned way of simply imposing levies with all the problems of that. I think we do have to explore new ways, new kinds of incentives, new ways of actually getting people into learning, both companies and employers. Let me give you one very practical way. The good thing that anybody involved in any enterprise soon understands and learns is that you have got to find out what your customers want. You've got to find out what your markets will bear, you've got to find out about prices and distribution and quality and all these things that we were hearing about just now. What we have got to do is to find out about the learning needs of employees as a normal business activity. We have got to get that at the heart of being a normal business activity. That is what shows the difference between a good business and a bad one is not only that you find out about what products work, what markets work, what services work, what suppliers can be relied upon, which banks to go to and which to avoid, you also find out what kinds of learning needs there are in your business, by analysing, foretelling, looking to the future, sharing in those learning needs. But let me just add one last point. We cannot all be on the side of employers. After all these are the very industries in which you get large labour turnover, mobility, change. People have got to own their own learning and we've got some very practical methods which are going to be launched next year. There is this brilliant idea of a national progress file, in which people invest in their own learning, reflect on their own learning, present a kind of living CV, it might even be on a bit of plastic card eventually, a very practical way of getting this cultural shift. We should not going back to the old ways of the levy which didn't work in this country, they may well work elsewhere. We should not simply leave it to rhetoric and exhortation but find new practical ways for individuals, for trade unions, for employers and for small businesses. John Humphrys: This plastic card, this thing that we're going to invest in, - invest in what sense? What's going to happen? New Ways Bob Fryer: One of things is that if we try and think about learning in new ways, we have to realise that learning is not something that is done to us, that is given to us only. It is about us investing in our own learning. We have got to invest in our own learning needs, reflecting on what we've done. John Humphrys: Why don't you ever use the word training? Bob Fryer: Why I don't use training is because I think training is a very specific kind of learning. I don't want to get into a kind of dialogue, I mean I want to avoid all this theory that you in broadcasters go on about all the time and get down to practicalities. One of the main problems is that training is still very largely supply driven. As long as it is supply driven, employers are not going to see why they should invest in it, because it may be not what they need; and employees are not going to be too keen to follow it because it is just something that is being delivered: you go in and you sit and you absorb something, and you don't see the point in it. Very often when we receive projects for financing we find they are very much the training providers telling us what they would like to do, without really telling us why they should be doing it and who is going to benefit. Dave Spooner (European Workers Education Association): I'm very interested in the role of trade unions in this whole process. But I'm becoming rather concerned that the entire debate has a somewhat utilitarian feel about it. It is about training; it is about vocation; it is about productivity; it is about profitability; it is about competitiveness and all of these very important issues. I understand, the importance of all of that. However, for example, the trade union movement, and also voluntary organisations, have a much broader contribution to lifelong learning, whether it be social education, political education, international awareness, all of these various issues which have not been touched at all yet. My worry is that lifelong learning actually gets driven more and more into a very narrow mindset, that basically it is there to serve competitiveness by employers. I want to know how we are going to escape that trap. Bob Fryer: If we look around - and it is true in every European country in different ways that normally about a third of all adults at some point in a 2 or 3 year cycle take part in some kind of voluntary or community activity. This can happen in all sorts of ways, everything from engaging in something very practical like a play group or a tenants' group, to taking part in plays and organising walks and so on. Now it is in this area that people express practical citizenship, not just by casting votes and taking part in constitutional matters. Dave Spooner is absolutely right: it is in this area that people, through their own voluntary commitment and interest and motivation, contribute to the quality of life, to the sense of social cohesion, their creativity, their interest in cultural activities. This is an enormous area of learning opportunity - volunteering, organising, creating, networking all across the country. Now we've got to understand that in some areas voluntary groups are the biggest creators of employment. That is an area to invest in enormously, in creative learning, in learning for personal development. In the wonderful foreword that David Blunkett has written to THE LEARNING AGE - where he talks about our spirituality, our social cohesion, our contribution to family and the community - he says that our appreciation of the arts and literature and music is through a lot of volunteering. A second area in which we can invest much more is the family. We talk a lot about schooling and I want to see schooling integrated much better with lifelong learning. I'm with you entirely on that. We have not done that in this country and it is no good saying we have just because there are a few rhetorical flourishes around. But kids only spend 20% of their time in school when they're young. What about all the other areas in which we can invest in ourselves and in our people? Great Divide Frances Smith: I sometimes, listening to the people around the table, have the impression that I've only been present at half the events. Listening to Bob just now - he seems to be describing some sort of brave new world which was not what I was hearing about in some of the workshops on exclusion. I think there is a great divide in this room. I was aware of it from the beginning of this conference. I do not want to say I'm disappointed in this conference; I'm quite pleased with the conference. But the organisers know that from the outset I had certain misgivings about the fact that we were calling it a conference on lifelong learning, which from the point of view of the organisation which I represent, or the part of the organisation which I represent, probably had a certain flavour of employability about it and it was largely being attended by people from the adult education sector. Now in fact it has been very interesting to bring those two worlds together. I think about some of the words of Tom Collins and Gus Johns yesterday, in the preliminary session on exclusion, the description of what will face us if we continue to imagine that all those people out there are somehow going to be motivated to learn and become nice citizens. If we carry on thinking it will just happen by some miracle, and do not actually make an effort to move that agenda on and to really make it happen, then I think we are going to be in very unstable times in the 21st century. Citizenship John Humphrys: Can't you make learning and pleasure the same? We should not just put a stone in the path and say everything which is in the past we don't care about. We don't care about our adult workers - they will retire soon and then they will carry on with their life. We are just going to think about young people. We cannot do that. We have a past and we have a future, but we also have a present. I think we need to rationalise in relation to the three different timings and sometimes I have the feeling that we are not doing that. Meaningful Partnerships Gus John: I detect an interesting tension emerging in the contributions from the platform. I think it is this: how does one try and effect meaningful partnerships between, on the one hand, some egalitarian vision of one nation and a cohesive society and, on the other hand, some structures that are by definition not about that? How do you marry up the vision of a one nation and a society of learning with everybody having an opportunity to be themselves, express themselves and develop themselves? Where you have an economic system whose capitalist principles, and let's not avoid the word, are fundamentally against that kind of social organisation. It is a very critical issue. I was the Director of Education at the London Borough of Hackney, a Director of the Local Training and Enterprise Council. In our education agenda in that borough, the schools, the voluntary education projects, Hackney College, spent a lot of time investing in the people of the local area. We did all kinds of things, access courses, business link courses, all sorts of things. To have an employable workforce who could exploit the opportunities in the heart of British capital down the road, the one square mile of the City of London, but those very employers within the City of London who are also theoretically part of that TEC area continued to recruit, not from Hackney, but from deepest Hampshire and Essex. The people poured into Liverpool Street and Cannon Street and Fenchurch Street and Charing Cross and so on, have come to work a mile away from Hackney. Yet the people whom we trained, organised training around what we were told to be the needs of the city, they were not being looked at at all. The minute you said to those people in the city that your address was in N16 or E5 or you came from Sandringham Road, they simply did not want to know you. The question I'm asking then is: what is the relationship between business, the social responsibility of business and the social exclusion that we are trying to get rid of within this society? John Humphrys: That's fine for people who are in work. But there are one hell of a lot of people - not just in this country, but in every other country represented here today - who won't get a job come what may. They are socially excluded, maybe because of age or disability or just because they are excluded, because that is how they've been brought up. So I think there is a community of interest. Business in the Community, which is a business-based body in the UK, has done a massive amount of work trying to marry up social responsibilities of business to meet the needs of local communities. Now they have set up regional offices and there are other initiatives coming forward which hopefully can start making an even bigger contribution. John Humphrys: If I could just make the point that the big difference it seems to me between your position and that gentleman's position is that he is talking about equality of outcome, and you are talking about equality of opportunity. It seems to me that the government takes the view that equality of opportunity is what matters; the gentleman over there takes the view that it's quality of outcome that matters. Whose Responsibility? Frances Smith: I think the people you're talking about here are still the ones who are semi-marginalised. These are the kind of people for whom, if you give them a little bit of a training course and say there is a little bit of a job here, all is going to be wonderful. What about those millions of people throughout Europe who do not even have the basic skills? There are people in this country who have never known anybody who worked. How on earth are you going to get them from that situation to even knowing how to go about being a working person? I think we are ignoring all of that and it has to be somebody's responsibility, our collective responsibility. Bob Fryer: It's not a question of referring it back, a lot of learning already goes on in families, some of it not very good learning, some of it very damaging learning. Some children learn that they are not worth anything in families - as they do in many schools. Kids learn to think of themselves as being worthless. So it is not a question of putting it back. It is recognising that the family is an environment of learning and investing resources in it, investing energy in it. To come to Gus's very important point, there are a number of levels you can work on this. One of the areas where there is some very good work going on in this country is for those with resources, including the European Union, including government, including some employers, including particularly local authorities to invest in community enterprise, to invest in credit union, to invest in young people. I've seen some brilliant schemes in London with people setting up their own enterprises. That's one level, supporting people in their own communities in their own economic and social activity. I can take you to places hit by the miners' strike where there was 80% unemployment. But we are not going to change employers overnight. The second level you can work at, as they do in France, and in some investment strategies in local communities, is an insistence that you get employers to open their books on where they're getting their recruits from, to show that they are actually investing in local people. John Humphrys: And what if they're not doing what you think they ought to be doing? Bob Fryer: If it is a grant, if you're in circumstances where you're giving a grant, they don't get it. Volunteers Robert Bachelor: I am a community volunteer and I would like to tell you what it actually is like to be unemployed. I am an unemployed man. I have been unemployed for 4 years. I was made redundant. I'm a trained qualified engineering inspector, and I was made redundant in 1994. From there I went into contract working, however, because of the sporadic nature of contract work I was continually having at the lean times to go back to the benefits system. The problem there was that the benefits system is actually quite destructive and quite obstructive. What happens is you get then locked into the system. You are constantly in and out. If you get work, the work is all short term; some of it is paid; some of it is not very well paid. Anyway to cut a long story short, that finished at the beginning of the year. And in that interim period I have had at least a dozen contract jobs. All that time I still had to sign on. I still had to go to the Benefit Office and record what I was doing. From there, we are 6 months on now and I've been involved in a community project called Cicero. What has happened to me personally, and I know this happens across the UK because I've been in touch with other groups about this, is that as you go, as you get stuck in the system, it actually discriminates against voluntary work. For example, you are allotted so many hours per week, and if you go over the hours your benefits are suspended. You do not live to work. The idea that you work yourself there, or work these ridiculous hours and go and look for another job at the end of the day afterwards, to me is a non starter. At Cicero we work with other unemployed people, some older than me, some are quite a lot younger than me. The approach of education to them draws the reaction, 'It is not going to help me, there are no jobs out there.' Some training is actually very good, some is appalling. There are qualifications that people can get which are purely practically based to the extent where they almost do not have to read and write to get that qualification. I know this because I've interviewed people with some of these qualifications. My question to the panel is, what is to be done about this attitude to work? In the UK alone, there are hundreds of thousands of people who work as volunteers, whose work is not recognised, who are constantly week in, week out, being harassed by the benefits system. We have just had a change of administration. The previous administration successfully and quite admittedly very cleverly criminalised the unemployed. We now have a disgraceful cheat's hot line and there are people on my project who have constantly been harassed by the Job Seekers Allowance authorities. They don't have any proof. It is a way of settling scores or dealing with grudges in some cases. What is Work? Frances Smith: I think here it is a question also of how we determine what is work, how would you define work. We are talking of new definitions of work as we come into the 21st century. How you actually accredit that sort of experience. We are talking about an issue which has been raised in several of the workshops, the whole question of informal and formal learning and accreditation. There is an awful lot of learning done by people in the voluntary sector, and this is something that surely has to be seen as qualifying people, giving them this awful employability that we keep talking about. But I think we also have to say, 'employed where, how and for what?' and not simply see things in terms of purely profit making manufacturing industries or service industries. Employers When it comes to medium sized employer training, the system within the UK and within most of Europe is designed to be slow response, exactly the opposite of what we call 'time to market', the urgent time when training is needed. It can't happen fast enough. Similarly there is a lot of work done, at least in the UK, with large employers and their needs. Very little work is done or encouraged within the formal system DfEE system working with medium sized employers. It is just too awkward. We have got over that awkwardness with thousands of exercises NIACE are carrying out, some of which are celebrated in adult learners week. Nobody is doing that with the smaller and medium sized section of the companies. Unless we change the attitude, unless we stop hitting employers over the head and saying, you know, they are the buggers out there who are causing all the problems, we'll continue going downhill. I'd like to ask the panel whether they think that medium sized employers are actually getting a fair and a proper deal out of the system and whether the system can respond at a sensible speed to change the environment for them. Analysts Bob Fryer: I saw a scheme in the United States of America which I'd like to see operating much more extensively here, where in localities teams of very highly skilled analysts work in colleges. They are deployed to go into companies for very short periods, work with those companies, with the trade unions, with the employees, with the firms, to understand the market, the product, the process, the service, to talk through and understand the learning needs. They then bridge back into the local college or whoever the proprietor is and design customised programmes of learning to meet the needs as expressed by the employees, the trade unionists, the managers. These are brilliantly successful. It is not just casting a curriculum out there and hoping it will meet somebody's needs, it is actually this reciprocal relationship between the needs of learners or of organisations in this case and what can be delivered of the highest quality. I'd like to see much more of that going on, but to get it, it is not only a question of changing people's attitude and aspirations on both sides of that relationship you have to persuade funding councils and organising bodies that this is a proper use of funds. We haven't won that one yet. Tony Webb: There are some examples actually of that happening within the UK, where FE colleges are providing very clearly customised training to meet specific needs of the businesses and individuals. That is extremely helpful. I'm sure that is increasingly the way forward, because the idea of generalised learning is something which is less and less I think on the business agenda. I think the whole purpose of this event is to bring together the fact that there are various misunderstandings and commonalties between the needs of the business community employers - not just businesses employers, but more generally - and providers. I think maybe one of the positive effects of this event has been to crystallise that and to make us all go away and think how we can communicate to each other better. The Way Forward John Humphrys: Let me ask each of you, to give us your thoughts on that in a sentence or two, crystallise it all into a single action that ought to be taken. Frances Smith: I think the European Union has acknowledged the importance of this whole question of entrepreneurship which underlies SMEs in the employment guidelines. It is asking member states now in their national action plans to put their money where their mouth is, in terms of what should be done in this area, how they can promote it. I still think that we need the member states' backing to spend more of community funding in these areas because SMEs, women and the handicapped still tend to be grouped together under one lump as problems. We need to be spending enough money to solve those problems. Marie Helena: I think that the first step is to recognise the potential of learning for the company, and the potential it implies for business and for the workforce. The second is the need to develop mechanisms in order to anticipate the needs of the company, of the workforce, of the employer in medium and small sized companies in many cases the employer needs as much training as the employee. And the third one is partnership. Tony Webb: I think the best way forward is for all of us to understand our respective responsibilities under the employability partnership and to deliver that. Paul Bochu: We are working on 2 major focuses, one was mentioned before which is the co-investment and the other one is extending the validation of professional qualifications acquired, that is very important in the company. Bob Fryer: I think we need to focus much more policy, initiatives, funding on the needs of learners and learning communities and away from providers. In doing that we have to say to government in particular: start doing some joined up policy. Do not let Social Services damage your learning opportunities; do not let Social Security get in the way; do not let your housing policy contradict your transport policy or your childcare policy contradict your policies for learning. This is exactly what is going on with Social Security. So, joined up policy, focus on the needs of learners. Direct resources, funding, support, advice towards the needs of the learners and away from the institutions and the providers.
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