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Opening Addresses
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Each member state of the EU faces a whole range of different challenges. During the UK Presidency of the Union, we have discussed the problems that we share including high unemployment amongst those with low skills and a core of long-term unemployed people, especially amongst the young, sadly resulting in social exclusion. It is vital that we provide people with security of employment by equipping them with the education and skills that they need to adapt to changing labour market needs and social issues. Continuing education and updating skills have been a really key issue for the UK Presidency and we placed lifelong learning, I am glad to say, right at the top of our agenda in an age when intellectual capital has replaced fixed capital as a key to success in all of our countries. I am delighted to see delegates here from so many EU member states and also from elsewhere over Europe. We have in fact about 30 countries represented here today from Latvia to Ireland from Norway to Cyprus. Thirty different cultures, thirty different economies, thirty different education and training systems, but all of us I think valuing lifelong learning and wanting very much to learn from each other. There is, of course, an enormous amount of expertise from all of these countries in this room about all aspects of lifelong learning. We have represented here today: adult educators; the voluntary sector; employers; policy makers; and providers of lifelong learning in our colleges and other educational institutions. Of course, I do not need to tell an audience like this how important lifelong learning is to our competitiveness, to employability, to active citizenship - we must not forget active citizenship and its importance - and, of course, to social inclusion. We are at present in the middle of carrying out a very widespread consultation following the publication of our Green Paper, THE LEARNING AGE. As one of the two British Ministers responsible for lifelong learning, I am very much looking forward to hearing the outcome of the discussions that you will be having over the next couple of days, which I see as part of our consultation process on our Green Paper. We are, of course, rather proud of this Green Paper. I know that in a number of countries there have been consultation documents of various kinds on lifelong learning, but I think that this is one of the most all-embracing. We are determined when we get the results of that consultation to move forward and implement the policies to make lifelong learning a reality in the UK. Your views and ideas will very much feed into the strategies that we want to develop over the next few years, taking us into the 21st century. Three questions I hope you will not mind if I identify three key questions. I think it would be very helpful if you could address them over the next few days. First, how can we ensure that initiatives in this country and right across Europe really benefit those who we want to get into learning, those who have missed out previously? One of the problems that we all share is that too often those who are already privileged in education or other ways are the beneficiaries of lifelong learning. In this country over 25% of adults have done absolutely no learning whatsoever they have had no educational training since leaving school. That is a scandalous statistic and it something that the labour government certainly intend to address. If we look at the awful intergenerational cycle of under-achievement that we have in this country in literacy and numeracy we will find that something like one in five adults in the UK have very poor literacy. That means that they have difficulty in reading a broadsheet newspaper. Of course, if they have these problems the likelihood is that their children will too. People who do not take part in learning and lack skills are, of course, also the people who are most likely to be marginalised in a whole variety of respects. Shut out, they cannot experience the benefits of the society in which they live. They cannot make a full contribution to their own communities and we see whole families sometimes, as I said just now, across several generations being held back by material poverty and by serious poverty of opportunity. The economy of course suffers from the waste of their potential, their creativity, their ideas, their enterprise. Their willingness to work hard will be wasted if they cannot contribute and if they cannot contribute we will all no doubt be the poorer. That is the challenge we face in our different circumstances. Second, how can we give real ownership of local programmes to those they are intended to help? We are after all not talking about children; it would be rather more difficult for them to take a complete ownership of what they are learning. We are talking about adults - grown up people - who do not want to be talked down to. Ownership amongst local people is essential I believe if we are going to overcome the barriers of learning that so many people face. The UK Government believes that there are a number of principles that will help us build a truly inclusive society. We set these out in the Green Paper, which many of you may have seen. They are:
The challenge is to make a reality of those things in ways that are meaningful to people in their everyday lives. Very often this will mean tackling learning disadvantage alongside other things, for example, through childcare centres, so that if a young mother has not had the opportunity to complete her secondary schooling and dropped out early, did not take any qualifications at the school leaving stage, that may be one route in helping her back. Her child's primary school may be another. If she is seeking healthcare of some sort that may be an alternative route, through housing associations, through tenants' associations, residents' associations, places where people may get involved because they are trying to improve their housing that may be another important route. There is then I think an important role for a whole range of community organisations, for voluntary bodies, for local authorities in working with education and training institutions to provide education and training opportunities. This is one of the things in the UK where we, I think, have been on a rather small scale. Incidentally we want to make it a much bigger scale by providing this sort of learning in family literacy programmes. My third and final question is, how do we get employers really engaged? How do we draw in employers, especially those from small and medium sized firms that have absolutely no past record of being involved in providing for their employees with opportunities to learn. It is not just a matter of skills and competitiveness of companies, critical though this is, it is also about who learns at work. Far too often, as I am sure many of you will agree, it is the better paid, the more senior people, those who are already quite well qualified, who have opportunities to train and improve their skills. Indeed in the UK graduates are 6 times more likely to take on additional training, additional education after they have got their degrees than other people. So we need to find ways of spreading the benefit to the whole workforce. Trade unions, of course, can play an important role and that is why we have set up a fund to encourage them to develop innovative ways of supporting their numbers and encouraging them to get involved. I would just like to spend a very few minutes on a couple of the initiatives that we in this country are taking to tackle these questions about which you are going to hear a bit more about over the next few days. University for Industry Tomorrow, David Sainsbury will speak about our plans for the University for Industry (UfI) and he has just been appointed the Chairman of the Transitional Board, which will be overseeing the setting up of the University for Industry. What the UfI aims to do is to make use of new technologies to make information about learning and access to learning widely available to people, to employers and particularly small firms, but not necessarily only to people in the workplace. This will be an important part of its work, but so too will be people at home and people in local community centres, local libraries and places of that kind. We want to provide a very wide range of local learning centres which people can reach very easily by walking, by a local bus, not only in colleges but also in their workplace as I have just mentioned. We want to also open up these learning facilities in places like shopping centres. The University of Sunderland has been undertaking a very interesting pilot. They have been working in the Gateshead MetroCentre in the North East of England, a vast shopping centre, and at Sunderland Football Club. This again has been a very successful way of involving some people who might not otherwise have turned up at their local FE college. We shall be launching the UfI in the year 2000, after the pilot phase we are currently undertaking. We did, in fact, publish just a few weeks ago a Pathfinder Prospectus. Those of you who have not seen it might like to get hold of a copy. It sets out in a lot of detail what we are intending to do, but I am sure that David Sainsbury will say more about that tomorrow. I am very grateful to the European Commission for its support through ADAPT funding and we will be working very closely with the Commission in developing the UfI. Individual Learning Accounts The second initiative I would just like to mention is Individual Learning Accounts. We are working on ways to try to help people take ownership of their own learning and this is one of them. It is also a method of, we hope, overcoming a barrier of cost that can stop some people participating. We are going to establish a million of these accounts by the year 2002 and the Government will contribute £150 to each account. We hope that employers will match that £150 and that individuals where they can afford to do so will also put a further £150 into it. This will allow them to buy into a very wide range of part-time courses. It will also create a much wider framework so that people can save and borrow over a lifetime for more or less continual learning. What we hope to see is that as people complete one course they will then think about the next stage so that they can go on building on their skills, enhancing them and extending their knowledge. In some ways learning is a bit like a drug once you get into it and I hope that people will go on succumbing to this particular drug. It is much less dangerous than some other forms of drugs like aerobics or jogging. We want to see new forms of partnership between the Government and our banks, between the Government and financial institutions to deliver this, to make lifelong learning affordable so that each year people will have something like a bank statement that sets out how much they have got in their account, what they have spent it on, and allows them to think about what they might spend next year's surplus on. Further Education I would also like to say a very brief word about the contribution of further education in this country. We do see a key role for our 450 further education colleges. Many of them are already finding ways of opening up learning, widening participation, but we want more of them to do even more than they are doing at present. Of course, this is not just about numbers, although we have already announced, in fact, Tony Blair announced at the Labour Party Conference last October, that we would be putting a further 500,000 places into further and higher education by the year 2002. This is also about those groups who are not taking part, for example, some of our ethnic minority notably Bangladeshi and Pakistani girls. Indeed, young women tend to be under- represented in all forms of post-school education. Those not in work, the unemployed, the long-term unemployed are also, of course, under-represented; so are much older people. What we want to see the FE colleges doing is working on new types of initiatives with the voluntary sector and the local authorities who reach out to people in the community rather than simply waiting for people to turn up at the college front door. European Dimension I would like now to say just a few words about the European dimension of lifelong learning. Making lifelong learning a reality has for some time been an important goal in Europe. 1995 saw the publication of the Commission's White Paper, Teaching and Learning: Towards the Learning Society. 1996 was the European Year of Lifelong Learning. During the Irish Presidency, the Council of Ministers adopted conclusions on lifelong learning. These highlighted the need for lifelong learning to strike a balance between the needs of the individual and the society and also between economic and employment concerns. They stated that lifelong learning should enhance employability and make a contribution to equality and social inclusion and active participation in a democratic society. The EU does play a really valuable role in supporting member states' policies in this area. Programmes such as SOCRATES and LEONARDO enable us to share good practice and innovation. LEONARDO links learning and employability by promoting partnerships between education providers and the world of work. I know that all of us here today are committed to lifelong learning. I know that over the next couple of days there will be a great deal of shared discussion and understanding. I am very sorry that I am not going to be able be to here tomorrow as I had hoped to take part in these discussions. I am afraid that I have to be in the House of Lords over the next couple of days to take our schools Bill through its committee stage. This Bill is about improvement in what we do in our schools, raising standards, developing a new framework for primary and secondary schools. I think that it is highly relevant to lifelong learning in the sense that if we do not set good foundations at that stage we will end up with far bigger problems later. Perhaps at this point I should also mention that David Blunkett had wanted to be here but he has a prior engagement elsewhere too, but he has recorded a special video message for the conference, which you will hear a bit later today. I am delighted to say that my colleague Kim Howells will be here to represent the UK Government. He is coming tomorrow and I am looking forward to hearing from him about many of the exciting and innovative ideas, which I know that the next two and a half days of vigorous and stimulating debate will produce. I wish you good luck with it. I hope it is both productive and enjoyable and I look forward to meeting you all again somewhere someday somewhere in Europe or back in the UK.
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