Annex B - Selected comments received from the PAT website Culture and incentives "A few of us have got out of the spiral because we believed in our own abilities…until we can give people the inner belief that they can learn to learn we will get only a few small paces ahead." "Consultation with local people ought to include broad options and be careful of jargon and terminology common in education circles." "You need to somehow involve the people you/we need to help in this process themselves, so that they are "active" in defining the help that they need for their particular community." "Students do seem to enjoy and relate to the vocational studies - we draw on local issues and information which they say opens their eyes to things going on in their own area. Given the range of difficulties and obstacles that students have to overcome, they need to feel they can readily relate to/engage with whatever education is on offer drawing on their own personal experiences and finding some solutions for personal difficulties along the way." "If training can be built on something that interests them and is carried out in a venue which is acceptable to them ie NOT IN AN FE OR OTHER COLLEGE ENVIRONMENT. Adults do NOT wish to enter a building where they have to fight their way through young people smoking on the steps. The venue could be a pub, community centre, café, health centre or anywhere they will feel comfortable entering and as unlike school as possible. Many adults have a very poor experience of school and fear failure. The trainers (NOT teachers or lecturers) need to appreciate the hopes and fears of the target group and to be able to empathise with them. Ideally they should come from the "poor areas" themselves. Perhaps the first stage of any programme should be to identify and train trainers from that community." "An increase in confidence brought about by an improvement in skills can reduce the dependency culture and lead people to take positive steps to improve their circumstances. Community run shops, credit unions, organising play areas for kids can all turn these disadvantaged areas around and thus improve employability for everyone in the area. To help with this employers could be encouraged to be involved, which should remove the prejudice they have." "Many of these people have been in a situation of no hope for years. They need to be encouraged and their self-esteem needs to be boosted. Constant failure is damaging to the ego especially when you have been consistently blamed by society for it. Success in this context must depend on building on the talents they have - many do voluntary work helping an elderly neighbour with the garden for example. Just surviving on the dole means they must have considerable budgeting skills more than many in more fortunate positions." "Pushing people back into areas where they (or the educational system or their environment) have obviously failed will…demotivate them. Focus on what people can do and want to do and build from there." "Leadership and energy needs to come from within the local community and the community needs to see itself as "pulling in" services and resources from external institutions etc. We need to break the cycle of perceived dependency." "People with low skills levels would perhaps benefit from looking at the skills that they already have, not in term of qualifications, but in terms of the things they can do - such as drive a car, rearing children, gardening, etc etc. A preliminary skills audit with an adviser may help boost confidence and set them on the road to undertaking more training of a more formal nature." "A change in the perception of what constitutes learning may provide the individual with the realisation that they have acquired skills, albeit not taught formally" "Education and learning is not viewed as being "for the like of them"." "In order to address this issue, any training and learning offered in these areas should be sensitive to [the local] culture, and novel ways devised of presenting learning. Formally organised provision will be seen as similar in nature to the learning they rejected at school." "It might help if the benefits/tax system was overhauled to make it worth people's while to work. The cycle of welfare dependency needs to be broken, and people be supported back into work." "One of the first skills to encourage people to develop is self-belief and self-respect. For people who may not have done well academically it is important that they are able to recognise and articulate those skills that they have developed throughout their lives. Once they realise that they do indeed have very valuable and transferable skills, they may well see the relevance to their lives of acquiring more." "If you REALLY wish to help residents of disadvantaged areas then sufficient funding will need to be available to allow outreach work, small class/group size, well-trained specialised adult trainers who can empathise with the target group." "For many in poor areas who have skill gaps, their immediate need is money. Experience of training without a direct connection with meaningful paid work that is fulfilling and well paid quickly becomes counter productive. There are far too few examples of people gaining success through skill improvement as even skilled work have low wage levels. In some areas, finding work means moving away, which depletes the poor area of role models." Basic skills "Developing the necessary basic skills is a mountain to climb for many students, which is not always helped by the cumbersome accreditation that is sometimes imposed upon them and can make tutors feel like "sherpas"." "Real Second Chance education is more than basic skills, but it can lead to these skills being acquired without the 'diagnostic/ pathologising' approach." "Basic Skills is not just about vocational training. It should be about helping people to learn how to learn for themselves and their own self-esteem first and foremost." "Basic skills are the foundation. However pre-foundation work is required to secure the foundation. Pre-foundation work needs to focus on equipping people with the skills to make realistic choices, and identify their skill deficiencies. Once we are able to customise learning and tailor it to a person's need then we can move on. Basic Skills may be the priority item for practitioners, but it may not be given such a high priority for the individual. We need to enable the individual the opportunity to prioritise their learning, to enable them to identify their basic skills issues in relation to their life choices and take it from there. It is more effective to work with the student's agenda, rather than the practitioner's agenda." Prejudice "One way of addressing employers' prejudices would be to engage businesses in contact with schools in these areas, and make contact with school pupils to gain some awareness of their potential." "If more businesses became involved with community activities, this may alter perceptions held of some communities." Outputs vs. outcomes "It's about "change management", it's a long term thing, and Government should not expect to get too many "instant" success stories." "I support the view that there is a need to establish qualitative outputs rather than quantitative. However this has always been a major problem when justifying project activity to funding agencies." There is a chance that the government's current policies could work for a number of the socially excluded, but it will not be a quick fix, rather a systemic re-orientation towards a community-supported society." "Terminology which is inconsistent across government departments and local agencies can be a fundamental barrier to collaboration." "Where bidding is concerned, clear criteria and accessible help with the bidding process is very important for local voluntary groups. Some bidding processes, particularly set up by local councils, can miss the importance of these basics." "[There should be] monitoring [of] every new participant in a publicly funded informal or formal learning scheme of any kind on the basis of previous participation/involvement. This could be an indicator of levels of new engagement/inclusion. This may require a clear, if broad definition of lifelong learning used by government, local government and provider agencies, which might be a good thing in itself." "My experience has shown that outcome measures which are negotiated with participants themselves are recognised and effective. Although "official" certificates are generally thought to be intimidating or irrelevant, some form of certificate is welcomed, and is often treasured." Coherence "Competition for funding between organisations impedes co-operation and the best use of resources. If organisations can only obtain funding for projects if they are in a partnership within a local area they will realise that it is in all their interest to work together to improve skills in an area." Institutional priorities "Providers may need awareness training in understanding poverty and its impacts." "One barrier is attitudes within the service delivery and resource-providing institutions and organisations and networks, in which too high a proportion of the people delivering or channelling them have a "help the needy" perspective rather than "release and empower the potential that is already there." Quality and variety of provision "Some investment has to be made in providing venues that are secure and well equipped, local people should be involved in the planning of such provision. This increases the sense of ownership and can encourage people to protect what they have achieved." "Our conclusion was that the way forward is "learning by doing" rather than learning by learning, and that the "doing" needs to be: intrinsically interesting and of a nature that useful things can be done without having to do a lot of preliminary learning; strongly and visibly connected to wider opportunities, particularly to novel kinds of opportunities that embed the element of "the wider networked economy" and are open to people regardless of their geographic and social setting."

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