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3. Basic Skills Development
Issues
Many of the areas covered by SRB regeneration schemes have levels of literacy and numeracy below national averages. The situation is often compounded where there are concentrations of minority ethnic and refugee populations with limited proficiency in English. This can hamper broader progress in school, restrict formal qualifications, and impede access to at least some types of training. Many Modern Apprenticeship schemes, for instance, require five GCSE passes at grades A-C.
So, for many of the SRB partnerships, tackling low basic and core skills is crucial to progress in any other area.
Tackling the Issues
Improving basic skills and competences is a common strand running through many schemes, and features in five examples below. One of these, which encompasses the whole scheme rather than a single project, is designed to embed a comprehensive strategy for core skills development across the whole of Birmingham. The other four examples focus on Early Years and primary school children – often including some element of family learning.
Four projects are addressing early needs in a variety of ways:
- Towards a Learning Community, Hattersley: One of six strands in this project concentrates on early years development, which includes a number of inter-related elements:
- childcare provision, including pre-school, early years reading and breakfast and after-school clubs;
- childcare training, involving parents in the education and care of their children;
- Homestart, a voluntary organisation providing support in their own homes to families under stress;
- Bookstart; and
- the Co-ordinated Individual Record System, providing benchmarks against which parents can compare their children's medical, educational and social skills development.
- What some participants said:
- 'I use to **** myself when someone put a piece of paper in front of me but not now.' (parent on family literacy scheme)
- 'I want my kids to do better than me. I've never had a job – I was pregnant at 16 and have always looked after my kids.' (32 year old mother of four)
- 'This is my Butlin's.' (seven year old on Holiday Play Scheme)
- 'I love kids – this will help me get a job at the end.' (parent on NVQ childcare course)
- Raising Attainment in the National Curriculum in Coventry and Warwick: This is aimed at pupils whose academic performance is hampered by poor command of English. The project, which expects to assist 36,000 children in all, includes the following activities:
- collaborative work with class and subject teachers to deliver language support across the curriculum;
- bi-lingual approaches to learning in the early years; and
- developing mother tongue language skills in ethnic minority children; and seeking recognition and accreditation for their achievements.
- Raising Achievement in Core Skills, White City Partnership's CASE project: This focuses on children at Key Stage 1, with the CASE programme and materials to help children to develop numeracy and cognitive skills and to articulate their learning. The work takes place mainly in intensive half-hour sessions - for six children at a time. Similar work at Key Stage 3 has already shown significant impact in SATs test results.
Teachers report that benefits include much greater motivation, tolerance, collaboration and co-operation in class, greater confidence among the more withdrawn pupils, and thinking and expression skills which empower the children and which they can apply in many other aspects of their development.
- Working with Communities in the Erewash Valley: One of the educational projects in this comprehensive SRB scheme tackles family literacy. It focuses on working with parents (or other adult carers such as grandparents) to support their children's learning, while at the same time helping them improve their own communication skills. It reflects a county-wide literacy strategy, 'Read On, Write Away', organised through a county-wide partnership. The strategy's operating principles reflect those of BCSP:
- to deliver large scale activity;
- to knit together funding streams (the SRB prominent amongst them);
- to embed effective practice in standard practice; and
- to underpin work with research and evaluation.
Key Good Practice Lessons
- While at a relatively early stage in their development, three major elements of good practice characterise all or most of these schemes and projects:
- they reflect detailed rigorous research that has led to unusually specific baseline statements;
- these statements are being used to create performance targets that are meaningful in educational terms and measurable; and
- they aim for comprehensive, system-wide coverage that involves large-scale interventions and integration with main programmes.
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