South East England Development Agency (SEEDA)

A £1 million series of ground breaking initiatives to improve basic literacy and numeracy in the workplace has been announced by the South East England Development Agency (SEEDA).

The Fund - more than one sixth of SEEDA's £5.9 million budget for skills, will help the seven million adults who are unable to read and write to the standard of an 11 year old. According to the Basic Skills Agency 23% of people in the UK, have 'basic skills challenges' and 47% of these are actually in work. This means that almost 300,000 people in the SouthEast of England are working but are not able to take on anything beyond low skilled work.

The focus of the majority of Basic Skills programmes is on teaching basic skills outside the workplace, but SEEDA has identified this gap in educational provision as being critical to the future prosperity of the South East.

"This very important area of adult literacy is often neglected", explained SEEDA Chief Executive, Anthony Dunnett. "Many people in low skill jobs will be severely held back by literacy problems and in some professions hidden literacy difficulties can even be dangerous.

"We want to bring this issue out into the open and through working in partnership with local authorities, companies, training organisations and the Basic Skills Agency, to develop an approach which can help bring people out of a skills 'black hole' and gain more job satisfaction, career progression and boost the skill base of the region as a whole." Mr Dunnett continued: "A recent study by Ernst and Young put the cost of poor basic skills to the UK economy at more than £10million. It is clear that if we want a knowledge based economy which competes with the world's best, then the UK and the South East region must help its most vulnerable and unskilled to get a step on the ladder. For example being unable to read a basic Health and Safety leaflet could result in a serious accident; even looking through the Yellow Pages to find a plumber is beyond the reach of many of the people we are looking to help."

Defining the fund's approach, Mr Dunnett said: "The seed funding provided by our £1m grant and the partnerships we have supported by the SEEDA Fund aims to pilot 15 different approaches to addressing this issue and from them develop best practice which can be shared with government and other regions in the UK to help improve the overall focus and effectiveness of basic skills training in the workplace."

Director of the Basic Skills Agency, Alan Wells, applauded the initiative. "We welcome this innovative approach from SEEDA," he explained. "Only 0.2% of the adults receiving help with basic skills were in workplace programmes. There is clearly a real need for this type of initiative to boost employability of those who are facing literacy and numeracy problems. Those with poor basic skills are four times more likely to be unemployed, but if they have jobs they are twice as likely to be made redundant or sacked. This will only get worse, as increasingly jobs require entry level skills which these individuals cannot reach - 90% of new jobs require communications skills and 50% numeracy skills."

The £1 million fund for 2000 is split between 15 pilot projects, which are all partnerships between learning institutions, businesses and local councils or community bodies. By bringing together these partnerships, SEEDA hopes to develop a series of innovative approaches which can then be fed into the mainstream work of government and basic skills agencies. These include:

• A partnership with the Ford Motor Company, Eastleigh Action for Skills to develop learning programmes for low-skilled engineering workers, their families and the small businesses in their supply chain in the area.

• A mentoring scheme in Hampshire and Surrey to train two employees in each of 16 small business such as hairdressers and shops who can help develop and coach others to promote learning in the workplace.

• The development of a snack bar concept in Brighton and Hove to help young people develop literacy and numeracy through menu writing, cash handling and the development of a web site.