NS & Fellows' Associates round table - Britain may be poor in skills, but it does not lack the funds to tackle the problem. It's about time that employers realised there's something in it for them. Natalie Brierley reports

Upskilling is a matter of national security. "If we don't train the unemployed people, they have nothing to do and are more likely to fall into the hands of extremists," said the Muslim Council of Britain's Muhammad Bari about the communities he represents. The problem is especially bad in London, where, according to Bari, unemployment in Muslim Bangladeshi and Pakistani communities is two to three times higher than the national average. "If we are going to tackle the problem," he said, "we must look at deprived groups more seriously, and build partnerships with community and voluntary sectors."

The importance of partnerships has become a recurring theme of the series of regional round-table discussions on skills, organised by the New Statesman and Fellows' Associates. At the second event, in the north-west, Manchester City Football Club had shone as the guiding light in promoting a learning culture to deprived areas through partnerships. A few minutes into the third discussion, held in London, anyone would have thought the football industry was the only one to have got its act together on the skills agenda. "It's about making people realise that learning is sexy," said Susan O'Brien of the Football Foundation. To that end, the foundation supports projects such as those that use football players as mentors to help children excluded from school. The skills minister, Ivan Lewis, considers such schemes a real opportunity to replace intergenerational deprivation with intergenerational advance. If young people are turned on to education, that will stay with them for the rest of their lives and they, in turn, will pass on their positive experiences.

And yet, sexy as it is, football on its own cannot sort out London's problems. The issue of connectivity applies particularly to the capital, whose size makes it easy for small organisations to become isolated. Helen Casey from the National Research and Development Centre explained that although there are many young people looking for apprenticeships, they can't find them. "We need to be making those connections," she said.

Cyrus Todiwala, co-owner of Cafe Spice Namaste in London's East End, was championed as an example of someone who had seen the problem, understood the value of training and done something about it. Ruth Spellman from Investors in People explained how Todiwala had started the Asian and Oriental School of Catering and initiated language teaching for his staff, who spoke 25 languages between them. In so doing, he facilitated a business network within the Asian restaurant trade in the city. "We need to help people like him," said Spellman, "and shout about his success to show others what is possible."

But the TUC's Tom Wilson was despondent about the lack of employers in London who are willing to take on apprentices. "The chattering classes in Islington complain about not being able to get a plumber, but that's because no one is being trained to be a plumber," he said. A vast improvement in staying-on rates in schools could be one reason, as could a mismatch of supply and demand. As Lewis pointed out, "You can't deliver high-quality vocational training without employers and educationalists coming together." Most of the participants agreed with Wilson: the problem was a lack of employer demand.

It was widely acknowledged that trade unions are doing great things to bridge this gap through learning reps. But here, too, there are difficulties. People do not feel encouraged to become reps, because their normal workloads are not being adjusted to allow for the extra work involved.

Usdaw's solution is learning committees, offering reps not just support, but an organisational approach to learning that helps cement agreements with employers. The crucial point, made by Viv Bird from the National Literacy Trust, is that they start not by saying: "We want to upskill you," but by asking: "How can we get you involved in learning?"

"Learning committees are fine in big organisations," said Susan Edge from Standards Verification, but she stressed that other tactics were needed for smaller organisations that do not have the benefit of learning reps. "We have to get off our soapboxes," said Spellman. "People don't want theoretical solutions, they want help." In her opinion, the way forward is to present hard facts and figures that prove the profitability of upskilling.

One of the main difficulties in getting employers involved has to do with the language used and the notion that skills are for those who haven't done well at school. Tony Breslin, chief executive of the Citizenship Foundation, felt particularly strongly about this. "We've got to reclaim the language of lifelong learning from a deficit model. Skills for life has got to be skills for all, including highly qualified people, who are often lacking in flexibility," he said.

Patrick McNeill, a freelance consultant, suggested that the government needed to be flex-ible enough to pay someone to walk the streets and approach small businesses, rather than talking at yet another seminar. But according to Philippa Langton of the Learning and Skills Council, to serve the 30,000 small- to medium-sized businesses in the London Borough of Newham alone, walking would be a waste of time. However, Breslin agreed that, at the very least, a different type of approach was needed from the "classic, bureaucratic" one. Alan Tuckett, director of the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, could also see the point. "Walking the streets is essentially what outreach work is all about, and that has proved invaluable in making contact with hard-to-reach communities," he said.

If Britain is poor in skills, it does not, apparently, lack the funds to tackle the problem. According to Tricia Hartley, a regional director of the Campaign for Learning, there is a lot of money around. "We just need to sort out the chaos to make sure people are benefiting from the available funds," she said. Tuckett felt that the government's approach was contradictory, because while it accepted the need to improve skills, there was no requirement for employers to invest in them. Lewis complained that there was not more recognition of the structure that had been put in place to tackle this. He outlined the strategy: sector skills councils, which articulate training needs; sector skills agreements, which encourage employers to commit to investment; and employer training pilots, which take the classroom to the workplace.

But does the strategy work on the ground? Tuckett believed that many of these developments would be lost on smaller businesses. "Government initiatives become straitjackets and are not the subtle, flexible tools that we would want to see," he said. Wilson felt that the strategy would work only if the government was in the background waving a big stick.

But Lewis was having none of it. "It's so frustrating when people come to sessions like this and spend all their time saying 'we can't do this' and 'we could do this', rather than just going out and getting on with it." The message from the centre was clear. Skilling the nation is not the responsibility of the government alone - everyone has a job to do.

www.newstatesman.com/skills

Participants

Jenni Murray (Chair) - TV/radio broadcaster
Martin Bamford - Lifelong learning project worker, Usdaw
Muhammad Bari - Deputy secretary general, Muslim Council of Britain
Viv Bird - Project director, literacy and social inclusion, National Literacy Trust
Tony Breslin - Chief executive, Citizenship Foundation
Helen Casey - National Research and Development Centre
Sue Diplock - Management council, National Association for Teaching English and other Community Languages to Adults
Susan Edge - Acting chief operating officer, Standards Verification UK
Tricia Hartley - Northern region director, Campaign for Learning
Madeline Held - Director, LLU+, London South Bank University
Photoula Kypri - Edexcel southern territory FE/HE manager, Pearson Education
Philippa Langton - Executive director, Learning and Skills Council London North
Ivan Lewis - Minister for skills and vocational education, DfES
Patrick McNeill - Education, training and publishing consultant
Susan O'Brien - Director of administration, Football Foundation
Rozi Premji - London region director, Skills for Life, adult basic skills strategy unit
Ruth Spellman - Chief executive, Investors in People
Andrew Thomson - Chief executive, Learning and Skills Development Agency
Alan Tuckett - Director, National Institute of Adult Continuing Education
Tom Wilson - Head of organisation and services department, TUC

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