The rise and fall of workplace basic skills programmes: lessons for policy and practice

Abstract

Since the publication of the Moser Report in 1999, improving the basic skills of adults has been a major priority for all of the UK's governments. There has been a particular interest in building up workplace provision, because of the assumed relationship between the basic skills of the employed population and productivity. A longitudinal study tracked 53 workplaces which hosted subsidised basic skills courses, and examined the impact on the enterprises themselves as well as on learners. It established that employers were not, contrary to policy‐makers' expectations, concerned about employees' literacy levels, and supported provision largely as a way of providing general development opportunities. Learners, who made small literacy gains at best, did not change their behaviour in ways which were likely to affect productivity. Once subsidies ended, employers were unwilling to support further provision at full cost. This provides further evidence that basic skills tuition does not have an immediate impact on performance. Overall the subsidised programmes used an extremely costly approach, and left no lasting legacy. The findings have major implications for the organisation of effective educational provision for less‐skilled employees and suggest that the current approach to subsidising workplace training is seriously defective.

Acknowledgements

The research described in this paper was funded by the ESRC's Teaching and Learning Research Programme (Grant No. RES‐139‐25‐0120) and the National Research and Development Centre for adult literacy and numeracy whose support is gratefully acknowledged. The views expressed are entirely those of the authors.

Notes

1. Becker's argument was that completely general training, which is useful to all employers, should in principle be paid for by the employees who receive it, and not by the taxpayer. Moreover, even where very specific training is involved, it also, he suggests, makes sense for employees to contribute to the costs (most obviously by accepting lower wages during training than they would be getting in other jobs). They will receive higher wages once they have acquired the relevant skills, and be in a good long‐term bargaining position vis‐à‐vis their employer, who needs trained workers who possess those particular skills.

2. See for example the DHL case‐study featured on the website of ‘Skills for Logistics’, one of the Sector Skills Councils set up by government to work with businesses, which highlights both a 12% increase in productivity and an increase of over 100% (sic) in employee satisfaction (www.skillsforlogistics.org/en/indix/skillspay/case-studies/).This latter increase is rather extraordinary: in our own study (and in most studies of workers in routine occupations) job satisfaction levels are generally consistently high—and significantly higher on average than for professionals (Glenn et al., 1977). An increase of more than 100% would be very difficult to achieve on standard rating scales.

3. Although we were equally interested in literacy and numeracy, only one numeracy course was recruited, reflecting their rarity on the ground.

4. We interviewed the manager most responsible for establishing the basic skills programme: sometimes the training manager but in smaller enterprises there was often no separate post, and training responsibilities were part of a wider job. When, at follow‐up, our original interviewee had left, we interviewed the closest successor.

5. This very large public sector organisation had stopped applying for public funding for its long‐standing learning centre because of the bureaucracy involved.

6. It is the one occupational area in which ETPs were able to enrol a substantial number of small employers (Hillage et al., 2006).

7. As pointed out above, this is very common among workers in routine jobs: see Glenn et al. (1977).

8. Four very large public sector employers, one company with a LearnDirect centre and one hospital trust.

9. This latter site also bought in a customised training course for its senior staff from a university, paying for this in full.

10. There is not and never has been a central register or source of information on how many workplace schemes existed, or how many workplace learners were recruited; as the government confirmed in a written answer to a parliamentary question (David Lammy in reply to Boris Johnson, June 18 2007) no relevant data exist.

11. Speech by the Deputy Director of the Adult Basic Skills Strategy Unit (ABSSU), DfES, Workplace Basic Skills Network International Conference 13–14 November 2002.

12. This figure is an average based on the cost profiles used by a number of higher education institutions when calculating per‐hour costs for audited external contracts.