Education and Employment Secretary David Blunkett has changed the rules on New Deal eligibility to avoid there being a shortage of cheap labour over the Millennium holiday.He’s agreed that young unemployed people will be able to take short term Millennium jobs, without losing the chance of help and support under the New Deal.
The Government has announced its intention to beef up training for school governors.It is extending the role of governors, and giving some parent representatives the power to sit on education committees of local councils.
Efforts to get better value from the money spent on non medical education and training are being hampered by a lack of information. There is no price tag because the cost is unknown. The Audit Commission has suggested that the figure is: “more then 1b pounds”.Health Authorities and Trusts are set to launch local audits in the autumn of next year to find out what resources are being committed to education and training. Armed with this information they will then look at how training and education is lined up with business plans, health improvement programmes and national policy and how efficiency and effectiveness can be improved.
A radical shift in public service culture has been signalled by the National Audit Office. The Modernising government White paper published in March 1999 described the aspiration of ministers that the deeply embedded risk averse culture would give way to a more innovative approach, but this is the first indication that change is actually on the way.The NAO has given a commitment that it will support well thought through risk taking and experimentation. Although the statement relates to research establishments and the commercial exploitation their activities, the move is a strong signal to central government organisations that carefully evaluated risk is OK. The NAO also makes it clear that this line is also being taken by the Public Audit Forum which represents audit and inspection bodies throughout the UK.
An extra 50,000 adults will get free basic IT skills training next year. The aim is to increase employability, particularly among those who have gained least from the education system. The scheme will operate in conjunction with the BBC Webwise campaign.Vouchers for the IT courses, giving directions to the nearest learning centre, will be available in job centres and supermarkets. The number of learning centres is set to rise to 1000 by 2002.
Persuading professionals in different organisations to think how services can be delivered differently is a barrier to joined up working. This is the view of people in six Pathfinder – New Deal For Communities – projects launched in September 1998. The authors of the report ‘Pathfinders’ Experiences’, published by the Department for the Environment Transport and Regions, canvassed the views of residents, local authority officers and other professionals who were involved in the projects.Because the New Deal for Communities is concerned with deprived communities in defined locations and focuses on worklessness, health, crime and education, it cuts across existing structures and cultures. The Pathfinder teams experienced difficulty building partnerships with the necessarily wide range of bodies. A particular problem was that decision making processes were all different. One approach that proved successful in overcoming this was a Partnership professional support team with representatives from a council, a NHS trust, police, Employment Service and Further Education.
Read more on PATHFINDERS STRUGGLE TO MAKE JOINED UP GOVERNMENT WORK…
The social care workforce and the services it delivers across the whole of the sector are to be regulated for the first time. A new General Social Care Council is due to be set up in 2001. The actual start date will depend on when the legislation is approved. The primary aim of the Council will be to drive up standardsAn Advisory Group has been formed to prepare the way for the Council. An early task for the Group, which meets for the first time next week, will be to oversee the initial drafting of Codes of Conduct and Practice for the workforce. The Office for Public Management has been commissioned to begin drafting the codes. The first task for the new Council will be to finalise and promulgate the codes.
David Blunkett, Secretary for Education and Employment has a vision of job seekers tracking down vacancies while they shop at the supermarket, consult the doctor at the surgery, relax in the community centre or drink coffee in the cyber cafe or beer in the pub. The vision will start to become a reality next year with a budget of 50m pounds from the Capital Modernisation Fund. Looking further into the future, vacancies may be viewed through interactive TV.Trials with touch screens connected to the Employment Service vacancy database known as the Labour Market System, or LMS, have proved successful from both a user and technical point of view. Starting next year touch screens will be installed in job centres and also in other places where people have free access. Job seekers in a supermarket or other place remote from the job centre who want advice will be able to speak to an official at the call centre.
A gift of 4m dollars (2.5m pounds) from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation will be used to fund 47 new high technology learning centres in deprived areas. The centres, which will be located in areas of greatest need, will be equipped with state of the art hardware and software. The aim is to increase computer access for all people to ensure that no one is left out of the technological advances of the 21st century. The initiative follows discussions between the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and Matthew Evans, Chairman of the Government’s Library and Information Commission.Although more than 13 million people in Britain have Internet access and the revenue from e-commerce is set to top 10b pounds next year there are many millions of people who have yet to switch on a computer. Three initiatives involving funding from lottery distributor the New Opportunities Fund, are already seeking to boost information technology use in libraries. They are a 250m pound programme of information technology training for teachers and librarians; a 50m pound project for the digitisation of electronic information to support life long learning and a 200m pound programme to promote community access to life long learning, helping link libraries to each other and to schools.
The approval of a further 41 Education Action Zones has brought the total to 67. The first zone was launched in September 1998. The zones are local partnerships between groups of schools (typically around 20), businesses, parents, local education authorities, the community and others, designed to boost standards in areas facing challenging circumstances. They are typically formed around two or three secondary schools and their feeder primary schools.Zones receive annual funding for their initial 3 year life which can amount to 3m pounds. Major businesses like Jaguar, Barclays and Safeway support the zones as well as small local businesses. In total the initiative has brought 18m pounds of sponsorship into education from the private sector.
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