About
Birmingham Core Skills
Development Partnership

The partnership was established in 1996 to test out new approaches to lifelong learning at the heart of Birmingham's economic and social regeneration, with the development of higher levels of literacy, language, numeracy and IT at the very core of this. A range of developments have supported partner organisations to develop core skills issues. The nature of the approach stresses the need to jointly create a coherent framework, with common messages, (rather than to aim for patchy, fragmentary activity) if consistent and wide scale impact is to be made.

The approach brings together ideas from networks of planners and practitioners and aims to work within the existing corporate strategies of the major organisations within the city. The aim is to extend what these organisations do rather than set up alternative activity.

The developments sit within the wider strategic planning and operating mechanisms between a range of key agencies in the city.

It is more a way of working than a structure in its own right.

It aims to bring about increases in the achievement levels – closing the gap to national levels and then going beyond these to meet, or exceed, the best comparator levels in European cities that have features similar to Birmingham.

It aims to do this by bringing about long term changes in the way systems work, long term improvements in the quality of services and increased coherence in the developments planned.

Contact: office@coreskills.co.uk

The Vision: Birmingham as a self-sustaining literate, numerate and learning resilient community

Birmingham becomes a city within which:

  • adults and young people have adequate core skills to be able to participate in community, social and economic activity
  • adults in employment have levels of communication/numeracy to do work tasks well and see opportunities for self-development
  • employers and employees recognise a shared responsibility for continuing development of communication/number skills of employees and the workplace
  • those seeking employment have essential skills for employability
  • pupils leave school having reached highest achievement levels in literacy/numeracy
  • children, young people and adults see themselves as able to be readers, writers, communicators in a range of ways
  • there is a strong culture of reinvesting learning skills for the benefit of others
  • parents are confident in their own abilities to develop literacy/numeracy skills in children
  • levels of literacy, numeracy and other core skills increase to exceed national target levels for pupils at Key Stages 1-4, and for adults

Development Framework

The valued developments are those focused on bringing about widespread change which:

In strategic terms:

  • links to the implementation of broader strategies
  • adds value to mainstream activities by improving the quality and diversity of opportunities
  • focuses on the needs of specific client groups, especially at identified critical transition times
  • seeks appropriate ways of embedding core skills in a wide range of mainstream programmes
  • enhances the existing professional development of staff to create whole-organisation approaches to core skills development
  • sustains the changes long-term by creating new ways of working that become independent of on-going financial support
  • recognises the interplay between literacy, numeracy and English Language capabilities and underlying economic, social and neighbourhood influences
  • recognises that broad ways forward are rarely linear/mechanical but usually need to be more open ended, taking account of complexities and able to sit loosely within emerging frameworks

In operational terms:

  • focuses developments that are structured not just on pilots but on activity that has impact on whole structures
  • increases multi-agency approaches and joint planning, with differing roles clearly defined
  • assists organisations to identify what creates success and to make this the norm
  • has some targeting based on need, without defining people/organisations as failing
  • expands the use of appropriate technologies to accelerate learning
  • supports assessment and target setting, based upon disaggregated, reliable information
  • increases the volume of voluntary activity
  • contributes to planned step-changes and contributes towards longer-term outcomes