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| In Birmingham we are working with a range of voluntary and community groups to support people wanting to develop their literacy, numeracy and communication skills within their community settings.
The developments rely upon identifying other members of the group able to offer support and encouragement in everyday ways in people’s normal settings. The aim is to encourage people with a good standard of literacy and numeracy who, with support and training, can help someone else improve theirs. This has attracted a wide cross-section of the community and the activities take place in a wide range of settings. More than 100 community groups have been worked with. This has resulted in 30 community group members volunteering to become basic skills support contacts for over 70 other people. This work is now attracting considerable national attention because of the way it is unlocking the basic skills needs of large numbers of community group members in low key, appropriate ways. |
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| The work sits alongside other devel-opments prompted by this Partnership. Key voluntary and community organisations are being ‘twinned’ with other high quality basic- skills organisations- and are being encouraged to work towards the Basic Skills Agency’s Quality Mark. In other cases a voluntary organisation or a network of community organisations may not be functioning effectively because of low levels of communication skills or numeracy skills of committee members or key organisers. Customised support to these organisers is enabling them to polish the basic skills they need to manage and administer the groups more effectively. | |||||
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