In recent years most of our partners have undergone some internal restructuring. This has led to a geographical broadening of the remit of those partners. Birmingham Training and Enterprise Council became Birmingham and Solihull Learning and Skills Council; Employment Services became Birmingham and Solihull Jobcentre Plus; Birmingham Careers and Education Business Partnership became Birmingham and Solihull Connexions Service, and Birmingham and Solihull Education-Business Consortium.

Since 2002 we have been managing, on behalf of Advantage West Midlands (the West Midlands Regional Development Agency) and the six local Learning and Skills Councils in the West Midlands, a regional set of developments to increase the volume and consistency of initial teacher training and continuing professional development for adult basic skills teachers. The Partnership is a member of the regional Skills for Life Strategy Group, has recently been commissioned to redraft the development framework for adult basic skills for the next few years, and has undertaken a set of activities to bring increased focus and clarity to the variety of regional developments that are being put in place.

Two years ago we made links with a parallel set of potential developments in Vancouver, Canada and the Yukon, Canada. After a visit to speak to various groups there, the Partnership hosted a return study visit from key workers form Vancouver and the Yukon. This, in turn, led to an invitation to Birmingham’s Head of Family Learning to be a keynote speaker at their annual adult literacy conference alongside a speaker from the Department for Education and Skills’ Adult Basic Skills Strategy Unit. This took developments in Canada one step further and we are hoping to host a further study visit to Birmingham in the near future.

Workers in New Orleans, America, picked up on our structured ‘whole system’ approach and we have established links with developments there. Birmingham and New Orleans jointly delivered a workshop at the March 2004 conference of the National Research and Development Centre (see ‘Remaining Puzzles and Opening Moves’ (PDF) for a summary of this workshop).

An increasing number of cities are interested in the system-change approach taken in Birmingham.