Birmingham’s strong commitment to a partnership drive on levels of literacy, language and numeracy, across all major agencies, has been clear since the Core Skills Development Partnership was formally established in 1996.  This is captured in the signature message at the foot of each email we have sent in the past few years:

“The function of the Core Skills Development Partnership is to support the exploration and implementation of a range of developments in literacy, language and numeracy in order that progress is made 'faster, deeper, wider' than might normally happen, with the aim of raising basic skills standards across all Birmingham to above national average levels (in ways that raise overall levels whilst also closing achievement gaps between different localities and communities).” 

This function has been carried forward via different sets of organisational arrangements as national and local contexts have changed.

Initially there was a need for a registered company; a strategic board of key decision-makers (to set overall direction); an operational delivery group of senior managers (to bring rapid refocusing of mainstream budgets and teams in delivery organisations); a set of loosely-linked development workers working out of different partner organisations (to get innovations linked and implemented).

As other governance arrangements were put in place for children’s services and adult skills development, the initial structural arrangements were absorbed into these.  The focus on core skills was still there but was integrated into the bigger set of decisions being made about ways forward to improve outcomes for people in Birmingham.  The network of development workers still acted in liaison with each other and the partnership office acted as a support and challenge function to keep things moving along within the new broader frameworks.

Now, in 2008, (twelve years on from that initial push on the city-wide literacy, language and numeracy agenda) there is still a need to sustain momentum, and for key agencies to be reminded of what more can be one.  At the same time the case for partnership working no longer needs to be made.  Working together is now much more the norm and it is taken for granted that structured developments will be taken forward in jointly planned ways.  More recently, concerns about ‘outcomes’ has all but taken over from concerns with ‘process’.

The original 1996 focus was on key public and voluntary sector agencies and through their connections on into every classroom in every school, into every library, every nursery school, into colleges and adult learning providers; into the range of family programmes; into most major voluntary organisations; into the network of skills and employment services, and into a number of employers – taking literacy, language and numeracy developments as fast, as deep and as wide into these networks as the systems could manage.  In most cases these organisations have become self-assessing, self-improving providers of higher levels of core skills.  Intervention is now only expected in a minority of cases.

The next phase is to build on this success and to go even deeper into the infrastructures of the city by extending the work that has been begun via private companies, community organisations, young people’s networks, voluntary service groups and so on.

The organisational arrangements needed to take this forward form a looser network of voluntary sector and private organisations that can link reading, writing, oracy, and an excitement about number, to ideas of social development and social enterprise.

The original ambitions of the early partnership arrangements are now almost fully distributed across the system.  There is no formal separate Partnership structure, no separate focus on core skills.  There is, however,  still work to be done; still boundaries to be pushed; aspirations to be set even higher – but with much more of a sense that progress is able to be self-sustaining now, if the will to improve the lives of people in the city is maintained.