In 1995, when the various education and skills agencies in Birmingham agreed to a collaborative drive on whole-system levels of literacy and numeracy, the commitment was to work through mainstream partners in order to influence the various planning and development processes across the city.

The bulk of the initial development work (1996-2005) is now complete and the Partnership’s influence has been embedded within:

• the emerging planning processes around the ‘children and young people’ agenda
• the adult and community learning planning processes across the city
• the inter-agency development work focusing on offenders; refugees and asylum seekers etc
• the local implementation of national developments and strategies to raise standards in school, and to raise levels of adult basic skills
• the planning concerned with neighbourhood renewal and raising the achievement levels of communities in specific localities.

Decisions that once might have been made through the partnership have increasingly been built into the ongoing annual plans of the Education Service, the Learning and Skills Council etc. The number of meetings associated with the Partnership (as a particular entity) have substantially reduced. The aim is to cease all meetings of the Partnership by December 2005, whilst ensuring that the co-operative ways or working together and the continuing focus on language, literacy and numeracy are sustained through the new planning and development processes.

The Partnership has established a substantial legacy in terms of:

• an ongoing influence on the development and implementation of national strategies
• a shaping of national and local thinking around mainstreaming; commissioning of change; outcome-focused development etc
• substantially raised levels of service to people at all ages across all Birmingham.

Clearly the work isn’t yet complete. There is still more to do to ensure that levels of literacy, language and numeracy rise even further – and that these levels of achievement are more even across various communities and localities. Any further development work can now, because of the work undertaken by the various partners over the past ten years, be taken forward through partner’s mainstream planning and development processes.