Over the past year the major organisations with responsibilities for learning have been reshaping their different functions in order to ensure further progress in securing better outcomes for residents of Birmingham, including raised levels of achievement in literacy, language and numeracy.

The City Council now has a duty to draw up a long-term Children, Young People and Families Plan which sets out a number of outcomes for 2009 that will be guaranteed by clearer planning, by interagency working, and by putting resources behind interventions known to produce desired changes. The plan for Birmingham is a result of a number of strands of thinking, some of which can be traced back to the elements of good practice developed collectively over the past several years.

The Learning and Skills Council, nationally, has been reshaping itself through its Agenda for Change. This realigns the relationships in the further education sector and reshapes the internal organisation of the local Learning and Skills Council making it better able to support achievements and to challenge where improvement are needed. The priorities for planning and funding are now much more explicit, with adult basic skills being one of the key priorities.

Jobcentre Plus and the Probation Service are redesigning their specific responsibilities and responsibility for much of the direct delivery of basic skills provision is being transferred to the Learning and Skills Council.

The responsibility for an overall post-16 strategy for quality improvement now rests with the newly-formed Quality Improvement Agency. This takes over responsibility for the on-going Skills for Life Quality Initiative which this partnership has a heavy involvement with.

All of these changes are producing varying degrees of ‘turbulence’ in the system but, ultimately, will produce a system much more able to plan and deliver those outcomes that this partnership has been involved in developing.