Bill Rammell - Celebrating Learning

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Thank you [Sue] and good afternoon everyone.

It's a great pleasure for me to be able to join you today and, if I may say so, a privilege to have been invited to join you in this celebration of the twentieth anniversary of the creation of Return to Learn.

I know you've had a busy day so far. And I know that it hasn't just been spent looking backwards at what Unison's learning campaign has achieved for members over the last two decades. I'm pleased that your day, starting I believe with Dave Prentiss' address this morning, has also been spent looking forward to what you're going to do next.

And there's certainly plenty to do.

I've been the Minister responsible for lifelong learning for three years now, But in this company, I feel like a relative beginner.

That's all the more true because the Department in which I now work, the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills is less than a year old. DIUS was created the day after Gordon Brown became Prime Minister last June in order to bring together for the first time political responsibility for the education and training of everyone over 19 years of age with cross-Governmental responsibility for promoting science, research and innovation.

This wasn't just another of the periodic rearrangements of the educational seating in Whitehall, of which we've seen several in recent times.

It was born of our recognition that raising the level of adult skills in this country presents one of the most urgent challenges that we face in the 21st century.

If we are to compete successfully in global markets in the years to come, it will not be as a low-wage, low-skills economy. On the contrary, it will be because our products are more innovative and of better quality than those of our competitors.

If you've visited any of the rising economies of the Far East, as I've done on a few occasions, you'll now what an increasingly potent a challenge to our businesses they are going to represent. And not just on the price of goods and services, but on their quality and technical sophistication, too.

All of them are investing heavily in skills. To stay ahead, so must we.

If we can do that, ordinary, hard-working people will reap the benefits that flow from prosperity.

Better prospects for individuals to progress in their careers and in heir lives.

Higher wages coupled with higher standards of living.

Greater social cohesion and a bigger stake for everyone in our democracy.

And, even more important than any of that, a better country and a brighter future to pass on to our children than the one we inherited from our forbears.

That is quite a prize, and quite a challenge.

The magnitude of what we must achieve has been set out in the Leitch review of skills. This described the trajectory that we will need to follow in order to create a workforce capable of supporting a competitive economy.

By 2010, we will need to have helped over 3 million adults to achieve their first full Level 2 qualification.

By 2020, we will need to have reduced by 40 per cent the number of adults who do not have functional competence in literacy and numeracy.

And by that stage, we will need 40 per cent of the whole working-age population qualified at degree level or the equivalent.

To succeed, we will need to harness to the full the talents of all our people. We can no longer afford to let those talents lie undeveloped through lack of training. 2020's going to be a key year. And it's sobering to think that 70 per cent of our 2020 workforce have already left school.

So participation in learning needs to be widened radically. That means reaching out to people who are reluctant to get involved for whatever reason. And also to groups who face additional barriers.

Now I've talked about what other people ought to be doing or are doing. But, you might be forgiven for asking, what about the Government? What are we doing? Ordinary, hard-working people contribute plenty to the nation's finances through their taxes. How is this helping to meet the skills challenge?

I can assure you that the high a priority that this Government continues to place on learning and skills is continuing to be reflected in how it spends your and your members' money.

The total public funding for post-16 learning and skills has already risen from £6.5 billion in 2001-02 to £11.2 billion today. By 2010-11, it will rise further, to £12.5 billion.

That will allow, among other things, an 325,000 apprenticeships a year to be offered by 2010, and 900,000 people a year to have their skills improved through Train to Gain.

This spending would be backed up with a new advancement service, to offer adults a single source of welfare and skills advice and help them get from joblessness into work and from low-skill to higher-skill employment.

That's far too big a job for the Government and its agencies to carry out alone.

That's why, over the past few months, you've heard members of the Government from the Prime Minister down urging the other bodies involved in education and training to make the changes necessary to ensure that their contribution, too, is felt.

It's true of employers. In the past, it's all too often been the case that an employer has looked only at this year's balance-sheet when assessing whether the cost of training in cash and in productive time of investing in training is worthwhile, not at the longer-term consequences of failing to do so.. That's why the Government views the Skills Pledge, and the example of those businesses who've signed it, as being so important.

Employers must recognise the fact that their own investment of time and money in an increasingly highly-skilled workforce will ultimately be reflected in their own business' bottom line. We need them to commit to developing a training culture in their businesses - signing the skills pledge, offering apprenticeships, and engaging with training providers to ensure that the learning that the learning that takes place in their company is right for them and their people.

Employers' organisations have complained about skills shortages for decades - often with justification. The Government is now offering to support them in solving the problem.

It's also true that further and higher education providers will have to change. In order to reach learners in the numbers we'll need with the provision that they'll need, there will have to be a radical shift of methods and outlooks.

Providers of training must give employers and learners what they need. That will require them to engage more closely with businesses in order to be able to tailor their provision to a particular setting. It will also require them to be innovative in how training is delivered - in the workplace, through new technologies, or in more easily digestible chunks than the traditional full course.

When my colleague John Denham spoke to the Association of Colleges on 22 November, I made clear that, in future, funding will not go to further education providers who fail to recognise and meet these needs.

And very shortly, I hope to announce the creation of a new strategy for higher level skills. Among other things, this will be intended to make university-level courses much more readily available to people in work.

The third area where change is needed is arguably the most challenging of all. Many more individual people need to acknowledge the fact that training can improve their lives and those of their families. Of course, many know that already. But those who don't yet know it are precisely those it is most important for us to reach.

Is there anything more dispiriting for those of us who believe in the power of learning to transform lives for the better than to hear someone say that learning's not for them? If the talents of all our people are to be unlocked in the way that we needs, those attitudes and the culture that makes them acceptable need to change, too.

Too many people in this country have distrusted learning for too long. The society we want to see if one where, when someone complains about their dead-end job, their best friend asks them what they are going to do to improve their skills.

All that is, I think you'll agree a pretty big agenda for change. However, I don't think any of you can claim to have heard any Minister say that the trade union movement's attitude to learning needs to change. The reason for that's not sentimentality. And it's not because you've got votes at the Party Conference.

It's because unions were present at, and instrumental in, the birth of the mass continuing education of working men and women. Just as you were present at, and instrumental in the birth of the Labour Party.

I, for one, am very happy that both traditions live and thrive to this day.

Who has done more than trade unions to take adults with inadequate or off-putting experiences of education behind them and convince them to get back into learning? On this of all days, I should perhaps say rather, to return to learn. And indeed, to ensure that high-quality, relevant learning opportunities are available to them.

That is an area where the trade union movement can and does offer real, practical help to its members, to the Government and to the country at large. The voice of a person's union is trusted - certainly more trusted than that of a politician.

When trade unionists go out and advocate the benefits of learning to fellow trade unionists, it has a real effect.

That is why this Government created the Union Learning Fund in 1998 and, in 2003, introduced a statutory right to time off with pay for Union Learning Representatives to carry out their duties.

The growing success of the Union Learning Fund and of the Unions Learning Representatives has shown how right we were in this analysis.

Among so many other things, the Union Learning Fund has financed your own Establishing a Culture of Learning project.

And there are now over 18,000 Union Learning Representatives who have helped over 400,000 workers back into training - 150,000 of them in the last year alone. Many of those have been in he hardest-to-reach groups, including workers with poor basic literacy and numeracy skills.

I know that Unison alone has over 3,000 Union Learning Representatives, half of whom have not previously been active in the union and two-thirds of whom are women.

With the creation of unionlearn, this initiative has entered a new phase. It will bring greater coherence to trade union learning and skills activities and should, by 2010, be helping a quarter of a million workers a year back into learning.

When he launched unionlearn in May 2006, Gordon Brown pledged continued financial support for trade union learning activities. I am happy to say that we are making good on that pledge. Government funding for the scheme has risen from £18 million last year to £21 million in 2008.

It is important that we build together on what has been achieved so far.

Unions have shown that they can put together a wide range of innovative and imaginative projects which help to bring skills to those who need them most. The challenge now is for unionlearn to take the union contribution to workforce development into a new era.

Supporting skills and training should be at the heart of modern trade unionism and I hope that all unions will raise the profile of learning within their work.

I come finally to the contribution of Unison itself, which has long been an exemplar even within the union movement of an unwavering commitment to the benefits of learning.

And, as befits a union that is so closely involved with so many different sectors, you have done it in a wide range of different ways.

Like Cleopatra, age cannot wither nor custom stale the infinite variety of the options for personal and professional development on offer to your members.

In any year, you are to thank for the training of as many people as an average-sized university.

As I mentioned earlier, and as you have been discussing during the course of the day, there is much more to come and you have new and exciting projects in hand.

You have long-since grasped the vital fact that training workers isn't only about coping with economic change and increasing productivity and profitability. It's about social change as well.

It's about teaching ordinary people how to get more out of their labour and more out of life.

It's about teaching them to aspire to a better future for them and their families.

It's about equipping them with the skills and knowledge they need to play a fuller part in their communities, at work or outside, and to participate more fully and in a better-informed way in the hard decisions that the people of any liberal democracy have to take.

In the end, it's about equality. About creating a country that's more civilised and more at ease with itself. Whose people have self-respect because of their own achievements and respect for others. Whose people react to difference not with suspicion, but with curiosity and a desire to learn more.

Unison is helping them to do just that. It is also helping the rest of the Labour movement towards our, historic objective of achieving not just a more productive and prosperous Britain, but also a fairer and more equal society.

Towards a Britain of opportunity and aspiration for all.

I must thank you once again for inviting me here today. I congratulate Return to Learn on its twentieth birthday. I congratulate you all on what you have achieved and on how many lives you have made better.

And I look forward with confidence to what more you will do.

Thank you.