Lancashire County Council
Focus on cleaning staff
Lancashire County Council has been running skills for life programmes for the past eight years, mainly for cleaning staff. There are around 3,000 cleaning staff within the authority, most of whom are directly employed by schools.Trainers and assessors use an integrated approach to deliver nine hours of skills for life training alongside a 20-hour level 1 NVQ programme for cleaning staff. Training is generally delivered in schools, and is adapted to the specific requirements of the learners’ job. At the end of the programme learners have the opportunity to achieve a skills for life qualification as well as the NVQ.
The authority identified lack of confidence amongst learners and a reluctance to admit that they could benefit from skills for life training as the main barriers to people taking up learning opportunities. The authority works with union learning representatives and uses peer mentoring to help overcome these barriers and believes that these approaches are critical to the success of the programme.
The programme has been rolled out to almost 700 individuals, and although there is no formal requirement to sit national tests, about a quarter of those involved in the programme have gone on to achieve a level 1 certificate. In addition, the programme has been important in building learners’ confidence.
