Learning and Development

Executive Summary

Until the 1960's in the UK, there were very few national learning and training initiatives. There were apprenticeships, which in some form had existed since medieval times. After the Second World War, a few large employers introduced management training centres, where short-term internal management and supervision courses and conferences were organised, mainly for newly promoted or newly recruited management.

The twentieth century saw dramatic changes within the world of work, and the twenty-first appears to have continued the theme of change. Organisations have evolved in terms of purpose, size, structure, management philosophy and relationships with the outside world. Technological advances have revolutionised all work methods, and for the government, being competitive is now a global requirement.

Contents

1. Introduction 4

2. National Policy & Framework 5

2.1 Labour 5/6

2.2 Training by Employers 7

3. CIPD - Learning & Skills 8/9

4. Impact of changes within the last 5 years 9

4.1 Biome UK Ltd 9/10

4.2 Organisational Growth 10

4.3 Biomet Training plan 10/11

Conclusions 11/12

Bibliography 13

Appendix 1 - Significant statutes, reports and government interventions 14/15

Appendix 2 - Workforce Development: Recent Government Activity 15/16

Introduction

The National policy for education and training has undergone extensive change during the last 3 - 5 years. This report will review the changes and illustrate how they affect Biomet UK Ltd and government's recent initiatives and how Biomet is using it to obtain funding towards its peoples learning and to be IIP recognised.

Biomet UK is a wholly owned subsidiary of Biomet Europe with headquarters in Bridgend and Swindon. Biomet's mission statement is to design, manufacture and market products primarily for muscloskeletal medical specialists, from reconstructive joints to biomaterials. Biomet UK employs 750 people with a turnover of £60 million per-annum.

National Policy & Framework

In 1989 Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) was established in England and Wales, and Local Enterprise Companies (LECs) in Scotland and Northern Ireland. They were legally autonomous bodies that controlled the public funds allocated to them, could raise private funds and were employer-based. Their aim was to make training policy sensitive to local needs and therefore have a real impact on business growth.

All these initiatives demonstrate that the link was being made by government between training, business needs, and economic performance. A 1991 White Paper Education and Training for the 21st Century, sought to improve the UK's skills base and ensure a fuller contribution to the economy by all individuals. In particular, it sought to increase the proportion of young people acquiring higher levels of skill, to ensure that people were more committed to develop their own skills throughout their working lives (lifelong learning), and to increase employers' commitment to training. In the same year, the Investors in People scheme was introduced to encourage employers to link training to business needs and in 1994, in recognition that traditional apprenticeships had virtually died during the 1980s, Modern Apprenticeships were introduced, linked to the NVQ system.

Labour

When Labour came to power in 1997, it inherited a situation in which there was growing evidence from a number of surveys that the UK had more poorly qualified employees and fewer young people in training than most of its European competitors. Two 1998 Green Papers, The Learning Age and Lifelong Learning, announced the government's commitment to lifelong learning. The TUC then announced the establishment of a network of learning representatives, supported by a government-backed Union Learning Fund, to stimulate individuals to learn and to access new skills. Other initiatives to encourage lifelong learning have been introduced, including the University for Industry and Learndirect.

Also in 1998, Labour announced its 'welfare-to-work' scheme - New Deal, to get the young and older long-term unemployed into employment. How successful this has been is arguable: many of those who found jobs might have done so anyway because of the growth in the economy and, like the YT schemes of a decade or so earlier, there have been complaints about the relevance of the training and the associated bureaucracy.

Meanwhile, the TECs and LECs had never been fully welcomed. Unions had opposed them because they had no voice on most of them, their mix of private and public funding had caused disquiet, and they were caught between local needs and national training priorities. In 2001 they were abolished and replaced by 47 Learning and Skills Councils (LSCs), overseen by a national Learning and Skills Council with responsibility for funding, planning, quality assurance and delivery of all post-16 education and training up to but not including higher education. The weak ITOs were abolished and are replaced by more broadly-based Sector Skills Councils (SSCs) from 2002.

In the same spirit of greater co-ordination, in 2003 the Government issued its Skills Strategy White Paper with the stated aims of ensuring that employers had the skills to support the success of their business, and that employees had the necessary skills to be both employable and personally fulfilled. The White Paper spoke of building a new skills alliance where every employer, employee and citizen played their part, by integrating what already existed and focusing it more effectively.

Writing about recent and current events, historical perspective is lacking. Labour's initiatives are more interventionist and put less reliance on the market than the Conservative's previous initiatives, although more consensus may now be emerging. The influence of the European Union, with a broadly more interventionist philosophy, is increasing. But the clash between voluntarism and interventionism still exists, as is demonstrated by difficulties