Skills, Learning and Enterprise
Purpose of the Service
This newly-created division within the Regeneration Department maximises the benefits for residents of the borough's position as Gateway to the 2012 Olympics/Paralympics, and its location at the heart of the Thames Gateway.
It also leads on the delivery of services for children, young people and their families through the 'Every Child Matters' agenda, and specifically in the area of Outcome 5, 'Achieve Economic Well-being'. In this area the key measures include:
- Maximising the numbers of young people engaged in education, employment or training, by raising their levels of educational attainment and by preparing them for working life
- Ensuring that children, young people and their families live in decent homes and sustainable communities
- Reducing the numbers of children and young people living in households where there are low incomes or worklessness
- Ensuring that childcare is available to meet the needs of parents in work or seeking work
In order to achieve maximum impact in these 2 interrelated performance areas, the key service delivery priorities for the Skills, Learning and Enterprise Division are defined by the following factors:
- The aspirations of local residents are largely based on a labour market that is 30 years out of date when manufacturing and large companies dominated the labour market
- There is a lack of property based equity because 37% of our residents are in social housing and therefore have no access to capital to initiate enterprise. In our most deprived wards this rises to 62%
- Worklessness in our most deprived wards is intergenerational (including some 9,000 residents on Incapacity Benefit)
- There are also striking differences within the Barking and Dagenham community. For example, the economic activity rate for males was 75% for 2005 against a rate of 63% for women
- Our black and minority ethnic communities are more likely to be economically inactive and unemployed than the borough average. Yet evidence suggests that 64% of the new business starts supported by our local enterprise agency in the last 3 years have come from these communities
- In the last year Barking and Dagenham saw the largest rise in London for rates of unemployment. Employment rates overall are below the European Union threshold. Many residents are engaged in temporary, low-paid employment outside the borough
- Our skills base although rising recently, remains the lowest in London - only 43% of the working age population has a level 2 qualification or above compared with 59% for London. Skills projections for the Thames Gateway indicate an ever-widening gap between skills held by residents and those needed for high quality permanent employment
- We have amongst the highest percentage of young people aged 16-25 not in education, employment or training in London at 12%
- Our business community wishes to see institutional and bureaucratic barriers to enterprise and business support minimised. They are concerned about the business environment and crime. Our space for enterprise to flourish is inadequate in scale, poorly located in terms of access for our residents and generally poorly maintained
