The New Deal and employment initiatives 

The New Deal is a Government programme that gives people on benefits the help and support they need to look for work, including training and preparing for work. There is a variety of types of New Deal for different target audiences, including young people, over-25s, over-50s, lone parents and disabled people. For more information visit www.jobcentreplus.gov.uk. A Literacy Today article from 2000 looked at how the New Deal in Fife addressed literacy - Accelerated literacy learning for adults.

New Deal clients are screened for basic skills needs and offered intensive help to improve their skills, where necessary, through work-based learning. In late 2003, a proposal to extend a pilot scheme involving punitive cuts in benefits to Job Seeker Allowance claimants who do not take up basic skills training, caused a storm of protest. The Social Services Advisory Committee (which advises Government) informally sounded out agencies and expert bodies about the proposal.

In its original report in 2001, the committee advised government against including the element of sanctions. A subsequent pilot scheme was judged to be too small and inconclusive, so an extension to the proposed was proposed, to run for 12 months from April 2004.

Niace (the National Institute for Adult Continuing Education) and Rapal (Research and Practice in Adult Literacy) expressed their unequivocal opposition to cuts in claimants' benefits as a means to encouraging them to improve their skills.

In a formal response to the government, Niace stressed three key reasons why it opposed the proposals:

• they are not an effective approach: they will not motivate people to learn
• they are unnecessary illiberal: 'a sledgehammer to crack a nut'
• they are incompatible with the rest of the government's skills strategy which stresses voluntary approaches to learning

The Niace response said the evidence is that adult learners with low basic skills are only motivated to learn in an encouraging and supportive learning environment. Imposing sanctions risks confirming fear and suspicion of the educational system, and reinforcing the perception of learning as being undesirable and stressful.

Rapal questioned the proposal on grounds of the validity of the research and its simplistic view of basic skills learners. It said, "no one learns well through fear or the threat of further impoverishment".