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Home > News > Learning and Skills Council

Learning and Skills Council

An East Riding of Yorkshire salads business is helping its employees to improve their literacy and English skills.  Since last August, as part of the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) Humberside’s ‘Skills for Life’ initiative, the Hedon Salads group of companies has helped more than 50 of its employees to ‘brush up’ on their literacy skills, or study English language. The group’s commitment has now put in it line for the LSC’s Ambassador Award.

The Ambassador Award recognises good employers in the Humber sub-region.  The award was launched last summer and the LSC is now looking for employers who might be the Ambassadors of 2005.  Last year three companies secured the title, but the LSC believes that many more employers deserve recognition for their commitment to providing Skills for Life opportunities for their workforces.

Linda Ainsworth, Director of Adult Learning and Strategic Marketing at the LSC Humberside, said, "Hedon Salads should be commended for providing its teams with the chance to improve their literacy and English skills.  Improving these skills does make a real, identifiable difference to business performance, which is reward in itself, but now employers can also gain public recognition for their commitment to employee development via our new award scheme."

Yorkshire Forward funded the Skills for Life project at Hedon Salads, which grows cucumbers, peppers and aubergines for distribution to retailers and caterers, in partnership with the Learning and Skills Council and the Consortium for Learning, which promotes work based learning in the Humber sub-region.

Hull Business Training Centre was involved in the delivery of the Skills for Life project.  Training towards the Level 1 adult literacy qualification was provided to a wide range of employees at Hedon Salads in North East, Burstwick and Newport.  Judith Dolman, Managing Director of HBTC, explained that, "The success of the project was based around flexible delivery to accommodate shift patterns and carried out on-the-job with the use of laptop computers.  Many learners were from eastern European countries, including Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Poland, and from Iraq" the training contributed to excellent improvements in their literacy skills."

Lynn Walmsley, Human Resources Coordinator at Hedon Salads, explained the value of Skills for Life training, she said, "Literacy and language skills are important for our production and crop workers.  The work that we have undertaken as part of the LSC’s Skills for Life initiative has not only helped to ensure that everyone understands work related matters such as health & safety requirements, it has also built confidence and provided a valuable first step towards NVQs and further training."

"Skills for Life is now an important part of our overall training plan," she confirmed.

Linda Ainsworth of the LSC said, "Through highlighting the commitment of employers like the Hedon Salads group of companies, we hope to encourage even more employers to contact us to find out how they could be improving the levels of literacy, English language skills and numeracy in their organisation."