Policy Review Section

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Abstract
Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) were announced in the December 1988 White Paper Employment Policy for the 1990s and launched by the Prime Minister in March 1989. The Policy Review Section of the previous issue of Regional Studies set out the wider economic development background to the development of TECs. The first TECs were launched in 1989. They are a major government initiative to turn over to private sector led councils a number of major Training Agency programmes, such as Youth Training (YTS) and Employment Training (ET), to give major new local flexibility to areas to fine-tune training provision to needs and, in the longer term, also to co-ordinate with many existing business-education links. In Scotland, the TECs will also include many of the existing functions of the Scottish Development Agency. An LSE team has been monitoring how TECs are developing and the problems they will encounter. Their results were presented at a conference at LSE on 20 April 1989 of 180 participants convened by Robert Bennett, Andrew McCoshan and John Sellgren, which was chaired by Alan Bartlett (Education and Training Director of the Association of British Chambers of Commerce). The Conference was associated with a Leverhulme Trust research project and the Institute of British Geographers Industrial Activities Study Group. Approximately 50% of the conference participants were drawn from the business sector, divided equally between companies and business organizations such as Chambers and Local Employer Networks (LENs); roughly 40% came from the education, training and voluntary sectors; and 10% from other areas including academic and research organizations. This participation, therefore, by no particularly deliberate intention, reproduced the likely composition of a TEC Board of Directors! Hence the discussion to some extent mirrored the first negotiations on the TEC Boards: getting down to practice in terms of how TECs will be organized, how they will operate, the areas they will cover, and the linkages and partnerships they will forge with the wider local community particularly with education and training. This Policy Review Section, guest edited by Robert Bennett, presents the papers delivered at that conference.

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