Government action on social exclusion is 'flawed'

Government efforts to help tackle social exclusion through life skills training are flawed because they fail to build on the skills and experiences that people already have, a report warned today.

The study, by the left-leaning thinktank Demos and the charity Crisis, highlights the importance of life skills such as dealing with bureaucracy and networking in tackling homelessness, and it praises the government for investing heavily in training.

But it warned that the impact of this investment in terms of rates of homelessness, unemployment and reoffending would be limited until the government changed its approach to how life skills are acquired.

The report, Survival Skills, argued that schemes such as Connexions - the government's one-stop shop for services to young people and its Skills for Life strategy adopted traditional approaches to teaching skills that had proved ineffective.

It said they were based on the flawed premise that the experiences of socially excluded people were irrelevant to picking up the skills needed to participate in society.

This approach risks "diminishing the strength of will that people show when they try to step away from difficult and damaging circumstances", it said.

It added: "Unless we equip people to build on their difficult past experiences as a foundation from which to move into a more stable lifestyle, successes in overcoming exclusion will only ever be short-lived."

One of the report's co-authors, Hannah Lownsbrough, explained: "Attempts to help people develop life skills need to start from the skills and experience they already have, not the things they lack."

The research was based on alternative approaches to life skills training including Crisis' Skylight project.

Ms Lownsbrough said: "Successful life skills projects have used people's own experience as the starting point to increase their self-confidence and to develop new life skills."