Neil Coyle – 2016 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Neil Coyle on 2016-02-22.

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, what plans his Department has to publish a national strategy for English for speakers of other languages for England.

Nick Boles

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills, the Home Office, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Communities and Local Government work together to support the policy ambitions of state-funded ESOL: to enable unemployed people on benefits to get the skills they need to get into and stay in work; and to support the integration of long-standing migrant communities and particularly those individuals most at risk of isolation from services and wider society.

There are no plans to publish a national strategy. We fund ESOL through the Adult Education Budget, and colleges and training providers have the freedom and flexibility to determine how they use this budget to meet the needs of their local communities. It is therefore their responsibility to plan which ESOL courses they deliver locally, within their resources.