EDUCATION
literacy and writing skills in their mother tongue, and basic writing skills are also needed. In the Thames Gateway, people from ethnic minority groups additionally faced problems of racism, different cultural expectations (especially for women) and ‘bounded horizons’ – concerning where they might go and what they might achieve. The Learning and Skills Council (LSC, 2006) identified distinct groups of migrants with differing needs for ESOL provision: asylum seekers needing help with integration, foreign-born citizens seeking citizenship, and migrant workers seeking English language competency for work-related purposes. They found that nearly 500,000 ESOL learners were enrolled at further education colleges in 2004–5. Of the full-time ESOL learners, 15 per cent were asylum seekers, and presumably the rest migrants. Provision was greatest in London, but this raises questions as to what is available in areas with a more recent history of migration. Given the widespread concern and discussion about ESOL, the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) set up a Committee of Inquiry on ESOL, which reported in 2006. It was critical of the quality of ESOL provision, and especially the lack of links to employability and information, advice and guidance about employment, a concern echoed by Leitch in his review of skills training (Leitch, 2006) and by refugee and migrant organisations who participated in research in Birmingham in 2006 (Phillimore et al, 2007). They also found an increasing demand for ESOL, especially from the new Eastern European migrants. The LSC study (LSC, 2006a) noted that Polish enrolments had increased 18-fold between 2003 and 2006. A separate LSC study, however, found that British Asians (the study used ethnic categories) were the largest group of ESOL learners. There is, however, general agreement that demand exceeds supply. In Bolton, for example, there is a waiting list of 1,100 people for ESOL at the local college and a one and a half year wait to start classes. The research strongly suggests that increased provision is needed to meet the demand from A8 migrants in particular, as well as a need to enhance linkages with other education and training provision, ensure distance learning and flexible provision, and arrangements to meet the needs of excluded groups like migrants working in inaccessible locations. Research for the Institute of Community Cohesion (2008), involving more than 100 local authorities, concluded that there is insufficient provision of ESOL to meet increasing demand, that part of the problem is the shortage of ESOL teachers and that more restrictive rules around the Government’s funding for ESOL will make the problem worse. There are, however, other pressures on ESOL. At the end of 2006, the then Department for Education and Skills (DfES) announced that fee remission for hitherto 117