Providing education for Dundee’s unemployed adults may be the only way to alleviate poverty levels in the city, according to a leading education chief.
With the council having to find £23 million of savings in 2016/17, Grant Ritchie, principal at Dundee and Angus College, fears second chances for impoverished adults could fall by the wayside.
Although the waterfront redevelopment, the creation of the V&A and Dundee earning Unesco City of Design status demonstrate Dundee is clearly on the up, Mr Ritchie said there is a danger some of the city’s social ills could be ignored.
“The extent of poverty in Dundee is such a scar for us,” he said.
Mr Ritchie added that it is time to lift people from the cycle of poverty.
He said: “You end up with generations of families who have no experience of education or work. They don’t know how to get out of the situation they are in.”
Mr Ritchie is a member of the city’s multi-agency Fairness Commission, which is tasked with looking for solutions to the city’s poverty crisis.
He said he was staggered to see struggling Dundonians say they were getting “no help” in key education areas, such as literacy, IT and life skills.
“Unless we can give people these skills they are stuck,” he said.
“We’ve got all these facilities, and if we had the funding we could be open for evening classes.
“We’ve got hundreds of PCs that sit empty most evenings that could be used.”
He said psychology classes taught in Blackness Library are just one example of the ways the college used to work with part time learners out in community centres.
However, Mr Ritchie said 140,000 college places were lost across Scotland when the Scottish Government decided to focus on 18 to 24-year-olds due to the issue of youth unemployment.
He said: “When the Government made the focus on to young people there was a high level of youth unemployment. We need to widen that now.
“We need to look at adults who have been made redundant or are unemployed. If we don’t fill that role anymore then who does?”
The Fairness Commission will publish its report in early June and Mr Ritchie said he wants to see a conversation with Dundee City Council about “imaginative ways” of pooling resources to provide adult education come out of it.