Training and Employment
and travelling to the nearest centres where courses are available is both difficult and expensive. In some such areas support groups, helped sometimes by other volunteers from adult literacy/community education, provide English teaching for Vietnamese families in their own homes; in other areas groups have been successful in obtaining funding for previously unemployed teachers under the MSC Community Programme for work with those who are housebound. Help with travel is sometimes given by individual support group members: sometimes donations from church groups have paid for travel costs.
15. The refugee agencies for their part have drawn attention to the education needs of the Vietnamese and, with education authorities and support groups, explored ways of meeting them in areas where access to language training is difficult. For three years Ockenden Venture have also operated six-monthly residential courses for young Vietnamese between 16 and 25 years from across the country. Almost without exception they have achieved a reasonable fluency in English. This has enabled a number to go on to further education and others directly into employment. The social skills training
which is part of the course has also benefited the families from which the refugees have come.
16. The Vietnamese share unemployment with some three million others. The national unemployment rate in mid 1982 was 13.6%. Unemployment among ethnic minority groups in the same period, according to a recent Hansard reply, varied in several parts of the country between 13% and 24%. Vietnamese over 80% are unemployed.
Among the
17. It is possible to point to pockets of employment in various parts of the country be it in restaurants, factories or within the health service. The Vietnamese have also shown themselves prepared to use the initiative and entrepreneurial skills which they traditionally possess.
18. In a situation of high unemployment, however, their inadequate language skills and the limited transferability to our own market of the skills which they brought with them mean that Vietnamese refugees are handicapped from the start in their search for work.
19. To improve their chances in the labour market the agencies have increasingly turned to the Manpower Services Commission and they have shown considerable understanding of the problem and a readiness to respond. There are a number of Pre-Tops and Tops courses linking language and skills training, and suitable for the Vietnamese as well as for others for whom English is a second language, in colleges in several parts of the country. One programme so far caters specifically for Vietnamese - this is a Pre-Tops course at Stoke-on-Trent which was funded through the MSC but whose curriculum is established by the college. The MSC have also set up 3 pilot work-related skills-linked language courses in Poole and Bournemouth purely for the Vietnamese (12 at a time) which are intended to overcome the problem of dispersed settlement by recruiting people from more than one area.
20. Other initiatives being pursued this year are a course in Lewisham to help the Vietnamese set up their own businesses and the development by OV of a system of locally based job seekers among support groups who will endeavour to assist in identifying jobs which the Vietnamese might undertake in areas such as Newcastle, Oldham, Redditch, Birmingham and Manchester. The agencies have also made use of the Community Programme and Voluntary Projects Programme for this type of work. The BRC is sponsor of a Community Programme
4.