The Hedon Salads group has helped more than 50 of its employees, based at Selby and Newport, to brush up on their literacy skills, or study English language. Cucumber, capsicum and aubergine supplier Hedon has been helping its employees improve their skills since last August as part of the Learning & Skills Council (LSC) Humberside’s Skills for Life initiative,

Linda Ainsworth, Director of Adult Learning and Strategic Marketing at the LSC Humberside, said, “Hedon Salads should be commended for providing its teams with the chance to improve their literacy and English skills. Improving these skills does make a real, identifiable difference to business performance, which is reward in itself, but now employers can also gain public recognition for their commitment to employee development via our new award scheme.”

The Skills for Life project at Hedon was funded by Yorkshire Forward in partnership with the LSC and the Consortium for Learning. Its success was based shift patterns and carried out on-the-job with the use of laptop computers. Many learners were from eastern European countries, including Lithuania, the Czech Republic, Latvia, Poland, and from Iraq - the training contributed to improvements in their literacy skills.

Hedon’s Lynn Walmsley said: “Literacy and language skills are important for our production and crop workers. The work that we have undertaken helped to ensure that everyone understands work related matters such as health & safety requirements, but it has also built confidence and provided a valuable first step towards NVQs and further training.”

Sergei Svydyrenko, from the Ukraine is a supervisor at Hedon Salads. He said: “I have found the course very helpful and I think that I have achieved a lot. Part of my job is to complete necessary paperwork, and the course has made that so much quicker and easier.”

A free needs assessment visit from a LSC adviser is available to employers that are considering providing Skills for Life opportunities for their employees.

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