Building society staff brush up on English

STAFF at a Yorkshire building society have gone back to school to improve their English language skills.

About 20 Leeds Building Society employees have been sent on an internal training course under the instruction of a former A-level English teacher.

Four sessions have been laid on covering punctuation, parts of speech, sentencing, paragraph construction and writing concisely. They were designed to make internal reports easier to read.

Sales and marketing director Kim Rebecchi said: “The standard of formal English within the society is strong. What we wanted to focus on was a more consistent approach to our internal writing, focusing on clarity and brevity.

“I am absolutely delighted that our staff, of all ages and from all areas of the business, many of whom have been out of formal education for a long period, have been so enthusiastic about ‘going back to school’. The sessions have been fun, thought provoking, caused healthy debate and have focused on consistency, clarity and brevity.”

A growing number of firms are offering extra tuition to staff and a school in Portsmouth even gave English lessons to teaching assistants. Several major business figures have spoken out about the educational standards of workers.

Last year Sir Terry Leahy, the chief executive of Tesco, criticised “woefully low” standards in many British schools and said employers were left to fill in some of the gaps in young people’s skills, while Sir Stuart Rose, the former chief executive of Marks & Spencer, said businesses were “not always getting what we need”, from the education system.

The Leeds is Britain’s fifth- largest building society, with nearly 690,000 members.