AHEAD of the government's looming shake-up of post-16 education and training, across the whole of Lancashire there is virtually universal support for the county to have two of the new Learning and Skills Councils that are to replace the existing Training and Enterprise Councils across the country.

It is a policy that would give East Lancashire its own LSC and save our region from losing much of the valuable expertise it has built up in developing, improving and providing training and education for the workforce of tomorrow .

So why, alone among Lancashire's chambers of commerce, the existing TECs and all 12 district councils, are the County Council and its erstwhile offspring, the economic development firm, Enterprise plc, opposed to this view and are calling instead for the government to be recommended this week that there should be be just one LSC for the county?

This newspaper can only conclude that - just as was demonstrated by its strident opposition to Blackburn with Darwen and Blackpool gaining their independence as local authorities - the County Council is once more self-seekingly anxious to protect its overblown influence and power base.

But this is not just a question of a misplaced sense of self-importance, it is an outlook that could be extremely harmful to East Lancashire. To begin with, it threatens the waste of the talent and experience that now lies in ELTEC, East Lancashire's own Training and Enterprise Council which, when rated by its results, is in the top five per cent of TECs in the country.

On top of this, ELTEC is a force that has been influential in the bringing together of East Lancashire councils and public sector providers with private sector business and enterprise organisations to forge a dynamic and widely envied partnership system that has worked superbly for our region's regeneration and to develop its economic future.

And all of this has been tailored to East Lancashire's distinct and peculiar needs - much of which lie in the region's high dependence on manufacturing, a high ethnic population and lower skills levels than elsewhere.

If its future training and education is mixed in with the different and motley requirements of other parts of Lancashire, the special requirements of our region's business and industry and of the youngsters seeking training and employment may be dissipated and blunted - and the drive to boost East Lancashire through its burgeoning sense of partnership could be driven off course in the process.

This shake-up is meant to improve post-16 education and training and for that to happen in our region, East Lancashire must be allowed to retain ELTEC's unique experience and talent in a Learning and Skills Council of its own.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.