§ 28. Mr. ChaytorTo ask the Secretary of State for Education and Employment what plans he has to extend and improve the services of Learning Direct. [68900]
§ Mr. MudieThe Department intends to increase Learning Direct's capacity so it can handle 1.5 million calls a year by 2000–01. To do this we are in the process of extending our current call centre and have invited expressions of interest from organisations to operate additional call centres. From our ongoing evaluation, we know over 91 per cent, of all callers to the helpline think the overall quality of the service is good. However, the service is under constant review. We are currently improving the databases used by Learning Direct and are332W developing better management information systems. We further plan to make the Learning Direct data available on the Internet.