TotemPole that is incredibly short sighted (to discount ongoing education, restrict the class hours per week allowed, and call a halt to attendance). It is gobsmackingly stupid in fact, to effectively make sure you have a workforce with limited education and verifiable skills. How do you attract business with so little to offer by way of employee quality? It reinforces my suspicion that what the Tories feel about workfare and those it targets is that they are trying to punish fecklessness/the undeserving poor/spongers -- allowing unexamined prejudice to govern policy instead of looking rationally at lack of skills and lack of opportunity.
I really think Ireland has a much better idea, and has been doing things better since the start of the old regional techs, (now institutes of technology), along with the reshuffling of the Leaving Cert offerings. Making technical/vocational education accessible (which means supporting people trying to get ahead) is so important. The regional techs were supposed to turn out people with qualifications in areas such as lab technology, IT, quantity surveying, quality control, business specialisations like marketing, etc., with the aim of producing a well qualified workforce spread throughout the country, and located in places that never had a third level college before - Tralee, Carlow, Donegal, Athlone, etc. and many other county towns. Braun located a factory in Carlow a few years after the tech there had been up and running.
I used to volunteer teaching adult literacy. People who were referred by courts (this sometimes happened) were harder to reach/teach than people who came voluntarily. Adult literacy is a tricky area, whether the adults are completely illiterate or have minimum literacy skills. There are often complicated reasons for adults to end up illiterate or sub literate, including physical (eyesight, dyslexia) and psychological/emotional issues (childhood spent being bounced around in care, no continuity to educational experience, childhood abuse or neglect, experience of failure and harsh treatment in school, family constantly moving, eg from Ireland to England, etc). You can't just force adults to go and get their literacy sorted out. It is not as simple as that, and there are not enough volunteers to manage this task (and I think there is the assumption that these are people who ungratefully thumbed their noses at school when they had the chance, and the Tories are not going to let them get away with it).