Yet the American economy’s downturn, and the shift of manufacturing production to cheaper sites elsewhere in Asia, left Singapore confronting very similar challenges in helping adult workers adapt to new forms of work.

To date, the overwhelming focus of post-compulsory education in Singapore has been vocational. Yet here was the Ministry of Manpower hosting an event focused entirely on culture and creativity - partly because they have a larger part to play in design-rich, knowledge-centred economies, but also because motivating and training workers displaced by economic restructuring involves a different set of skills. Their learning symposium opened with a session in which the 1,000 participants sat in among the members of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, while Roger Nierenberg explored with them and us how innovation, co-operation and communication worked in an orchestra, and in other learning organisations. Some members of the audience got to direct the orchestra, the players had passages where no one was given authority to set the tempo. It was a convincing demonstration of the value of clear, flexible and responsive leadership. But mostly it was an exhilarating reworking of a familiar experience. The next morning Tony Buzan wove his distinctive brand of mind magic; an American philosopher tried to link Kant and Confucius to the contemporary company; and there were a variety of community and arts-based presentations.

The pi ce de resistance came at the end, when Dr Madan Kataria led a practical session in Learning Through Laughter. Dr Kataria was impressed by studies that show that laughter improves your immune system; reduces stress, and makes us more flexible in responding to change, and by evidence that the way we live now means we spend less time laughing. All but abandoning his general practice work in Bombay, Dr Kataria has established Laughter Clubs International - developing clubs in parks and workplaces where people laugh together for a period at the beginning of the day.

Laughter exercises help people explore conflict through laughing - hard to feel quite so cross when you have wagged your finger in someone’s face and roared with laughter at them, while tears stream down their face as they laugh back at you. I know it all seems daft, but Madan reduced a thousand deeply serious people to helpless laughter within a few minutes as he taught us some basic strategies. Like other forms of lifelong learning, laughing is good for your health and for the mind. Hard to see how it would fit in schedule 2 of the 1992 Act of course, but perhaps the time has now come for learning through laughter to find its way into neighbourhood renewal strategies.

I was not too surprised to see no reference to having a laugh together in the Performance and Innovation Unit’s paper on Workforce Development. It was quietly released on the same day as Gordon Brown’s Pre-Budget statement, and Stephen Byers’ release of minutes of a meeting with Railtrack. Curious that the criticism attracted by Byers’ timing was not equally applied to the Cabinet Office for failing to secure wider attention for the paper. Perhaps this is because, while most PIU papers are issued as government policy, this one makes clear that it isn’t. More widespread inter-departmental consultation leading to a second paper next summer,suggests that this area is still some way short of settled policy.

The Skills Task Force was unequivocal in advising that adults should have an entitlement to learning up to level 2. The logic of the PIU report underpins that, but it sounds as though Treasury nervousness has intervened - an impression reinforced by the pre-budget statement itself, where an even tighter schedule 2 seems to have been reinvented in the narrowness of vocational focus for the new money in prospect. The PIU report says that introducing a requirement to train would be a big change, not to be undertaken lightly. Surely, if we want a learning society, and a learning-rich economy, investment in the workforce should be a precondition of being allowed to trade, just as the obligation to secure a safe working environment is now. It is worth noting in passing that Singapore does have a training levy on all employers.

The Learning and Skills Council strategy for workforce development cannot surely wait until the summer. I think it needs a sharp and clearly focused programme that works for existing and emerging areas of the economy, that does something to strengthen management and leadership training; develops measures to address skills gaps; keeps a consistent focus on what the CBI used to call the “long tail of underachievement”, and at the same time leaves room for a bit of a laugh.

Alan Tuckett is director of the National Institute for Adult Continuing Education