Hello everybody. I’m delighted to have the opportunity of being here, I’ve just come straight from the Education and Skills Select Committee, so when I say you as an audience are some light relief that is in no way insulting, it’s a bit like having survived an appointment at the dentist and being incredibly relieved to be able to address a sympathetic audience.

Little did I realise the trouble I would be causing when I insisted on inserting the term Learning Community into the Skills White Paper. I have to say people can present White Papers in a very sophisticated way but they are a moving feast, a piece of work that evolves, and as the days close in and the period gets nearer when you are committed to present the White Paper, it really does focus the mind sometimes.

But it wasn’t an idea that was plucked from thin air. It was an idea building on a lot of existing work; but it was also in a way something that’s occurred to me as somebody in two and a half years who has had four separate jobs within the Department for Education and Skills, and the one benefit from that, is it does get you to think a little of joining up some of the policies we have.

And for me the separation between the development on the one hand of the schools standards agenda and on the other of the adult learning agenda is a seriously missed opportunity. We can improve educational attainment amongst young people by having better schools, by having better teachers, better head teachers and a more flexible curriculum.

But if we don’t have family and parental support, high aspirations and belief in the importance of education then there will be a serious limit to our capacity to achieve transformational change in our society and to make a reality of lifelong learning. So that was the motivation behind, if you like underpinning, my belief that we needed to test out this principle of what learning communities may look like.

And I want to spend most of my presentation today talking about that. And I want to begin by putting all of this into a little bit of context.

The first thing to say is what is this government all about? I don’t expect any of you to answer… but the government is the first government really in history that makes the case for the inter-relationship between social justice and economic success.

The old left used to focus on social justice, the old right on economic success. This is the first government that says, to have a civilised successful twenty-first century society you have to bring together your belief in the importance of social justice with your commitment to economic success.

This agenda uniquely has the power to create both a fairer society, and a more successful society. Learning and skills support individuals to fulfil there potential, (individuals of all ages) and something that I describe as individuals to discover the dignity of self-improvement. Any of you here who work directly with learners, particularly those learners who are the hardest to reach, know well the power of discovering the dignity of self-improvement, for many of those individuals who have not been anywhere near a positive learning experience possibly throughout their lives.

So, also central to economic success, if you look at the productivity and the competiveness gap which exists in terms of ourselves and other similar countries, skills are an essential driver of productivity; and if we don’t have a higher skills population at all levels, than that productivity gap will continue to remain stubbornly as it is now.

And it is also, I believe, essential to the kind of public services reform agenda that we’re developing now. If you want the best hospitals, the best schools, the best criminal justice system you have to have leaders, front line staff, middle managers who have the skills and the confidence to be able to provide those responsive, modern, flexible public services. So, this agenda brings together social justice, economic success and public service reform. I also believe it answers the Norwich Union question more effectively than almost anything else. It seems to me we can’t deny the reality, indeed it’s a cruel deception to deny the reality that the principle of job for life in a modern world is dead. It’s dead.

But there has to be a replacement for a job for life. The government can’t simply sit there and say globalisation, change, this is how it impacts on communities and individuals. You are on your own. Laissez-faire.

And our belief is that the appropriate replacement for job for life must be employability for life in the future. The Twenty First Century challenge is to create a society where there generally is for every individual the principle of employability for life, which recognises people will move frequently from job to job, hopefully progressing and hopefully advancing, but certainly able to overcome the consequences of globalisation and change.

It’s also vital that we abolish education apartheid in this country. There are far too few people still who benefit from education opportunities in our society.

And what education apartheid has meant is that we have educated a relatively small number of people to a higher level, and the vast majority of people would have been satisfied at not supporting those individuals to fulfil their potential, and that’s got to change.

Central to that, I believe is creating a culture of lifelong learning and high aspirations in communities and families, where education has been historically for somebody else. So, we have got to break those low aspirations, that endemic structural sense that education and learning is for somebody else.

So, how does the notion of learning communities fit into that? Well first of all, the cycle of deprivation, underachievement and worthlessness is not just confined to individuals - a very important point. It blights whole communities and it often transfers from one generation to the next. We need to raise aspirations and skills community wide and that’s why we’ve stressed the importance of learning communities. If I can say to you, politicians are rightly criticised on the one hand, but also pressured on the other, for quick fix instant solutions. You do not change a culture of low aspirations with one initiative, one decision, one White Paper, one speech, we have to have a sustainable attack, which is coherent, which is strategic and which genuinely seeks to change culture. So, this is not a short-term quick fix. This is about saying how do we put into practice, structures, reforms, changes in policy that can really demonstrate one way or another how we can most effectively impact on community as well as individual aspiration.

Of course, learning communities are fundamentally about raising aspirations. We can improve the quality of providers, colleges and training providers, we can stimulate demand amongst employers and to some extent amongst individuals. But if we can’t raise those aspirations particularly in those communities I have referred to, then we won’t achieve the change that is really necessary.

Learning communities have to be about raising the status of learning and communities and promoting the benefits of learning and communities. That’s why I’m quite keen on the concept of membership, of involvement, of belonging to a learning community. But I also believe it’s about supporting the local economy, through businesses and employment by helping to development the local skills base for local work opportunities, whether in the public, voluntary, community or private sector.

We want to show what learning communities are about, by creating small pockets where negative cultures, attitudes and approaches are challenged. In the test beds, we want to work in local partnership to develop a coherent, innovative, locally relevant response, which does a number of things. We want to develop new ways of working and community capacity building, establishing links between local community activity and regional economic direction, in order to enhance the fortunes of an area and to accelerate activity, which raises aspirations, attainment and widens participation in learning.

I want to expand a little on those points.

I would like the test bed learning communities to seek to bring everybody in a community together - the community themselves; businesses; the voluntary sector; all those who support learning and skills development across the generation, to develop new ways of working. Local Authorities, Learning Skills Councils, Learning Partnerships all have a crucial role to play. Now….. new ways of working may include various things: flexible funding, new routes into and through learning, local incentives, perhaps with an approach comparable to a membership or a sports club. The analogy I’ve used is that it’s very fashionable, it’s very trendy, and it’s very cache for people these days, middle-class people to be members of a sports or a leisure club. Having the membership card itself- whether they actually attend is another matter- has become a very fashionable and very trendy part of people’s lives. We really need somehow to create the same view, the same high status view, the same fashionable view of learning and the transformational power that learning can bring to one’s life.

I also think it’s important that we draw on evidence about the effectiveness of using parents and grandparents to encourage children to learn. But also vice versa, using routes through children to bring adults back into learning will include challenging some aspects of standard national approaches to better meet local needs. And it will also include developing and articulating a link between community activity and the regional economic direction, so that everybody sees some beneficial direction to their learning. Most employers value recognised qualifications. That’s the reality. So let’s develop approaches, which identify routes from the entry level of learning through to other local opportunities. Opportunities within business and within the community. Let’s show how comparable skills can transfer between the sector and open doors to learning wherever it’s delivered.

I think it’s an important point that when you think about employers concerns, about the skills that they say are lacking in the economy, obviously they talk about the basic skills, numeracy, literacy, ICT etc, which we are tackling both in terms of primary schools and in terms of adult skills. But they also talk about the lack of interpersonal skills, communication skills, teamwork skills, problem solving skills, leadership skills. Now all those skills frankly can be gained as part of developing a truly culture of lifelong learning in communities.

And I think therefore it is possible to make the case for this, as well as in the context of the social justice, the social inclusion agenda, as directly benefiting and impacting on the economic agenda too.

Employers increasingly say the problem is attitude. People aren’t really prepared for the world of work; people aren’t work ready when they leave the educational system, and people are not willing to invest in their skills and their personal development. One of the things that these learning communities can do, I think, is to transform those issues and seek to hook employers in. I think that learning communities that are strong should have a higher level of employer engagement on a community by community basis. And I do think that we should remember that often the most successful learning does take place in and around the workplace. If we look at the evidence from the Trade Union Learning Fund for example, supported by the Trade Union Learning representatives, which has been a tremendous success.

I also want to say that Learning Communities are not about tearing up the existing system and starting from scratch. They’re about learning from and building on what I know in many areas is already happening. There are some models around, Brighton, Hull, several lead by Local Authorities such as Blackburn and Darwen, which were awarded the Beacon Council status for their lifelong learning community approach. Some approaches already incorporate rewards or entitlements such as the reward smart cards scheme, which is available to all adult learners in Buckingham. This offers adult learners the ability to log into any one of the service’s ICT centres and also their own access to their own Internet account. So there is already a tremendous amount of good practice out there for us to build on.

I also want us to look at that and build on valuable examples of local activity to test out the variety of ways that we can intervene to make a significant difference.

Now, the real challenge will be to learn what works for once, before we rush head long into implementing and delivering policy. And having learnt what works, ensure that is mainstreamed into everything that we do in every part of the country. This must not be seen as some stand-alone side show or issue. It should be about making a reality of something that I think that in some ways we haven’t spoken about much in the last three to four years in a political environment - and that is making the reality of lifelong learning.

We were passionate about it. We were crusading on it. We believed it was the key to a fairer and more successful society and yet I think we have lost the momentum in terms of really looking at how do we create a society where lifelong learning is absolutely central. And I’ve been very encouraged by the fact that in recent weeks the Prime Minister and the Chancellor have both emphasised very clearly their belief that lifelong learning is a vitally important part of their vision in terms of the country we are trying to create.

So, we have a lot of political energy now that we already have the innovation that is taking place on the ground and we have the opportunity presented by the Skills White Paper to really drive this agenda forward in a way we haven’t been able to do before.

I think some of you will want to hear a little bit about our intentions with regard to the Adult & Community Learning Fund.

We know it’s been tremendously successful in helping individuals in danger of being cut off from learning opportunities. To date, 130,000 individuals have been helped to return to learning and it’s been successful too in working effectively with the voluntary sector. 75% of projects are with the voluntary sector and we must harness the knowledge and expertise gained in that new context. That’s why I recently announced that from April next year we are transferring resources previously used for the fund to the LSC. They will use the money, but they will use that money hand in hand with NIACE I am delighted to say, to meet their ambitious objectives for widening adult participation and for working more effectively with the voluntary and community sector.

The ideas are being worked on at the moment specifically, and will be revealed in the coming weeks. And maybe one of the things they may want to consider putting some money towards is learning communities. Dare I put in a bid from the lectern?. But I think there has been a concern in most areas that the LSC has struggled to engage with the voluntary and community sector and I think there is a new commitment from that organisation to recognise that the achievement of many of their objectives requires innovative and imaginative approaches, often that cannot be provided always by statutory services. And you need to engage appropriately with the voluntary and community sector, if we’re going to get to some of the hardest to reach people in our communities.

I spent my whole working life before I went into politics in the voluntary sector and statutory organisations, I think, often have a curious view of what partnerships really is all about. It seems often to be about telling voluntary organisations what’s going to be done, publishing the policy and then asking them do they want to come on a journey, because if they do they’ll be able to trigger some public funding. And the public funding arrives and the statutory body decides how to spend it and only involves the voluntary sector if the funding stream requires them to do. We also know there are voluntary organisations equally that are not appropriately managed, don’t have the kind of leadership that is necessary in a modern world and have real capacity problems.

But I’ve always believed that we’ll only really be able to achieve many of our objectives on this agenda and others if we do find a better way of engaging the state with civic society. There have been some improvements in recent years, but I think we’ve got a long, long way to go.

But this agenda, there’s never been a more powerful case for it, because we know that many of the individuals who are most reluctant, most intimidated by the prospect of learning, live on estates where we want a higher level of participation from, tenants and residents will attend community centres where they feel comfortable, and in an environment that’s more familiar and less threatening, maybe in a job where the trade union is active, and can offer them access through the trade union learning fund. We know that the individual learning accounts which weren’t all bad, despite what the Select Committee said to me this morning, in one of their more difficult questions.

We know that individual learning accounts were more effectively delivered in many ways, by the intermediaries that were the voluntary sector and the trade unions. So, I think that engagement community by community with the voluntary and community sector is going to be essential.

I also believe that one of the things I am very conscious of in the Skills Strategy, we talk inevitably about the LSC, the RDAs, Jobcentre Plus, Business Link and I want to make it absolutely clear I believe that Local Authorities and Learning Strategic Partnerships have an absolutely crucial role to play in terms of this agenda. They are often the organisations closest to their communities. If learning communities are going to work they have to be joined up at a very local level. We probably have to do things slightly differently than we tend to do on other policies - we need to build bottom up rather than top down.

And I think the best Local Authorities frankly, have the capacity to do that. Clearly there are some that aren’t very good. My attitude is we shouldn’t condemn local government based on those that aren’t very good we should say we need to improve them. But the centrality and importance of local government working with the Learning & Skills Council, Regional Development Agencies and others, on this agenda is very very important.

So, I believe we have an exciting opportunity to achieve transformational change in this area, I think the very fact that we’re recognising that to develop a schools standards agenda over there and an adult skills agenda over there, the fact that we’ve started to recognise that, and want to do something about it, is a very significant step forward.

I personally believe that of course there is significant room for improvement in terms of educational institutions, whether they be schools or colleges. But I also believe if you look at an ingredient that somehow we’ve missed at the heart of education policy in this country on a long-term basis, it is this whole question of aspiration. Whether it is family aspirations and pressure, whether it is community aspirations and pressure. And if we’re able to at least initially to recognise that’s the hole at the heart of policy and begin to address that I believe we will achieve so much more, both in terms of, as I’ve said, our social inclusion agenda and our economic success agenda. And we can start to, as a consequence of that, use public money in a far more effective way than we use it at the moment. We spend far too public money on dealing and reacting to the problems we have in society which would be better dealt with by preventing them happening in the first place.

And I believe one of the ways we prevent the waste of large amounts of public expenditure is by re-directing resources into preventive work, into tackling the fact that far too many people feel marginalized from our society, both socially and economically. If we are able to begin to tackle some of that, the social and economic gains are clear, but also the public spending potential gains are clear too in terms of the challenge that face us in the future.

I always say this at gatherings like today, we can only make policy and sometimes get it right. We can make the financial support available from government, but in the end, we depend upon people in this room to transform their communities, to transform individual lives, to make policies work in the real world. And I just really wanted to thank you for all of that innovative and imaginative work that you’re doing in your communities.

I hope you actually don’t see this as a top down imposed initiative, because it isn’t. It is a very very genuine belief in a positive notion about raising aspirations. And there’s a tremendous amount of flexibility in there for people to come up with local innovation and local solutions, which really make a difference.

I can’t see anybody who looks at this agenda objectively who can deny the potential benefits of creating a culture of lifelong learning and creating learning communities. But there’s no one size fit all doing that, no top down imposed solution. We genuinely want your local ideas, your local energy, and your local experiences to influence policy.

I think the prize is potentially very great. Because if we prove the tangible benefits of this, and some of it will be very very long term: let’s be clear, it won’t be easy to prove the tangible benefits in the short term. But I believe if we prove the tangible benefits then I think the concept of learning communities can genuinely over the next ten years in this country become a mainstream part of our social and economic policy. So thank you very much for all that you do. Thank you for your support in trying to implement this policy on the ground in the months and years ahead. Thank you very much.

I would firstly like to thank you for putting lifelong learning on the government’s agenda. You mentioned what we want to do is raising aspirations and stimulating demand. I think that the majority of us who work in the field are doing very good work in that area, but the problem has been, and I think you won’t be surprised, the problem is about the funding and that our short-term funding doesn’t help any of those issues. The majority of the activity that goes on, on the ground will go on, and communities will grow regardless of what we do. I would just really like to know how we intend to help those communities who don’t have support from various funding bodies and how we can help them to do that. The integration within, you said mainstreaming, that’s really important, and Jim had already raised this issue - we’re losing good people from projects because their funding runs out and you lose that long-term sustainability because the people who are actually making a difference, they also have their lives to lead as well, so it’s perhaps a plea really to try and get some cross over in terms of the words you’ve spoken about lifelong learning and the reality.

I think first of all funding is obviously dependent on a number of things. One is spending review processes and we have to go into negotiation with the Treasury every three years to make sure we have an allocation of resources, which reflects our priorities. I think one of things that this will hopefully do, when we go into those discussions in the next few months, is to identify funding over the next few years.

We can be better at making the case for lifelong learning as a whole, rather than have a discussion with the Treasury about Sure Start there, nurseries there, then schools there and colleges over here.

We all know about the higher education debate. In fact the higher education debate is relevant to this, because if we do continue - and this is a political point - but if we do continue to spend the level of subsidy on higher education, graduates spend at the moment, we aren’t going to have the sufficient money to do all the other things we need to do. I mean let’s put it bluntly: whatever your view is on the appropriate higher education policy, the fact that we spend so much more per graduate than we spend in the earlier years is nonsense, if we’re really radical and we’re serious about changing policy. So that would be my one political point for the morning. So there’s the spending review process. I also think we have to persuade those who have access to a variety of funding streams to join those up and to put community learning as central to the achievement of social and economic objectives. We don’t just have the LSC money - we have the RDA money, the Neighbourhood Renewal money. We have European money and what I’ve tried to do in the Skills Strategy is join that up region by region.

So we start to look at learning and skills in each of the regions in a holistic, cohesive and an integrated way. I hope that will begin to offer new opportunities. There are areas including my own, Bury, and I’m glad to see a representative from Bury on the front table, where we get nothing. We get core funding - we’re not deprived enough, we don’t have enough crime. I’ve been trying to import deprivation and crime but not succeeded. We get a little of those additional resources. I tell you what it means, it means it’s more difficult, but it also means we often have to be more imaginative and more innovative. We’re in the top four/five for Local Education Authories in the country, we have amongst the best state schools, we have the best college of Further Education, and we have the best relationship with the business community. And I suspect that some of that is needing to, because frankly there’s no other way we can do it.

And I would make a point about this agenda I really do believe that we should be saying to employers in these communities, because we are talking about quite a local level, why it’s in their interests to be part of this agenda and make a contribution as well.

We shouldn’t be shying away from having private sector investment on this agenda too because it’s directly in their interests. One of their big concerns, I told you earlier is about not having the skilled people that they need to develop their businesses, also one of their concerns is insurance premiums rocketing because of crime. You have to make it relevant to people as to why they should contribute; it’s not some altruistic act because that doesn’t usually appeal to employers.

So, we have to engage private sector investment into this agenda. We have to make the case for lifelong learning as part of our dialogue with the Treasury. I believe, I know I’ve said it several times, but I feel it passionately, if you can get parents and grandparents back into learning the direct benefits, productivity wise, in terms of schools and our children’s performance are obvious. They’re staring you in the face and we haven’t in the past made those links. And I think we should make them more effectively. If we’re a lobby group and you’re my extended lobby group, forgetting lifelong learning taken far more seriously, we’re going to have to persuade people, there’s a direct relationship between lifelong learning and the achievement that we all so desperately want as a priority for our young people in our society.

I don’t think we should be scared to say that. Of course we’re committed to genuine lifelong learning where adults get more than one opportunity, opportunities time and time again through their lives. But fundamental to the long-term health of any society is that we do better by more of our young people. Only 50% leave school at the moment with five decent GCSEs. That’s after all the improvements that we’ve seen in recent times. So I think we’ve got to make the case in a sophisticated way, in an economic way, as well as in a social way, as to why this agenda as I said in the beginning of my speech, unlocks both of those uniquely I think, unlocks both the fairer society and the more productive economy.

I would like to express a concern, we had a beautiful quote this morning from our chairman, that it’s not just an utilitarian exercise to provide units for the labour market. I found the White Paper seemed to concentrate so strongly on the labour market; it talked about lifelong learning for the personal development but there didn’t seemed to be much in the White Paper. I’m looking now for some reassurance.

You have actually reassured me with some of the things you said but the health implications not only for the grandparents helping the children but for their own personal, mental health and physical health by continuing to learn. So could you give me some reassurance?

Yes I think if you’ve read the White Paper in detail, which I can’t promise to have done, I wrote some of it but I haven’t read it since. No, a serious point if you need it - we go out of our way to reassure those who are concerned that there will be a dismantling of adult and community learning because of the focus on the skills agenda. We make it clear we believe in every community, in every part of this country that adult and community learning must continue to have a crucial role.

And we particularly make references - you quite rightly did and I didn’t - to older people. The fact that people are living longer, the fact that people retire earlier, the fact that it does make a direct contribution to those people’s physical and mental health, and maintaining their activity and their ability to be active members of local communities.

And I often think that older people are tremendously wasted talents and resources in our communities. So, we do say all of that in the White Paper but to be frank with you, the judgement is about how you deliver it and how you implement it and what it means in reality. And we’re going to have to work this through local LSC by local LSC, local adult and community learning service by local service, and we’re going to have to see what it actually means in reality. Can we create, yes, a focus on schools standards; yes. a focus on skills; yes a focus on adult and community learning but bring all of that together in terms of a genuine creation of lifelong learning.

Let me be frank with you. If you add all of that agenda up, schools, colleges, universities, those in the labour market, those on the edges of the labour market, adult and community learning, there has to be a legitimate grown up mature debate about the relative contribution of the state of individuals and employers to delivering that agenda. Because it is unaffordable simply to be able to deliver a lifelong learning society, simply through a 100% subsidy from the state. The public will not stomach the level of taxation that that will require and no politician will be willing to make that case.

So, we’re going to have to have that debate over the next few months and years. Again I’ll make only one other political point. In our Big Conversation document, one of the things that is central to that, in terms of the Labour Party’s dialogue with the public rather than the government, is what are the things in a civilised modern world that the state should fund and what are the things we should expect and more significantly through general taxation, and what should we expect a more significant contribution from individuals and employers.

That really is going to be a significant part of what I say delivering in reality. That’s one of the issues that we’re going to have to get to grips with. People are going to have to be very honest about it. People are going to have to be willing to engage in a mature way with us on it, and not really advocate irresponsible, unachievable policies, by implying that the massive amounts of public investment that this will require can be all funded out of general taxation. As it is not going to be possible under any government.

So we have to be clear. It’s not the same to define what’s important and where the state should put the bulk of its money. Something can be extremely important for society, but also simultaneously there can be a recognition that to make it happen, it’s legitimate to expect more from employers and individuals than in other areas of policy where you would expect the state to take 100% responsibility.

So if we are truly going to create that lifelong learning society, if we are going to protect adult and community learning, where learning does not have a direct economic benefit on the surface, although I reckon most learning has a direct economic benefit for the reasons I’ve articulated during the course of my presentation. But if it doesn’t lead to qualifications, or doesn’t have an economic benefit we’re going to have to look at all of those issues.

And that isn’t just an issue for adult and community learning. If you look at the central commitment in the Skills Strategy to a new entitlement for Level Two qualifications, there are implications of that for higher-level qualifications, for those people who already have a Level Two qualification who are out there in the labour market. So it’s important that I’m honest with you; there are no easy, free solutions to these issues, but let’s start with a clarity of purpose about what our objective are.

So, is our objective a society where lifelong learning is central, is absolutely integral to everything that we are seeking to do ? Or is it about how much we spend on Under Fives? How much we spend in Primary? How much we spend in Secondary? How much we spend in FE? How much we spend on HE? How much we spend on the labour market? How much we spend on adult and community learning? We have to try and move away from looking at our learning agenda, our skills agenda in that way. We have to be more radical; we have to be more innovative. If people feel it’s been removed from central stage in recent times, we have to put lifelong learning back at the centre of social and economic policy.

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