I want to begin by thanking you for inviting me to give this last John Baillie Memorial Lecture, and to say a little about why I am honoured to be here in the gentle and gracious presence of Blessed Baillie, and in the company of such good friends and comrades as Jean McGinty, Lesley Dee, Merrillie Vaughan Huxley, Alan Hurst, Peter Lavender, and Elizabeth Maddison.

John Baillie was a special man. It seemed to me, and to many others who knew him, that his life was lived in accord with those transcendent values of respect for each human being, a delight in our diverse humanity, a profound recognition that we are more than categories, more than consumers, more than workers, and that, whether we are believers or not, there is a little of the living spirit in each of us. From these values, and from the experiences of his own life, John gathered some logical conclusions. Amongst these was the belief and principle that those amongst us who had most, either by way of intellectual or other personal gifts, were here on this earth to serve others. This belief was not lived condescendingly or patronisingly by John, but as one fallible human being to another human being, making our way in fellowship, and learning from each other.

 was fortunate enough to know John for some time through ILEA activities and through Skill before he appointed me to a post at Southwark College, where he was then Principal. John and I continued to work together when I moved to a national role at FEU.

One of my sharpest memories is of John inviting me to see him, early on in that Southwark appointment, and saying ‘You’re not asking me for enough – do you need anything?’ and as I was leaving the meeting, ‘More power to your elbow’. That was the essence of the man - he saw himself in the service of the practitioner and the learner, holding himself accountable, and putting his talents and capacities, (and his cunning and guile) in the service of the work, and always believing in and supporting those who worked alongside him.

In these things, John was like another John – John Tomlinson, another friend and mentor whose too-soon loss we mourned last year. Like John Baillie, John Tomlinson had a deep belief in learning, not in its reductionist, functional aspects, though he could talk as rigorously as anyone about assessment, but in its capacity to help us engage with those human activities that give perspectives and meanings to our lives, in particular, for John – music, drama, paintings, poetry, the sciences. Those great endeavours that meant John could say he felt he had lived many lives, as well as his own rich one, because he had been able to look at the world through the eyes of of writers, painters, historians, and other educators of the human spirit.

John believed, above all, in teachers, in educators, and through his work as Professor of Education at Warwick University, in the General Teaching Council, and for us, through his national Committee of Enquiry into provision for people with learning difficulties and disabilities, he illuminated their work; jogging our shoulders to say, ‘Look at what they do – value them’, and even more importantly, ‘ Look at how they do it – build on that’, and ‘Look at the skill, respect, and tenderness of the relationship between teacher and learner – preserve that’. Both John Baillie and John Tomlinson considered it to be a human right for a person to be able to say (or to sign) ‘I understand, I know, I can do that’.

Against the benchmarks represented by these men, and especially the concepts and expectations expressed in Inclusive Learning, how far have we come in the last ten years? This is our theme of our meeting today.

One definition of a benchmark is – ‘a reference mark for determining further heights and distances’. It is a good time to ask ourselves-what further heights and distances have we achieved in the ten years since the publication of Inclusive Learning, of which I am proud to be a co-author, with Peter, Elizabeth, Merrillie, and of course, John himself? How does the balance sheet tally?

There is much to celebrate. First of all in the legislation, the two Acts of Parliament legislating for post-16 education in which learners with learning difficulties and disabilities have their rights to learning recognised and protected. What these Acts tell us is that these learners are no longer knocking on the door of learning after school, in by favour and persuasion, but in by right of being human beings, able and entitled to learn, to use learning to improve their lives, to work, and to make significant contributions to our society. The Acts say that education after school and later in life has an important part to play in supporting the ‘ordinary life’ that people with disabilities and learning difficulties want. We are, rightly, fiercely proud of this achievement. I can remember the triumph when the FEFC Act ‘named’ people with learning difficulties and disabilities. Skill, Niace, Natfhe, FEU, and other organizations worked together to make this triumph possible, influenced, I like to think, by the values that would later inform inclusive learning.

But, it could be argued, we still have a long way to evolve if we need separately to identify certain groups of people in order to ensure they receive the same entitlements as other groups. However, I share with many of you the belief that we still do need to ‘name’ the learners, because the culture, the systems, the arrangements, and the funding, do not yet feel secure enough not to do so. Learners needs have to be ‘taken account of’, and that helps protect the budgets, for some, not yet for all.

The next height for me, of course, is the concept and approach of inclusive learning: the philosophical and pedagogic approaches that are ours, developed by us and for our sector. These ideas were not developed in a closed, insular way, because we know how well inclusive learning sits with Valuing People and the principles of Every Child Matters, but by using the values, innovation, creativity and practice of the very best practitioners, and the visionary managers who support them, to develop a framework for learning. A framework, by the way, in which all learners can flourish. The fundamental statements of inclusive learning, that is of celebrating difference, of valuing the individual and the way they learn best, about fitting what we do around the learner, and about the hand-in-hand journey of learner and teacher, resonate with excellent practitioners, because these are the things that they do.

Inclusive Learning was commissioned by the visionary Bill Stubbs, who gave the committee the time, space, and support to do its work. Bill had set up a similar, though much smaller commission, when he had been Chief Education Officer in ILEA. The members of this new national committee worked with even more than the usual passion and energy they gave to their day- to- day jobs of running colleges, social service departments, local education authorities, or voluntary organisations.

Amongst the things we achieved was the recognition that every person can learn and that everyone is a potential learner, regardless of their disability or learning difficulty. It amuses and pleases me now when teachers quote ‘at’ me the inclusive learning definitions of lateral and vertical progression, understanding that, for some learners, simply holding on to the skills they have is an heroic challenge. Each individual’s learning, progress and achievement are valuable and represent for them a significant step.

As part of inclusive learning, the FEFC’s creative mechanism of additional learning support breathed new life into the cliché of ‘learner-centred learning’, and gave colleges, at least, greater flexibility, impetus to develop new levels of programmes, and more supported and less discrete provision. To use the mechanism effectively, we had to improve initial assessment, and practitioners tell me that inclusive learning helped them to do just that.

The three-year quality initiative that implemented key recommendations in the report, generously funded by FEFC and then by LSC, and wholeheartedly put into action by AOC, raised the game, helped improve the status of the work, and as teachers tell me, the status of the staff engaged in it. Less nebulous things were secured too. Two weeks ago, staff told me that they had put their cross-college level 1 vocational provision in place as their part of the Inclusive Learning Quality Initiative. Others have told me of opening out new vocational areas, of developing more integrated provision as the confidence and skills of staff grew, and as a consequence, the over-all capacity of the college. These successes were attributed by staff to inclusive learning. ACL staff tell me of how they re-organised to ensure there was a small core team of tutors working with learners with learning difficulties and disabilities, of how they began to set learning targets and record the progress of part- time learners, or of how they moved classes onto the main site, or set about including more of these learners into their ordinary classes. Others tell me of how the networks formed during the initiative are still a source of good practice and strength for their members.

Through FEFC we saw, for the first time, elements of a national entitlement to learning for young people with learning difficulties and disabilities – regardless of where they lived. That entitlement, developed partly by Elizabeth Maddison and her team, was ‘policed’ vigorously by the FEFC’s own inspectorate – the specialist team led by Merrillie Vaughan Huxley – that shone lights, sometimes for the first time, on provision for people with the most complex and severe disabilities. The direct link between inspection findings and policy development, related also to the ILQI, provided, in my view, the first coherent, strategic national approach to post-16 learning difficulties and disabilities provision that we had experienced. All of these developments were imbued with the views and experiences of people with learning difficulties and disabilities, beginning with the first ever, pioneering survey of learners’ views, led for the committee by the indomitable Deborah Cooper of Skill.

The boost provided by inclusive learning gave heart and confidence to practitioners and managers. Partly as a result , and because of the efforts of universities such as Cambridge, Birmingham, Manchester, organisations such as Niace and LSDA, professionals who had always been committed, developed greater professionalism, renewed confidence, and pride in designing curricula that did what their learners needed them to do, rather than only what was required for accreditation. Of course, some organisations had always held high expectations of what their learners could do – the Pozyganza team at Lewisham College leading the way, the richness of adult services in Islington, the skilled work of Star College, or the quiet, expert work with elderly people with mental health difficulties that I was privileged to witness in a day centre– unsung and unheralded, but making a significant difference to those lives.

The inclusive learning ripple effect, together with successful lobbying from people with learning difficulties and disabilities and organisations such as Skill, meant that the Learning and Skills Act also included a requirement that the new national funding and planning body take account of the learning needs of our learners. The advent of LSC raised hopes – here for the first time was a national organisation with the remit to plan as well as to fund provision, to pull the plug on poor provision, and which was directed to work in partnership with other agencies.

The new body is committed to inclusive learning but also to ‘mainstreaming’ provision – an ugly phrase for a proud ideal which draws on thinking about other dimensions of equality and diversity, on ethnicity and gender issues, as well as on the school inclusion movement. This high commitment to mainstreaming learning difficulties and disabilities is perhaps in danger of what I will term ‘conceptual slippage’. This slippage runs from inclusive learning to inclusion and then to integration. If we slip along with this elision, we end up somewhere that John Tomlinson, his committee, and those of us closely associated with inclusive learning, did not intend. We are in danger of losing that tight pedagogic attention to matching the carefully assessed learning needs of the individual, and the equally strong emphasis on the responsibility of the system, funding, planning and other arrangements to fit the shape and needs of the learner.

We find ourselves, instead, back on the integration road, driven by admirable moral imperatives but not perhaps always informed by direct observations of those learners who are not succeeding in integrated settings, or by the voices of learners who don’t understand, who aren’t supported, or by the experiences of staff who know themselves that they do not yet have the right skills to work effectively with some learners. A very recent study by Cambridge University described some of the failures of integration in the schools sector. In drawing our attention to these things, it echoed the findings of an earlier 2004 HMI report on the schools experience. Of course, we should do it much better in the post-16 sector, with our broader curriculum, real life learning, variety of settings, responsivess and flexibility. We can design and deliver learning on a farm, in a motor cycle repair workshop, in a hairdressing salon, as well as in the classroom or science lab. Our learners are older, and many of them are able to articulate their wishes and aspirations.

I am emphatically not arguing for discrete provision, but neither am I arguing for integrated provision. I am saying that the real test of any provision rests on how well it meets the learning needs of a learner, not on how well it fits with a political cause. Our skilled and experienced colleagues in the inspectorates, telling it ‘as they find it’, are invaluable in helping us keep the day- to- day experiences of learners in mind, so that we check again and again how evolution in thinking and policy affects learners. We do not know enough about the experiences of integrated learners in the post-16 sector, and HMI are currently undertaking work to tell us more.

It might appear that the shorthand answer to my concerns is to ‘develop the over-all capacity of the sector’, and LSC has signalled its intention to support this development by accepting the recommendations in Peter Little’s report, ‘Through Inclusion to Excellence’.

Peter’s report is different in intention, content and style from Inclusive Learning. We were saying let’s think about learning difficulty and disability in a different way – a new paradigm. The implications of that new paradigm would be a profound change of the whole system. Indeed, at one point, we were told to ‘stick with learning difficulty and disability’; we couldn’t possibly make recommendations about the system as a whole, even though we knew those changes would indeed benefit all learners. We decided to ‘boldly go…’

Peter’s concern has been to spell out in detail the changes that needed to happen on the ground to improve provision for learners with learning difficulties and disabilities within the new LSC landscape. His focus has been wider, to include work based learning, and the whole range of providers that constitute the new sector. His work was driven partly by the need to reduce the overall amount paid for low incidence placements in specialist colleges, and so to deal with the implications of the removal of the old schedule 2j gatekeeper, partly to help develop the overall capacity of the sector by ‘unlocking’ specialisms and expertise so that they are more available to more learners, and partly, and in my view, extremely helpfully, to attack the ‘funding silos’ that get in the way of real flexibility for learners. He had to ensure also that his recommendations fitted the LSC’s regional agenda. In doing so, he has emphasised the synergy and adaptability we achieve through creative partnerships between providers. It is worth remembering that, as well as focusing on the technicalities of teaching and learning, inclusive learning said that the whole system must change, not just for learners with learning difficulties and disabilities, but for all those other learners whose needs did not fit neatly into the right box. We recommended regional structures and centres of excellence, and it is good to see Peter Little re-contextualizing these ideas in his report.

So, where are we now, ten years after Tomlinson? What are the achievements, contradictions, and potential dangers of this moment in our evolution of the work? How do we measure against the bench mark?

The SENDA/DDA is, of course, a supreme achievement, secured by people with learning difficulties and disabilities themselves. We are some 15 years behind the Americans, without the catalyst of a Vietnam War and the political power of disabled veterans to drive us, but we are there. On a national level, we have the Learning and Skills Act, and still, a small core team of LSC staff, led by Beverley Burgess, based in Coventry, but with concerns about loss of expertise in some regions. There are still specialist HMIs and ALI inspectors, able to fulfill their vital role in reporting first hand on learners’ experiences-but only just… because inspection is driven now more by data and less on the outcomes of direct observation, as if data will tell us the truth of the learner’s experience. To my regret, we have lost much of that immediate link between inspection outcomes and policy development.

Additional funding still follows assessed need, that is, unless you are an adult learner or on an E2E programme. I will return to these learners in a moment.

There is a renewed focus on employability, not new, but welcome because it invites us to challenge our own expectations of what people with learning difficulties and disabilities want to do and can do. I sat last week with a group of learners with various disabilities, who were designing a new logo for a real client as part of their art and design programme. A few months ago, I sat in a café in the middle of a housing estate, with a cappuccino and cake prepared and served by people with learning difficulties, working in a social enterprise run jointly by MacIntyre, social services and a local college. Enabling people with disabilities and learning difficulties to get jobs, full time or part time, supported or open, is, in my view, one of the things we should be best at doing. But, here’s a contradiction and a danger.

Here’s the contradiction: we have a government that talks about employability, but which targets funding at level 2 programmes, forgetting that many learners can and do move from Entry Level to Level 1 and then go on to hold down jobs. We have stories in the last few weeks of three colleges in the North closing their learning difficulties and disabilities provision, perhaps because of this funding target. Most employers don’t understand Entry and Level 1 qualifications, and they will require help to understand the new Foundation Diploma. Many have little conception of the contributions people with learning difficulties and disabilities can make to their businesses.

Here’s the danger: there is a group of learners for whom employability is not an option. These learners were moved into the education spotlight by the efforts of John Tomlinson’s committee and by FEFC. LSC has continued to fight their corner. They must not be allowed to slip away into social care when so much has been achieved on their behalf, and because employability is where it’s at. The old, scandalous debate about who pays for what, over what is care, what is education, continues, because, as a society, we cannot wholeheartedly get our act together enough to find a simple, single mechanism that funds a learner’s whole development programme. Perhaps the work of the Children’s Trusts will lead the way for us. There is danger there, but also opportunity if we have the political will and canniness to crack it.

Something that has struck me more and more as I have undertaken national work on work-based learning and Entry to Employment, is the unhelpful and artificial distinction between learners with learning difficulties and disabilities and disaffected young people, including young offenders. Because the system is still too inflexible, though getting better, we place learners in funding boxes for our ease, not for their benefit. We know that the majority of alienated, vulnerable young people have emotional, social, behaviourial or learning difficulties, and yet, despite the efforts of magnificent organisations such as Nacro, Rathbone and Barnados, these young people get less by way of learning, not more, than their peers. I consider E2E to be a lost opportunity. The frustration of learners and staff is tangible; they considered the programme to be exactly what was needed, but for longer and with enough funding to support learners properly. As one young woman said to me recently as her programme came to the end of its twenty two weeks, ‘why are they throwing me off now, I’m just getting somewhere’.

Though I may have reservations about what E2E has offered for our learners, it seems to me one of the great achievements of the last few years, wholly good and wholly right, to bring into the funding, planning and inspection fold, organisations such as Rathbone, Roots and Shoots in London, Barnados in the North East, Nacro, and other organisations working with these vulnerable learners. In this way, their skilled work is protected, and they are better able to make their contribution to local patterns of provision by offering those ‘hooks into learning’ that motivate learners.

If you will allow me a digression at this point. A constant through my professional life, and through most of yours, has been the low levels of participation of young learners with emotional and behavioural difficulties and adults with mental health difficulties. They are always at the bottom of the educational ladder. Why is that as an educational community we find it so difficult to embrace these learners? Is it because we don’t have sufficient emotional intelligence or emotional resource, coupled with the right skills, to design more and better opportunities, and safe learning places, for them? Despite wonderful work, these individuals remain some of the least reached and least benefited of our learners.

I want to say something about adult learners now, and I draw a deep breath, because I have next to me, one of their strongest champions in Peter Lavender of Niace. It is nearly sixteen years since he and I sat outside a long stay hospital for people with learning difficulties, and wept at what we had just seen. We went on to do something about it by developing a curriculum to support people moving into the community: work undertaken by two enormously talented women ACL tutors. Since then, so much has been achieved. Most learners are out of the hospitals and living as independently as possible. Many, but not all, day centres have rethought their roles. The learning needs and right to learning of adult learners have been recognised. There have been curriculum innovation and programmes which support independence. There has been the inspiring work of Lesley Dee, and others, with people with complex and profound disabilities. But, what is happening now?

Adult and community learning is again under threat, with committed staff working with some of the most challenging learners in day centres, hospitals, care homes, trying to fulfill our national commitment to life-long learning which is inclusive – for everybody, but which comes last in the funding race each time. Are we going to lose what we have fought for?

Other contradictions and dangers, it seems to me, lie in our thinking about literacy and numeracy, and what an individual needs in these areas in order to contribute to our society. It is good that we have for the first time, standards for literacy and numeracy, and a common curriculum. Who would wish the golden keys of literacy and numeracy not to be available to everyone? And yet, have we got this quite right? For some, not all, learners we seem to have created what a teacher described to me three weeks ago as ‘literacy and numeracy assessments that trap learners at the level of their disability’, that is, by emphasising what they find difficult to do, rather than what they are good at. Do we need to be more realistic, more in touch with the actual learners and their practical strengths, and less concerned with teaching skills that are not necessarily going to open more job doors? A learner in a focus group last week said ‘ I can do the job, but I can’t do the writing’.

I want to link the literacy and numeracy debate to teacher training, because one response to what I have just said would be that good teaching makes literacy and numeracy part of the vocational curriculum. To do this, teachers need high level skills, and the greater the disability or learning difficulty, the greater the expertise they require. We have failed in the last ten years to do what is needed to equip teachers and other staff with the levels of expertise they require to meet the needs of those learners with more complex disabilities coming through the schools, or to meet the needs of older learners. We do not have a coherent national plan to ensure that there will be enough staff with the right skills in the right places to support inclusion. Fifteen years on, ‘A Special Professionalism’, has not been implemented. That report’s identification of three different levels of professional need is still relevant and still needed. We do not have yet national occupational standards for specialist staff, except for those being developed by RNIB/ Birmingham University for staff working with people with visual disabilities. How can we develop the overall capacity of the sector, and drive forward an inclusion agenda without a complementary strategy for professional development that includes initial teacher training?

Activities designed to unlock specialism will help, of course, and here LSC is making a difference for the better in its willingness to invest in flexible partnerships that break down the walls between different providers and funding streams, so that learners really can move between different experiences as they need to. I was struck recently in the North East by the wealth of links and partnerships between work- based learning, mainstream and special schools, and colleges, with voluntary organisations playing a significant part in brokering arrangements. All supported by a creative LSC, willing to do everything it could to stimulate truly individualised learning, to get as close as it can to providing what a learner requires, and in doing so, making inclusive learning possible. The same richness of partnerships is replicated elsewhere in the country. Flexible funding arrangements are still new, but it is heartening to see how local and regional LSCs are willing to support innovation.

The best providers and the best practitioners have always renewed themselves, rethinking what they do and how they do it, in response to the changing aspirations and capacities of their learners, and fired by their own desire to capture excellence. For example, during the last ten years we have seen the development of the ‘internal consultancy’ approach to additional support whereby skilled learning support staff work within their organisation to influence curriculum design and delivery. Forward thinking specialist colleges are reshaping themselves in order to make their expertise and resources more available. Voluntary organisations are working with ACL, social services and others to develop social enterprises which offer the next step for learners.

We are near the end of the retrospective! I suggested at the beginning of my talk that John Baillie and John Tomlinson together represented a bench mark for us: a ‘reference mark for determining further heights and distances’. How do we measure up?

Well, it seems to me that we have come far. Our expectations of, and for, and with, people with learning difficulties and disabilities have shifted. An ‘ordinary working life’ should be more possible for more of these learners. We are slowly turning the old Queen Mary system around and making it more responsive to individuals. Progression is easier, there are more curriculum steps in the ladder. Practice is better, with more good quality provision.

But, I can’t relax yet, and I don’t think either of the two Johns would have wanted you to relax either. Much has been gained, but there is much to lose, as the unintentional consequences of policy, the devil in the detail, work their way into provision that represents a once in a lifetime opportunity for each learner. The loss of a national entitlement, present in all but name for the last ten years, seems to me to be in danger. There are still learners who deserve and need to be centre stage, and who need more not less learning in their young lives. There are still adults whose entitlement to life long learning is debated, as if it could be moved up or down the priority ladder, rather than being seen for what it is-an absolute human right.

John Tomlinson once said to me that post-16 education and training appeared not to have much of a ‘collective memory’. We were, perhaps, too keen to discover for ourselves each thing anew, forgetting the huge steps made in previous years. This partial amnesia could mean that it was hard sometimes to hold onto those things that had been achieved because, paradoxically, energy was being used up in rediscovering them. This could sound like ‘Those were the days, my friend’, of course, and John understood completely the sentimentality and backward-looking negativity of that refrain. What he was pleading for, and what is perhaps timely I plead for at this last John Baillie Memorial Lecture, are three things. First, that we pay our dues and build on what has already been achieved. Next, that we do not lose one inch of the precious ground we have won. And then, that we keep pushing forward together, developing the thinking, the work, and the policy, in humble and respectful partnership with people with learning difficulties and disabilities.

I would like to add one more thing: the hope that the values John Baillie and John Tomlinson stood for, alive and in this room through the presence of you all, will continue to invigorate and challenge us, and to bring us together again to take stock of our efforts.

Thank you for inviting me to join you.

Pat Hood

May 2006

Pat.hood@btopenworld.com

Copyright: Pat Hood 2006

Click here to Read Peter Lavender's response to Pat Hood's Lecture

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