Organisation and Policy: Influencing Public Policy: Archive
The FEFC Widening Participation Committee consultation document
A NIACE Response
1. Introduction
NIACE is pleased to have the opportunity to respond to this Consultation Document. We wish also to express appreciation of the ways we have already been enabled to participate in the work of the Committee and our general endorsement of the emerging conclusions set out in 'Pathways to Success'.
This response will concentrate on those aspects which have a national significance and, since NIACE is not a sector institution nor a provider of education and training, will not cover all the issues set out for consultation.
2. General Issues
The current consultation is taking place while there remain a number of unresolved matters for the Committee, including the refining of the emerging conclusions into final conclusions and the development of a set of recommendations to support each of these conclusions.
This inevitably has implications for the immediate recommendations in that they are drawn from interim rather than final and rounded conclusions.
In particular we would wish to draw attention to a number of issues which may make it important to regard the immediate recommendations themselves as subject to modification in the light of the conclusions and recommendations of the Final Report.
i) the issue of poverty was acknowledged as a major barrier to access in a paper provided by the secretariat for a Funding Seminar held under the auspices of the Widening Participation Committee in March this year:
"the evidence outlined above shows a clear link at all stages of the student programme between poverty and difficulties in recruiting, student retention and student achievement. This link with poverty allows us to identify the under-represented group using poverty or a proxy for poverty as an indicator. At the recruitment stage there is a strong link between poverty and prior attainment. This relationship has also been proven for student achievement."
We believe that the link between poverty and low educational attainment in all age groups is as clear and direct as that between poverty and ill health. This issue, as the recent report Unemployment and the Future of Work from the Council of Churches and much other evidence makes clear, will not be sufficiently addressed by reference to means tested benefits. The number of people and their dependants who are outside the benefit system, often in work, but with no realistic possibility of deploying the disposable income needed to participate effectively in education and training remains high.
The Welsh experience of the use of postcodes as a proxy for poverty measures, drawing on census and other data to identify localities of concentration of indices of social deprivation and offering weightings to colleges for recruiting and retaining students from these areas, has been shown to work and should be adopted by the Funding Council in England, unless some better method can be developed.
ii) the issue of student support where the current arrangements are rightly described in Pathways as "wholly unsatisfactory" cannot be resolved by the council alone. Reform here is necessary before even the actions proposed in the interim recommendations can be wholly successful.
iii) the issue of a unified curriculum (Schedule 2/Non schedule 2) is likely to be overcome in the proposed pilot partnerships in that they are unlikely to be approved unless all avenues for development including 'first steps' and confidence building activity which is not directly vocationally oriented, are included.
However, this will not be true if the partnership principle is extended from pilot areas to the country as a whole. We believe that the Scottish experience, where colleges are not barred from providing any activity which they see as essential to their mission with proper safeguards for the rights and duties of others to provide and against duplication of funding, may have something to offer here. Once again we urge the Committee to take evidence on this.
3. Consultation Issues
i) NIACE agrees that immediate action is needed to improve the position of adults in Further Education so that it may develop into a truly comprehensive sector at the heart of efforts to create a learning society.
ii) Strategic Partnerships
While agreeing with the proposal we would wish to add the following comments:
 | the concentration on local communities, understanding of local labour markets and involvement of local employers and other community leaders, which are essential to FE providers, should not be allowed to obscure the fact that labour is mobile (actually and 'virtually') and that some students should be preparing themselves for work outside localised labour markets. |
| publication and dissemination plans should always take account of the media most likely to communicate effectively with currently non-participating adults. |
| applicants for pilot partnerships should be required to demonstrate their understanding of the importance of identifying areas of concentration of socio-economic deprivation within proposed geographical areas to be covered if participation is to be successfully widened (the 'postcode' issue). |
| partnerships might be encouraged to concentrate some effort on newly emergent target groups such as young disaffected working class men. |
iii) A New Learning Pathway
This is an exciting and farsighted proposal opening up, as it does, the possibility of tilting the balance away from a concentration on those students easiest to reach and likeliest to achieve. The acknowledgement that there should be "incentives, status and recognition" for those working with these students is particularly welcome. The knowledge and expertise which the Committee recognises as existing within the sector and which has too often remained unregarded and on the margins can now be properly recorded and more consistently and systematically applied.
The new pathway will need to be tested and, no doubt, modified and amended. At this stage, we offer the following comments:
| learner groups will need to be more generously interpreted than as those in receipt of benefit and their dependants. We urge the adoption of the 'postcode system' which meets this objection and can be properly and rigorously audited (see comments on 'poverty' above). |
| not only will the targeted learner groups "have little or no recent successful experience of learning" but such early educational attainment they may have will be an inappopriate measure for the inclusion of adults in the targeted groups (quite the opposite is true for young people). Among adult learners early experience of learning is likely to be forgotten and/or outdated and evidence of it will also take no account of uncertificated learning which has taken place since. |
| among the key characteristics of the pathway should be included a proper regard for equality of opportunity for women, black and minority ethnic/linguistic communities. |
| also included should be opportunities for confidence building and 'first steps' activity. |
| "accreditation of guidance, tutorial and learning support" will be a complex and difficult as well as essential task. NIACE would be interested to be kept informed of progress in this area. |
| the criteria for self assessment provide an excellent concentrated summary of good
practice in working with previously under-represented groups. Special acknowledgement
should be given to: - the need to use media appropriate to the target groups in making information "accessible and available" - the fact that it is hard to underestimate the importance of "financial and practical barriers" for some of these potential students. |
| NIACE welcomes all the ways it is proposed the Council should recognise the costs and the need to provide incentives and support to institutions. The Committee's recognition that "funding is the most important lever for achieving change" has opened up the possibility that real and lasting change will occur. |
4. Conclusion
NIACE has been pleased to have the opportunity of commenting on this Consultation Document and would be happy to receive queries or enter further discussion on any of the issues raised in this paper.
Page first published, June 1999