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Editor's Letter - June 2006

Welcome to the June 2006 issue of Adults Learning, the last of the current volume. We are pleased to include a number of articles reflecting on the impact and continuing relevance of Inclusive Learning, the 1996 report of John Tomlinson’s committee of enquiry into provision for adults and young people with learning difficulties and/or disabilities. Co-authors of the report, Pat Hood and Peter Lavender, both contribute reflective pieces, while Deborah Cooper, Viv Berkeley, Yola Jacobsen and Kathryn James consider, from their different perspectives, how far we have come in the ten years since publication – and where we now need to travel.

For Deborah Cooper, the report offers a model for learning much wider than its original remit called for, ‘a tool to ensure that for an individual, a course, an institution or a planning authority there is a match between the needs and interests on one side and the provision and support on the other’. In the preface to his report, John Tomlinson argued that everything proposed therein was ‘within the grasp of the system if we all want it enough’. But how many of us are ready to sign up to that? Cooper asks.

While there has been much to celebrate over the past decade, Pat Hood argues, there are nevertheless some worrying trends, not least where adult learning is concerned. Adult and community learning – lifelong learning that is truly inclusive, with committed staff working with some of the most challenging learners – comes last in the funding race every time. Adults’ entitlement to lifelong learning is debated as if it could be moved up and down the priority ladder, rather than being seen for what it is: ‘an absolute human right’.

Viv Berkeley and Yola Jacobsen share their insights from the field. Berkeley reports practitioners working with learners with learning difficulties feeling demotivated and tired of finding themselves and their learners bottom of the funding heap. According to Jacobsen, the Government’s policy of prioritising learners working to gain a full level 2 qualification is leading to the exclusion of people with learning difficulties: ‘Several providers have cut courses for individuals working below entry level, namely people with severe learning difficulties. This is because no matter how significant their progress in learning may be it will not count towards Government targets … there is a real danger of people with learning difficulties being disproportionately affected by the current funding pressures in FE.’

This, Jacobsen continues, is not to say that there hasn’t been real progress over the past ten years, only that those achievements need to be built on if we are not to start going backwards. As Peter Lavender argues, more joined-up government is called for – and an appreciation that education cannot play its role while funding policies ‘endlessly favour the young’ – but this will only happen once disability – long the invisible in policymaking – is made visible.

Paul Stanistreet, Editor, Adults Learning