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Editor's Letter - June 2007

“There is alarm at what many see as weak evidence and unproved systems at the heart of the skills strategy”

The New Labour Government has taken post-16 education more seriously than any previous UK administration, allocating major new funding, prioritising basic skills and establishing new structures and strategies, during its 10 years of power. The Learning and Skills Council, established by the Learning and Skills Act in 2000, has seen its grant rise from £5.5 billion for its first year of operation, to £11.4 billion for 2007–08.

Despite this, the Government’s own figures show that the number of adults in further education and adult and community learning in the UK has dropped by nearly one million over the past two years. Many critics are concerned that the Government has got the balance between vocational and non-vocational adult education wrong. A ‘revolution’ in the skills prioritised by the Treasury is promised but it looks increasingly as though it will be paid for at the expense of wider adult learning.

With so much at stake one would expect the Government’s strategy to be based on strong and sound evidence, yet, with the Government’s Leitch Implementation Plan due for publication next month, there is increasing alarm within the sector at what many see as weak evidence and unproved systems at the heart of the strategy. In his third Adults Learning column examining the state of research in adult learning, Stephen Gorard questions the assumption that increased vocational training is needed to give people the flexibility to meet the demands of an increasingly contingent labour market. Apart from perturbations in the 1940s, Gorard writes, the average number of reported job changes per person per decade has remained constant since the 1930s. The ‘end of jobs-for-life’ has been a mantra of ministers for years but there is a disquieting lack of real evidence for the proposition.

Furthermore, there is evidence, cited by Gorard, to show that those who do change their jobs regularly – and often dramatically – do so with little or no formal training. NIACE’s recent survey of learning at work demonstrates an overwhelming preference for less formal ways of learning to improve job performance. As Gorard points out, some of the most sucessful learners do not show up in measures of either participation or qualification. Clearly, there is more to skills than qualifications. Leitch proposes a ‘demand-led’ system of education and training, with all public funding for adult skills – ‘apart from community learning’ – routed through the employer-led Train to Gain programme. But, as Paul Mackney argues, while the case for greater employer engagement has been made, the case for employer control has not. It is absurd, Mackney observes, ‘to equate the needs of the economy with the aggregated demands of individual employers’.

Equally, it is far from clear that many employers would want the role. As Jane Thompson points out, many employers have a stake in ensuring that their employees function below their potential, so that they ‘can continue to make profits on low-priced, standardised goods and services, in the interests of a “strong economy”’. Indeed, despite our employers’ apparent disinterest in skills, the UK remains the world’s fifth richest economy.

Ministers and civil servants pay ready lip service to the value of community learning, yet there is little in Leitch, or in the DfES funding consultation that followed, to suggest that the likely impact of their proposals on learning of this sort is anywhere near the heart of their thinking. As focus continues to narrow, fees increase and courses for adults close. Unless a new, better-balanced settlement for adult education is agreed, it seems likely that adult learning opportunities – many of them vital points of entry for those with the greatest distance to travel – will continue to disappear.

Paul Stanistreet, Editor, Adults Learning