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Commentary - June 2008

There may be trouble ahead

Structural changes to the system of publicly funded post-16  education in England raise concerns that adults will, once again, get the raw end of the deal, says ALASTAIR THOMSON

The whole English system of publicly funded post-school education outside universities is gearing up for its biggest shake-up in a decade as a result of the Government’s Raising Expectations paper. Although the changes will not happen until 2010, re-engineering on this scale takes time and planning. But already there are concerns that attention to the needs of younger learners and employers will mean that adult learners get a worse deal.

Raising expectations: enabling the system to deliver is a consequence of two decisions taken by Gordon Brown a year ago. The first was to split the Department for Education and Skills in two, putting Children, Schools and Families under Ed Balls and establishing Universities, Innovation and Skills under John Denham. The second decision was to announce the intention to transfer funding for 16-18 year-olds’ education and training from the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) to local authorities’ education budgets.

Cynics will say that every eight years, politicians feel the urge to re-structure. It was in 1991-1992 that responsibility for further education was taken away from local government, and colleges were incorporated and given their own funding council. This was swept away in its turn, along with Training and Enterprise Councils, in 1999-2000. The latest proposals will prompt muttering about money diverted from teaching and learning to fund bureacratic re-shaping – but it is worth trying to understand the political drivers behind the proposals.

An important dynamic behind the children’s department was the Government’s twin desire to improve broader children’s policy after well-publicised lapses in child protection and welfare and to bring coherence to 14-19 education. This is driven, in part, by the perceived problem of NEETS (young people who complete their compulsory education but are then not in employment, education or training). The UK appears to have has a higher proportion of NEETS than comparable countries (although there are questions about how much this is due to ‘churn’) and the resultant economic and social costs worry politicians. These include low levels of certificated skills and the moral panic about the supposed knife-toting, binge-drinking, gang-joining underclass.

Despite initiatives like Education Maintenance Allowances and apprenticeships, the number of NEETS has remained, after 10 years, stubbornly and embarrassingly high for Mr Brown. Reduction of the NEET population was behind Mr Balls’ introduction of the current Education and Skills Bill to Parliament, the centrepiece of which is the proposal to raise the minimum education or training leaving age to 17 by 2013 and to 18 by 2015.

An equally important political driver has been the implementation of the Leitch Review of Skills. Commissioned by Mr Brown when chancellor and prompted by concerns over sustaining UK competitive advantage, the urgency of this agenda is rising at a time of global economic uncertainty and domestic turbulence.

It is, however, the children’s department’s agenda that dominates the proposals for the next Education and Skills Bill, announced in the Government’s Draft Legislative Programme (Cm 7372) published in May.

This takes thinking on from Raising Expectations and gives further pointers about the new Young People’s Learning Agency and Skills Funding Agency that will replace the Learning and Skills Council. It also announced a very welcome proposal to establish a legal right for employees to request time off for training from employers – perhaps the first step on a journey towards paid educational leave?

What is worrying though is the degree to which proposals for pre- and post-19 provision seem to differ. ‘Institutional stability’ is deemed important for the youth system but for those aged 19 and above there seems to be little more than a ‘demand-led’ market-based system – with high levels of ‘contestability’ and relatively little planning – except sectorally.

The risk of such an imbalance is that many further education providers simply opt for the security and stability of providing for learners under 19 rather than bothering to compete for contracts for adult provision where margins are forced down by low-overhead private sector providers.

A government solution that is limited to a re-configured informal adult learning sector on the one hand and Train to Gain on the other would be far from comprehensive. It would leave vulnerable much of the individual demand for affordable vocational career development that does not coincide with employer demand or which comes from adults at some distance from the labour market.

Adult learning contributes to more agendas than simply national economic competitiveness and private personal development. NIACE will need all the help it can get to promote learning for social inclusion and community cohesion, for citizenship, for public health and family wellbeing. Nobody would say that schools should only prepare pupils for the labour market, or that universities should not develop their students’ capacity for cultural enrichment alongside their intellectual development. Why should public support for part-time adult learning be any less life-enhancing and broadly-based?

Alastair Thomson is Senior Policy Officer at NIACE

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