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Editor's Letter - June 2008

“Tutors feel ‘straight-jacketed’ by the constraints of top-down policies, buffeted and undermined by having to cope with constant policy changes”

In March, the Government published a White Paper, Raising Expectations: enabling the system to deliver, setting out its plans for the dissolution of the Learning and Skills Council. From 2010, 14-19 funding in England will be transferred to local authorities while, for adult learners, the new Skills Funding Agency will route funding to colleges and other providers of adult education and training ‘to meet the demands of employers and learners’. The move is the latest tumult in the career of a sector in which continual reform has become the status quo.

While the culture of root-and-branch reform keeps policy analysts – and one or two magazine editors – in work, it is doubtful whether it is good for learners or, indeed, for the sector’s teachers, most of them talented and hard-working professionals who can only fantasise about being given the respect accorded colleagues working in schools and universities.

The latest upheavals do little to make them feel more valued. As Ann Hodgson and colleagues argue later in this issue, the changes further cement the Government’s intention to create a ‘quasi-market’ in adult skills, a relatively unplanned, ‘demand-led’ system ‘driven at least as much by government priorities as by what employers and individuals want’.

Hodgson et al’s research found both policy actors and practitioners expressing frustration at the pace of change: ‘too much policy, too fast, with no time for reflection or evaluation, so that valuable lessons were not being learnt and energy was being squandered in trying to understand and respond to successive waves of change’. Tutors and managers feel ‘“straight-jacketed” by the constraints of top-down policies, buffeted and undermined by having to cope with the constant policy changes in the sector and to manage ever shorter funding and planning horizons’.

Michael Tedder et al, in their article on learner voice, suggest the establishment of ‘regional quality improvement panels’ offering ‘possibilities for the expression of a practitioner voice as well as a learner voice’. In the current climate of ‘anti-professionalism’, they argue, there is a risk that practitioners will be ‘driven into sullen compliance by the forces of accountability and inspection’. Yet, as the Hodgson study shows, for learners the relationship with tutors is centrally important. Success for learners at lower levels, the authors write, ‘depends upon a flexible, patient and informal approach tailored to individual needs, which builds confidence through small-group learning, one-to-one teaching and time to build skills levels to support progression’.

Chris Humphries argues that delivering the skills necessary for improved economic productivity and social inclusion depends not on developing a definitive list of the skills we need but on transforming teaching and learning practice. Taking this seriously will mean making practitioners – as the ‘crucial mediators’ in teaching and learning – full partners in progressive change and not the subjects of yet another experiment in public policy.

Paul Stanistreet Editor, Adults Learning