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Commentary - March 2006

Listen and learn

Reading the nominations for Adult Learners’ Week awards reinforces a sense that tutors, teachers and trainers need less measurement and meddling and more trust, says ALASTAIR THOMSON

I’ve been helping to shortlist the hundreds upon hundreds of nominations for Adult Learners’ Week awards before they go to our judging panels and are announced in May. It’s an annual chore but one which I accept gladly. Each form tells an inspiring story of determination – of individuals using education and training to transform their lives and the lives of other people, whether in universities, colleges, training schemes or voluntary organisations, prisons or workplaces.

This year, perhaps because of January’s Green Paper, A new deal for welfare: Empowering people to work, I paid particular attention to the significant number of Incapacity Benefit claimants using education as their route back into the labour market. They included many people recovering from mental illness, others forced to consider different careers after traumatic accidents or people managing degenerative conditions. Some needed help with reorientation, others were much further from the labour market. What was striking though, was that there were hardly any for whom a first full level 2 qualification would be either wanted or needed.

Speaking at a recent NIACE conference, Margaret Hodge, minister of state at the Department of Work and Pensions, made it clear that the Government recognises the complexity of people’s journeys back to work after incapacity and seeks to proceed with reforms with a degree of consensus. One can only hope that she persuades ministerial colleagues in education departments across the UK to ensure sufficient public resources are available to preserve a diverse range of educational routes – even when these fall outside headline national priorities. At a time when LSC post-19 budgets are being squeezed as a result of success in getting 16/17 year olds to continue in education, I’m not optimistic.

The stories of younger adult nominees aged 19 to 25 were equally powerful. There were many accounts of people with intelligence and motivation who had been alienated by compulsory schooling, left it with few or no qualifications, but who then realised, as adults, that life could offer more. Getting by in minimum wage jobs and with the constant temptation of less legal lifestyles, these are people who will find it hard to meet higher fees (maybe £1,000 for three A-levels from next year) when they want to top up extra GCSEs or A-levels, often to enter HE. Again, the entitlement to access a first full level 2 qualification looks like a well-intentioned but blunt instrument. Colleagues in Wales, Scotland and in the NHS have shown how Individual Learning Accounts can work. Perhaps it’s time for English civil servants to bite this bullet. ILAs failed last time because of bandit ‘providers’ – not because of criminal learners.

I’ve been moved, almost to tears, by the poignant stories of older workers, all with experience and many with skills and recognised qualifications, displaced from dying industries. It is simply wrong that the skills strategy does not prioritise support for people whose taxes paid generously for my higher education but who, when they need help, are told that first full level 2 qualifications and basic skills come before their needs.

Here, once again, Mrs Hodge seemed to be more open than England’s Department for Education and Skills to explore in public just how policy needs to accommodate the country’s changing demographic profile – and, in particular, the dependency ratio. After 2009 the flow of teenagers into the labour market will decline and more and more people from the post-war baby boom will reach conventional retirement age. Strategies to motivate older people to extend their engagement with the labour market are not just an economic necessity which can be sorted by market forces, they have profound cultural consequences. At the risk of labouring the point, current strategies seem to have a complacent default assumption that change can be delivered by focusing on new entrants to the labour market. It is amazing that Government has nodded though the first four sector skills agreements even though (as Chris Humphries has observed) the plans collectively assume twice as many young people entering the workforce than actually exist!

In addition, skills and learning policies need better to acknowledge that the UK is a magnet for migrant workers – not least from EU accession countries. Bearing this in mind, Sir Andrew Foster’s report into English FE colleges and government skills strategies looks in need of some refinement and our ESOL strategy is clearly no longer fit for purpose. It can only be hoped that future consideration will take languages in the round as well as ESOL – the inability of native English speakers to communicate in other languages (not least Mandarin, let alone Spanish) is worrying.

Age and sector-sensitive skills and learning strategies are what we need. A ‘one size fits all’ approach goes against the grain of this Government’s entire public service agenda. Perhaps the next spending review will call time on the unquestioning reification of Public Service Agreement targets that have, since 1997, assumed a totemic significance that is both disproportionate and counterproductive. The levers that served Mr Brown as Chancellor may not be suitable for future prime ministers or chancellors.

Reading the nominations for Adult Learners’ Week awards reinforces a sense that tutors, teachers and trainers need less measurement and meddling and more trust. Although the Government sometimes seems to be unsure whether colleges and LEAs are part of the problem or part of the solution to meeting skill needs, I have yet to meet teachers and trainers who didn’t have high expectations and ambitions for their students. Talk of mediocre and coasting colleges or services does little to raise standards. What does is listening to learners.

Alastair Thomson is Senior Development Officer, Government, Advocacy and Members, at NIACE

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