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Commentary - November 2006

Waiting for the big one

Responses to the next demographic earthquake will fail unless we challenge a culture of learning based on the assumption that access is an elitist right, offering benefits to the already privileged, writes COLIN FLINT

We used to talk about the demographic time-bomb back in the 1980s, when we worried about how we would cope with ‘the Bulge’, all those additional 16 year olds needing education and training. One of the things about demographic change, you do get warning – though we are not very good at heeding it. We suffer still from the inadequacies of our responses then, the failures to address curriculum relevance, all of that highly variable YOPS (Youth Opportunities Programme Schemes) stuff, the vast empires of the Manpower Services Commission. Many of those left with serious deficiencies in their levels of basic skills went through those schemes as school-leavers or adults.

We have been aware of the next demographic earthquake for a good many years. We know that the number of school-leavers declines rapidly from 2009, with something like 60,000 fewer each year. The shape of the profile of the UK population is changing, with many more older people and many fewer younger ones. The bulge now is more your middle-age spread: in 2020 there will be more people in Britain in the 50-54 age bracket than in any other five-year group, and the next biggest is the one above it, the 55-59 year olds. The UK birth-rate fell dramatically during the 1990s, to below the ‘replacement rate’ of 2.1 live births per woman per lifetime. It was 1.6 in the 2001 census. And, as we know, longevity has been increasing as a result of better medical care and higher standards of living. The ‘dependency ratio’, the proportions of those who are not economically active compared to those who are or will be, gets ever more challenging.

So, how are we preparing for this long-signalled earthquake? Well, we’re increasing the number of school sixth-forms, creating new secondary academies, and devoting higher proportions of the educational spend to the needs of fewer young people. At least some of that expenditure is going to be counter-productive. Then, we are investing billions in employment training schemes (Train to Gain, the level 2 entitlement), but we are cutting the rate of subsidy, frequently totally, to much other adult learning. The concept of lifelong learning, if not totally abandoned, is seriously distorted. Some people in Government must be keeping their fingers permanently crossed.

None of us is against the improvement of our secondary education system. It needs more investment – in teachers, resources, buildings, curriculum (though we remain at risk of getting it all right except the last bit). We cannot go on allowing almost half of 16 year olds to leave school without a level 2 qualification. We cannot afford the numbers of 17 year olds who are being lost to education and entering dead-end jobs or entering nothing at all (we still have one of the lowest rates of participation in learning by 17 year olds of any nation in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development). We have to reverse the widening gap between those who have, educationally and economically, and those who have not. Above all, perhaps, we have to hope that the present Government’s strategies are going to work, because the more time that passes, the more acute the problems become.

NIACE is not alone in having reservations. The House of Commons Select Committee on Further Education has plenty, on – among other things – voluntarism in employers’ attitudes to training, the lack of research evidence to underpin government strategies, the apparent lack of concern in those strategies at the scale of demographic change, and the direction of the cuts to adult provision. The summary of their recent report, published in September, states:

There is compelling evidence that certain types of adult learning are being inadvertently put at risk by current funding priorities – there is a real possibility that this will generate problems in the future as the economy becomes increasingly reliant on older workers. Courses, once lost, are difficult to replace, and the hard-won confidence of some returning learners, difficult to sustain.

Members clearly are worried about the loss of infrastructure in adult learning and about the impact of steadily increasing fees on those who might benefit most from returning to learn, and who are least likely to be able to afford to do so. We do not yet know the full consequence of the funding changes in the present academic year on adult learners, but it is highly likely that there will be at least 200,000 fewer accessing college and adult education centre provision. Evidence in a survey conducted by the City Lit indicates that increasing fees are beginning to have a disproportionate effect on those with lower incomes. The whole strategy, and indeed the economy, may fail if we alienate further those we are most anxious to attract. We will certainly fail if we do not challenge and change a culture which has always operated on an implicit assumption that access to learning is an elitist right, offering benefits to the already privileged, as Chris Humphries put it in a recent paper to a NIACE audience. We are at risk of increasing the barriers, not removing them. Their removal is an essential element of any successful adult engagement strategy.

Colin Flint is Associate Director for Further Education, NIACE

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