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Commentary - October 2007

Where now for lifelong learning?

The relaxed timetable for implementing Leitch is an opportunity to assert the wider value of further education for adults, says PAUL MACKNEY

When I hear ministers explain the need to rebalance further education spending away from adult education to some other worthy cause, I am reminded of the law of unintended consequences. Joseph Stalin provided an extreme example in an address to Red Army graduates. He told the young comrades that the principal problem for the Soviet Union had been a dearth of ‘technique’. To thunderous applause he reminded them how, in solving this problem, he had been obliged to deal with some comrades rather roughly. He went on to analyse current problems – the main one being, of course, a shortage of people.

We can be sure that the post-Leitch ‘skills revolution’ will be less brutal, but it may still have major unintended consequences. The danger is that funding all adult education and training, except for a small reserved element, through Train to Gain, with its deadweight provision and pyramid of brokers, will effectively put FE colleges on the institutional equivalent of zero-hours contracts. This will begin to destabilise the very institutions which have had such tremendous success in developing adult education since Labour came to power in 1997. This destabilisation could generate another war between colleges trying to meet externally set targets and staff trying to defend the quality of their lives both at work and home – the sort that was so destructive in the 1990s.

Thus, it is good news that the Government’s response to the Leitch report relaxed the timetable for full implementation from 2010 to 2015. This allows a period of further contemplation and an opportunity to show how the full implementation of Leitch conflicts with earlier Government aspirations for the further education of adults, set out most clearly in David Blunkett’s 1998 Green Paper, The Learning Age.

For this reason NIACE has organised a ‘triad’ of conferences on ‘Further Education in the 21st Century’, loosely focused on learning from the past; deciding what is worth keeping from the present; and what to work for and what to resist in the future. The conferences will be accompanied by 10 weeks of debate and articles in the Times Educational Supplement.

Our concern is that policy-making should be evidence-based and not grounded in amnesia. We need, for example, an honest assessment of Train to Gain, how much of it is handing money to employers to enable them to do what they would have done anyway and how much is new and successful training. It still doesn’t seem like good policy logic to select the weakest performer in the training world – employers – for the leading role in remedying the skills deficit. Similarly, it does not seem sensible to apply one model from Camborne to Carlisle, from Brick Lane to Park Lane. Train to Gain makes little sense in Hackney where only 40 per cent of the adult population is in work, usually in the public sector or in small businesses struggling to survive.

There is an opportunity to argue with the new Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills that, as the first-ever adult education ministry, it should espouse a broad-based educational definition of Leitch’s mantra ‘economically valuable skills’. A narrow definition will effectively exclude those social groups with whom colleges have been so successful.

At the TUC, Gordon Brown said that ‘unions have a new role to bargain for skills’. But such activity, though often worthwhile, will be peripheral until training becomes part of the statutory list of collective bargaining items for which unions receive statutory recognition and ULRs (or, in non-union workplaces, learning champions) have a right to full consultation and negotiation on training issues with a lifelong learning committee consisting of ULRs and management representatives. We may then find, particularly if there are experiments with paid educational leave, that there is an immense demand for education and training from within the workforce, some of which will have to be undertaken with people from other workplaces at the local college. The creation of the DIUS raises further questions: What does the future hold for the Learning and Skills Council? Do we need a single funding council for FE and HE? Can universities follow the lead of the Open University and a few others and play a larger role in adult education? Do we not need an effective adult careers and guidance service? Do adults learning have to be adults earning? How are the voices of learners to be heard? How does ICT change the learning experience? Does self-regulation only provide colleges with the independence of a cost centre?

Education for leisure, happiness and self-fulfilment still has as important a role to play in the twenty-first century as it did when Beveridge wrote in 1944 that ‘Learning and life must be kept together throughout life; democracies will not be well-governed till that is done. Later study should be open to all, and money, teaching and opportunities must be found for that as well.’

If the nineteenth century was about the development of public elementary education, and the twentieth about the development of public secondary education, we need to debate how the twenty-first century will usher in a new era of mass further and higher education, with lifelong learning as a basic human right.

Paul Mackney is Associate Director (Further Education), NIACE

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