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Editor's Letter - October 2007

“In the case of further and adult education the Government has, in effect, decided what is of public value”

Skills, the Government says, are central to achieving ‘our national goals of prosperity and fairness’. Taken at face value, few would disagree. A strong economy does support social goals, can combat social exclusion and certainly promotes social mobility. Yet we have to wonder quite what we stand to lose by not pursuing these non-economic goals explicitly, as social goods of value in themselves.

In the case of adult learning, the focus of resource on improving employability and economic competitiveness has had some adverse social consequences. While the Government has massively boosted investment in adult learning and skills, its relentless targeting of ‘economically valuable’ skills has meant that other forms of provision have suffered. Figures published by the Learning and Skills Council reveal that one million adults have been lost to publicly funded learning in the last two years. Courses have either closed or become too expensive.

For those wanting to learn as adults, there has been a significant loss of choice. As Alison Wolf argues in this issue, despite all the rhetoric about the creation of a responsive, ‘demand-led’ system, the reality seems to be more and more central control. Demand, she argues, counts only when what is demanded is what the Government is prepared to provide.

The danger of pursuing social goals as an adjunct to economic ones is, of course, that not all social goods have a direct impact on economic competitiveness. We know that people get involved in learning for many different reasons, from developing their skills to making a difference in their communities, and that learning supports important social goods, such as health and social cohesion. As NIACE’s 2005 report on the state of adult learning in colleges, Eight in Ten, argued, adult learning not only improves employability and supports workforce development, it creates and sustains cultural value, supporting ‘the development of a tolerant participative democracy’.

The loss of so much of the adult offer is potentially damaging to civic engagement, health and community cohesion, as well as to economic regeneration. It is against the background of this loss that stakeholders have sought other ways in which to articulate the wider value of adult learning. Public value is one such framework, first formulated by Harvard scholar Mark Moore, in response to concerns that public services were, in his words, ‘hitting the target but missing the point’.

Public value, according to the Work Foundation, ‘aims to put the “public” back into public service by placing citizens at the heart of reform’. But, writes Colin Flint, in further and adult education ‘the voice of the public is not heard at all’. Despite all the recent talk about ‘personalisation’, in this case the Government has, in effect, ‘decided what is of public value’.

The challenge, Flint argues, is to find new ways of asserting that individual adult learners matter as much as their counterparts in higher education. This demands a broadening of ministerial vision and a framework for decision-making that recognises the importance of outcomes of social value. For Flint, this means a return to the concept of educational entitlement.

As Sir David Watson commented in launching NIACE’s inquiry into the future of adult learning, while there is increasing recognition of the role learning can play in creating both a prosperous economy and a cohesive community, current solutions have failed to ‘join up’. A good start would be to recognise both the economic and the wider social value of adult learning, and to give each an equal place in a properly balanced strategy.

Paul Stanistreet, Editor, Adults Learning