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Commentary - September 2006

It’s about getting the balance right

As public investment focuses ever more narrowly on provision that supports the achievement of national targets, we are in danger of neglecting the wider needs of a civilised society, says ALAN TUCKETT

This month the Big Conversation launched by NIACE in the summer builds to a crescendo. NIACE has distributed a mass mailing of postcards to providers, for learners to highlight for policy makers and the media ‘what adult education means to me’. We are hosting a day of enquiry, on 19 September in London, to address how much provision, and of what sort, there should be for adults, and who should pay how much for it.

Contributors include learner representatives, the Vice-Chancellor of the Open University, Brenda Gourley, John Brennan, Chief Executive of the Association of Colleges, representatives of industry, regional development agencies and providers of all sorts. On 25 September Bill Rammell, Minister for Further and Higher Education, will be contributing to the conversation in a Labour Party conference fringe meeting, whilst on the same day John Hayes, Tory spokesman on vocational education, addresses the issues at a NIACE-hosted event at City and Islington College. Then, as part of Sign Up Now, NIACE will be publishing briefings on the issues facing those under-rep-resented groups of adults whose learning needs must be addressed if the Skills Strategy has any hope of success.

Already, the NIACE Big Conversation website carries powerful testimony, well worth looking at, that points to the complexity of the field, and of the challenges facing policymakers. Adult learning is, of course, central to the economic health of the country, as the Skills Strategy recognises. Many thousands of adults do want and need coherent progression routes to help them to achieve aspirations for career progression, or to enhance job security – and those routes need to be flexible and responsive to the needs of learners who have to fit learning in among the other pressures on their lives. Many others need learning opportunities readily accessible to give stimulus and richness to lives beyond work. Of course, many of them can pay towards such provision –but it cannot be allowed to become an option available only to the affluent. Getting the right balance of investment between vocational adult education and liberal adult education exercises governments of all sorts, throughout the industrialised world – and there are few who feel we have that balance right for adults just now in England, or in any of the other administrations in the UK.

The task is made harder because engagement and achievement in adult learning is both an area of public policy worth supporting in its own right, and it is a catalyst for the achievement of other policy goals, too. The wider benefits of learning have been well mapped in the last few years. Engaging in learning is good for your health, and in particular for positive mental health. It prolongs your active independent life. It fosters tolerance, civic engagement, social cohesion, and regeneration. And it has these impacts whatever the prior educational experience of learners, and whatever their social class background. Importantly, too, it has these impacts whatever you study. These positive effects are only secured, however, when adults participate. Yet we are currently seeing a reduction of one million adults taking part in publicly supported adult learning over three years, as public investment is focused more narrowly on provision that supports the achievement of national targets. Adult educators of all sorts must welcome the commitment that has led the Government to spend in excess of £500 million a year on literacy, language and numeracy. It is welcome, too, that the Skills Strategy focuses on adults with few or no qualifications. But when every young person who stays on displaces ten adult learning opportunities, and when pensioners can expect free bus passes and television licences, but face higher fees for a reduced number of classes, there will be casualties, notably among under-represented groups. It is hard to see how the balance of spending now furthers both the economic and social inclusion aims of wider government policy. For adults at least, the target regime has led to an unhelpful hardening of departmental arteries, where we risk hitting public service agreement targets in education at the expense of the wider needs of a civilised society.

Fortunately, this autumn offers more than one opportunity to make the case for adult learning. First, there is the Leitch report on the skills needs of the British economy, to be published alongside the pre-budget report. It must surely address how best to engage people furthest from the labour market, and consider their routes to skills – informal and formal.

There is the prospect of a Foresight study into mental wellbeing and learning throughout life, commissioned by the Government’s chief scientific adviser. There is the pressure to renew civic engagement arising from the Department of Communities and Local Government; welfare reform initiatives coming from the Department for Work and Pensions; attention to citizens’ rights for adults at the Department for Constitutional Affairs; and there is a Comprehensive Spending Review underway. We shall pursue adult learners’ interests in each of these contexts. But will the result be greater coherence, and a better balance? Watch this space.

Alan Tuckett is the Director of NIACE

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