[ Current issue ] [ Back issues ] [ Special Issues ]

Editor's Letter - September 2007

“The brief (false) dawn heralded by developments such as the famous foreword to The Learning Age is fading to nothing”

he publication of World Class Skills, the Government’s plan for the implementation of the Leitch Review of Skills in England, was received with relief in some quarters. Welcoming ‘the direction of travel’, NIACE congratulated the Government ‘for deciding to focus on individuals’ aspirations and ambitions’ rather than subsuming them within an entirely employer-led strategy. Others, however, remained deeply sceptical, pointing up the failings of the flagship Train to Gain programme and the absence of a coherent vision for economic development.

In this issue of Adults Learning, the first of Volume 19, we canvas views from the three main political parties and hear from some of the experts. Bill Rammell, Minister of State for Lifelong Learning, Further and Higher Education, explains how the Government plans to meet the challenges of increased global economic competition and rapid technological development to achieve a ‘skills revolution’, while opposite numbers Sarah Teather, for the Liberal Democrats, and John Hayes, for the Conservatives, outline their views, a mixture of critique and encouragement.

John Hayes cites the recent Education and Skills Committee report, which urged the Government to rethink aspects of its Train to Gain scheme, the expansion of which is a central plank of its plans. The committee was particularly concerned about Train to Gain brokerage, suggesting that ‘in some cases brokers may be succeeding only in adding an extra, unwelcome layer of bureaucracy’.

Mick Fletcher offers a detailed analysis of the role of brokerage in the ‘demand-led’ system envisaged by ministers. Within this system, Fletcher argues, it is not the ‘ultimate customer’ whose demand counts but an intermediary working to orchestrate competition on our behalf. Train to Gain brokers, he writes, ‘seek to support firms, but their greater loyalty is to the level 2 target … the advisers will be able to focus support only on those who agree to study what is prescribed for them’.

The counterpart to the rise of brokerage, according to Fletcher, is an increasing tendency to downplay colleges and other providers of adult education. The assumption of policy makers appears to be that providers are ‘inflexible and self-interested’; only ‘the intervention of brokers assisted by the operation of manipulative funding regimes will force them to serve the public good’. We are moving towards a ‘two-tier system’, Fletcher writes, where some adults will be able to make their own choices and others will be ‘brokered, incentivised and otherwise directed into provision which is deemed to be good for them’.

The cost of the new priorities for wider adult learning, writes Ewart Keep, will be high: ‘The brief (false) dawn heralded by developments such as … the famous  foreword to The Learning Age … is fading to nothing, and the wider concept of lifelong learning is effectively dead as an important element in English official thinking’.

‘All learning is to be valued,’ according to the Government’s implementation plan for Leitch, but ‘first and foremost we must support people to take responsibility for their own skills development, to gain economically valuable skills’. The language is a long way from the sort of unqualified defence of education for its own sake offered by Dennis Hayes. Ministers are quick to pay lip service to the intrinsic value of education, Hayes writes, but always with some qualification or other. It seems that education itself is little valued. Continuing on this course could prove disastrous for adult education. We may succeed in winning over ministers or securing some funding, Hayes argues, but in the long-term we only undermine people’s belief in the value of education.

Paul Stanistreet, Editor, Adults Learning