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Commentary - September 2008

Enough is enough

The Government’s skills strategy is not working and the consequences for adult learning have been disastrous. It’s high time funds were found to meet the real demands of adult learners, says ALAN TUCKETT

The time has surely come for a change of heart. As things stand, with 1,400,000 publicly funded adult learning opportunities lost in the last two years, and a reported £150 million under-spend in the Train to Gain budget, the Government’s skills strategy is not working properly, and comes at too high a cost. Far from shifting another half a billion pounds into Train to Gain in the forlorn hope that employer demand will suddenly explode during the economic downturn, it should be given back to further education to meet real demand by adults happy to beat a path to their community centre or FE college.

Putting right the damage done by overeager re-balancing of the further education budget will take time. The Conservative Party’s skills consultation paper, Building Skills, Transforming Lives, presents a thoughtful contribution to the debate about how best to balance the role of education in fostering a vibrant economy and its wider role in an enlightened society. Its conclusion, welcomed by NIACE, was that there needed to be a sum of £100 million pounds injected into adult and community learning programmes, in the belief that learners can be trusted to make sensible decisions about the things they need to learn, whether for work or their lives outside the workplace.

John Hayes, the Tory front-bench spokesman on skills, argues powerfully for the role of learning in offering a second chance, and has carried that conviction into the paper. The Conservatives argue, again rightly in my view, that colleges have had a raw deal in recent years, but they go on to propose that colleges rather than local authorities are the natural distributors of the proposed new budget. NIACE has expressed concern that local authority and third sector providers will need to be included if a budget of that size is to be used most effectively, not least given the dramatic cuts in adult learning opportunities some colleges have overseen.

In our own response to the Government’s informal learning consultation, NIACE argued (among a wealth of other proposals) for a major budget of new funding to be identified for innovation and investment in the infrastructure of a national outreach strategy. I understand there were 5,500 responses to the informal learning paper, dwarfing the responses to the machinery of government consultation. But it is now a year since John Denham launched conversations on the shape of adult learning to come, so the promised command paper cannot come a moment too soon.

There are, of course, some mild causes for cheer: in the Time to Train proposals, and in the integrated employment service pathway pilots from government; from the increasingly powerful alliances on behalf of older learners; and from the cultural sector.

But, all in all, the picture is bleak. So, once again, NIACE will be in campaigning mode this autumn. On 30 September, at 5pm, at 27 Britannia Street, London, we shall join with the National Union of Students, the University and College Union, the Workers’ Educational Association, and Unison, at the launch conference of CALL, the Campaigning Alliance for Lifelong Learning. CALL will argue the case that affordable access to the life-changing opportunities provided by education is the hallmark of a civilised society, and that good-quality adult learning opportunities backed by well-qualified staff should be a right and expectation in all our communities. I do hope readers of Adults Learning and their organisations will want to join us.

Our second campaign of the autumn is aimed at potential learners – working with the Government and the Learning and Skills Council to encourage more adults who want to strengthen their numeracy skills to take up provision. To date, numeracy has been the least developed of the Skills for Life programmes, and if the campaign is at all successful there will be demand for more qualified tutorial staff to be found and recruited.

We intend to launch our third campaign on 10 December, the sixtieth anniversary of the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and at the end of the UN Human Rights Year. NIACE believes that the most unacceptable feature of current ESOL policy is the denial of access to publicly funded learning for new asylum seekers. Our international commitments to offer succour and safe haven for the victims of torture, rape or lives devastated by conflict begin the day asylum seekers arrive. So, given the failure of government to honour international promises, civil society needs to pick up the obligation for now. We will co-ordinate a campaign to train volunteers to offer language learning and intercultural support – involving church groups, refugee organisations, trade unionists and others – to provide the support to asylum seekers that should be their right. In time, we are confident government will see the justice in reinstating properly funded services.

Then there is the Inquiry into the Future of Lifelong Learning, challenging existing policy paradigms with new research. Do watch its website, www.lifelonglearninginquiry.org.uk , for stimulus, and to join the debate. And do help bring the campaigns to the attention of students, teachers and policy makers alike.

I hope like me you will be girding your loins for an eventful academic year. Adult education in all its forms is, after all, too precious to be lost by accident, or, for that matter, by design!

Alan Tuckett is Director of NIACE

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