[ Current Issue ] [ Back Issues ]

JAPP: Editorial

Volume 4, Number 2, Spring 2007

Mary Stuart
University of Sussex

This edition is distinctly focused on the idea of ‘really useful knowledge’ (Cohen, 1990). Can such knowledge be ‘just’ skill development or is there a need for a more holistic approach to learning? Is there an inherent prejudice against skill development in our society? (Unlike many others, where there is a much less marked divide between skill development, or vocational learning, and academic learning.) This focus is timely in a journal like this, concerned about the interface between research, policy and practice.

We have recently seen the publication of the Leitch Review of Skills. It was commissioned by the Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Secretary of State for Education in 2004, and has been eagerly awaited within education circles because many believe it may drive education directions for the next decade. The report concentrates on skills for employment in the next twenty years. It points out that nearly three-quarters of the workforce of 2020 is already an adult. The focus, therefore, is on adults. This has significant implications, which I will draw out later.

Across the board, Leitch found that the UK’s skill base remains weak by international standards. The report highlights lower level skills, the problems with adult literacy and numeracy, and the low level of the skill base of many adults. (A target is to increase the number of adult educated to Level 2, (GCSE), from 69 per cent to 90 per cent ‘as soon as possible’. Jon Swain’s article in this edition discusses the effect a low-level numeracy course has on the lives and values of two working-class women. It is interesting that skills education is often seen as functional, in contrast to education for its own sake. The course Swain examines had a significant impact, leading the women to perceive themselves and others quite differently. In a case like this, perhaps, instrumental skill development may also have significant effects on students undertaking a course.

Gartland and Paczuska, in looking at widening participation mentoring schemes with young people, draw out the role of personal relationships between HE students and young people who have no history of higher education in their background. They see this informal ‘student ambassador’ relationship as a key to helping disadvantaged young people on to the road to HE. Often, we do not pay enough attention to how the informal and the personal interact with issues of identity to form part of the learning process, even ‘just’ for a skills course.
In terms of higher-level skills, the aim in Leitch is to increase the number of people with Level 4 and above skills from 29 per cent in 2005 to over 40 per cent. The report does acknowledge that funding for HE in the UK from both public and private sources is low by international standards; the solution proposed to reach the target is for Level 4 and above skill development to be funded by ‘individuals and employers’. The report expects that employers should increase their training budgets. In this issue, Connor and Little point out that vocational qualifications are still seen as the poor cousin of higher-level skills. Their research shows that attitudes to vocational qualifications in HE remain negative, although they give reasons to hope that the lifelong learning network initiative may provide some clear examples of ‘what works’ to counteract the prejudice that vocational qualifications still receive from admission tutors in HE. Shaw’s ‘What price plumbing’, argues that attitudes towards vocational education have prevented a proper growth of skills education in this country. As long as this remains the case, it is difficult to see how Leitch’s ideas of employers paying for skill development will ever take off.

As I said at the start of this editorial the focus of Leitch is largely on adults: in the Debates and Discussion section we have two lectures which look at two of the key players in adult education in the last century: Robert Tressell and Raymond Williams. Both point out the relationship between skills and knowledge and the importance of a whole education, including skill development as well as providing opportunities to understand the world in which we live. Alan Tuckett highlights the importance of returning to Williams’ philosophy at this time of simplistic government attitudes towards adult learning, and Stuart Laing, reflecting on the role of the University Centre Hastings, argues that pathways and routes through learning cannot be simply linear. Both lectures draw out how relevant the philosophies and principles of Tressell and Williams are to us today. We could do much worse than to look again at those values and try to build our future skill development needs in a spirit of emulation of their work. Leitch, too, could learn a lot from these two great proponents of adults in education.

REFERENCE
Cohen, P (1990) Really Useful Knowledge, Stoke-on-Trent: Trentham Books.