More, Different and Better

ESOL classes are often the first step towards a new life

Channel 4’s recent series about immigrants learning English – Why Don’t You Speak English? – made me think about the barriers my own mother faced when my family moved to this country, almost 30 years ago, and the impact her English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) courses had on us.

My parents and I moved from Belgium to England in 1984, when I was five and a half years old. My father spoke English, my mother spoke Japanese and I spoke French. I was enrolled at the local infant school, my mother attended ESOL classes at the local college and we often ended up doing our homework together, with my father’s help. Within a year, I was fluent in English and excelling at school. For my mother, however, the story was very different.

I recall the howls of frustration when my mother would realise whilst cooking, that yet again, she’d mistaken the picture on the label and bought a tin of plums instead of tomatoes. I remember having to write out her cheques whenever we went shopping. I recollect how, as a child, I would have to talk to people when they couldn’t understand my mother and how they would talk to me as if she wasn’t there. And I remember wondering, somewhat impatiently, when she would learn how to speak and write ‘properly’, whilst apologising for her broken English. Shame on me!

Now, I understand how hard it was for her to learn a new language, in a new country. How hard she worked to pick it up, learn the odd colloquialisms, understand the different accents and master the inconsistent spellings. How hard it must have been for her to keep finding the motivation to persevere when it just didn’t seem like she was progressing. When I asked her what kept her going, she told me that it was because she wanted to be able to have conversations with me, to help me as I grew up and to not get left behind. She has certainly met her goals and then some. My mother has taught Japanese at a university for almost 20 years and has been the Chair of the British Association for Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language for the past 3 years. She is also a fantastic mother and wife. Needless to say my father and I are immensely proud of my mother and her achievements.

My family has learned, first hand, the importance and the impact of adult education and ESOL – both as individuals and as a family unit. It’s something that’s highlighted on a daily basis through my work at NIACE and that we hope will be clearly evidenced when the NIACE-led Family Learning Inquiry reports in October.

The classes my mother attended gave her the first step towards a new life. It gave her the ability to feel connected to her family, engage in her community, make friends, get a job and live a rounded, independent life. Through adult education and ESOL, she has changed her own life and changed the lives of many other people around her. These are the reasons NIACE strives to make the case for ESOL provision and why we’re anxiously awaiting further details of the funding for benefit claimants with ESOL needs announced in the Spending Review.

Incentives for graduates – what impact on low English and maths skills?

Some good news this week came from the announcement – from the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills – of funding of £20,000 grants for Maths graduates to train to teach in Further Education. There will also be grants of £9,000 for graduates training to teach English or teach students with Special Educational Needs.

As NIACE’s national Inquiries into Adult Literacy and Adult Numeracy both found, one of the major problems with the current system is the lack of trained and qualified post-16 teachers of these subjects.

But of course the devil will be in the detail of this announcement. For instance, it is not yet clear if the funding will support those who want to teach different levels of English and maths, from what could be called ‘basic’, which includes Functional Skills, or up to GCSE.

While the support for those wanting to teach students with Special Educational Needs is good to see – and of course the extra investment of £1 million to ‘fund high-level specialist training for those already working with students with SEN’, which shows a strong commitment to Continuous Professional Development – it’s important to remember that the majority of the millions of adults with poor numeracy (around 1 in 4 adults) and literacy (around one in six) don’t have Special Educational Needs, and neither are they likely to begin their learning on a GCSE-level course.

The literacy and numeracy problems of this country do need a range of actions as we have pointed out on many occasions. A qualified, experienced and committed workforce is one of the major components and will go some way to addressing the shocking statistics of 8 million adults lacking the English and/or maths skills they need to function effectively in everyday life.

But what’s also needed is more use of peer support and innovative first steps interventions such as the family learning and community-based schemes which have helped to change adults’ attitudes to learning in several places across the country. But there needs to be more of these schemes, on people’s doorsteps, in a place, at times and in a way that will help them take those first tentative steps back into learning, for their sake, for their families and for the communities they live in.

New measures to counter youth unemployment

Whilst youth unemployment has fallen by 59,000 since the launch of the Youth Contract in April 2012, figures published last week by DWP show that the scheme has fallen substantially short of original targets.  This flagship scheme has funding to pay 160,000 wage subsidies of £2275 to employers who recruit and retain an eligible young person for 6 months or more. After 12 months, however, only 4690 subsidies have actually been paid. So why the considerable shortfall in take up? And what does this tell us about the future prospects for the latest initiative to help young people into work – Traineeships?

It’s over a year since Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, first set out the plans for Traineeships which are available from this month.  Full details of this initiative have become clearer since the Spending Review in June, which led to the welcome announcement that the programme would be extended to young people up to the age 24, after being initially limited to 16-19 year olds.

Since June we’ve also seen the publication of an updated Framework for Delivery, which addresses many questions around eligibility, funding and complexities linked to the benefits system.  Clarification that young people taking part in a Traineeship will be able to continue to receive Jobseeker’s Allowance is welcome. However what will the impact be of different eligibility rules and funding methodologies for the 16-18s and 19-24s? And what will the implications be for providers as they deal with the split in funding between Education Funding Agency and the Skills Funding Agency?

Targeted at young people who are currently out of work, have little work experience, but have a reasonable chance of getting a job, Traineeships will provide a welcome and important ‘bridge’ for many young people.

Whilst the core content of the programme will be focused upon successful work preparation training, English and maths delivery and a work experience placement, flexibility and quality will be crucial to the success of the programme.

With good initial assessment, flexible delivery and tailored support for learners, providers have the opportunity to make a real difference in preparing young people for work experience.  However, the work experience placements themselves are likely to present more of a challenge. Providers will need to invest time and energy in securing Traineeship placements of between 6 weeks and 5 months that are of a ‘high quality, substantial and meaningful experience for the individual’.

Whilst funding rates (announced by the SFA) will involve payments of up to £900per Trainee for the provider, the incentive for employers to offer a placement is less clear. At a time when employer margins continue to be tight, many (particularly SMEs) are likely to seek incentives linked to the costs of planning, delivering and staffing a work experience placement that will give a Trainee a real insight into the world of work.  In the absence of any payment, how much of a danger is there that some employers will either a) not engage with the new Traineeships at all and refuse to provide the work experience placements that are needed or b) they will engage but in a half-hearted manner, offering poor quality work experience placements that don’t meaningfully support Trainees to gain the relevant vocational skills necessary to progress into work or onto an apprenticeship.

Like many initiatives Traineeships will no doubt evolve over their lifetime.  Providers and employers throughout the country will develop innovative and creative ways of ensuring that Traineeships have a tangible impact on young people and provide a pathway to secure and rewarding careers.  Through a range of development work, NIACE looks forward to supporting providers and disseminating effective practice in the delivery of Traineeships, so that all Trainees have the opportunity to benefit from an experience that secures the best outcomes for them.

Turning the key, unlock the change

NIACE recently held an event in London which showcased some of the projects funded through the Community Learning Innovation Fund (CLIF). The focus was the difference projects have made to learners, families, communities and the organisations involved. It was attended by project staff and learners, representatives from key government departments, and NIACE’s Patron Her Royal Highness The Princess Royal.

It was an incredibly inspiring and moving day. There were interviews with learners, musical performances, films, displays of creative project materials and interactive activities. The wide-ranging positive impacts of adult learning shone through in everything we heard and saw.

Learners with learning disabilities spoke about how their skills and confidence in money matters had improved, giving them more control and choice in the way they manage and spend their own money. Young, unemployed parents with no qualifications spoke about how learning and volunteering improved their confidence and skills, leading to apprenticeships or employment and enabling them to support their children in their own learning. We also heard from learners about how their physical and mental health had improved as a result of learning: people living with HIV becoming healthier as a result of nutrition workshops, people overcoming mental health problems through learning and peer mentoring rather than drugs and therapy.

There were some interesting displays to browse throughout the day, including ‘Out of the Frame’ loan boxes, which essentially contain objects from the Wallace Collection that are loaned to care homes and day centres giving care staff and residents the opportunity and confidence to talk about art and heritage. City College Peterborough also displayed their ‘Cultural Boxes’, featuring items that represent different countries and cultures that are used to increase skills such as IT, photography, confidence-building, cultural awareness and ESOL.

We also saw some fantastic films; digital stories produced by women prisoners as part of the Stretch-Story Box project; a creative dance produced as part of CALAT’s disability and bullying awareness programme ‘RSVP’; a film produced as part of an intergenerational digital learning project in North Tyneside called ‘Back to the Future’.

Lastly, we were treated to two wonderful musical performances. Members of a choir from the Creative Edge project led by Sheffield Cathedral performed two of their own songs. And at the end of the event, Janet Wood from the Creative Directions project led by darts (Doncaster Community Arts), performed Turning the key, unlock the change – a song written on the day based on conversations with staff and learners from other projects about important moments in their learning journeys (which they were asked to write on to luggage tags attached to keys).

Image courtesy of Darts, Doncaster Community Arts

I was overwhelmed by the projects showcased on the day, which were only a very small sample of the 96 projects that have been funded through CLIF. The Fund has given so many organisations the opportunity to run creative and innovative community learning projects with learners’ needs and potential at their heart. As a result, they really have, as the Creative Directions song says, turned the key, unlocked the change.

Learning is the only pathway to reducing re-offending

Before I got involved with Offender Learning, or should I say when I was an unsuspecting member of the general public, my views on learning in prisons and opportunities for offenders in the community were at the very least skewed and at the very most totally off the beam. I heard somewhere once that you could do a degree in prison, in fact I have friends who include it as part of their career planning, and I believed it. I was bemused at the concept of paying for ‘criminals’ to learn. Surely we are only making them better ‘criminals’.

I never knew though that a significant percentage of people in the criminal justice system have low educational attainment levels or that there is a prevalence of mental health, learning difficulties and disabilities, drug and alcohol misuse among offenders. Neither did I know that many offenders are themselves, in fact, victims of abuse. Like the rest of Joe Public I was interested only in the sensationalism of criminality and not the root causes of it.

However, over the last few years I’ve been privileged to have interviewed, visited and spoken to a range of practitioners delivering outstanding teaching and learning within prisons. Their job is not easy as they work in settings where the primary aim is not to deliver learning and skills; they also work with some of the most disadvantaged learners around.

I have seen a growing number of good partnerships between prisons, providers and organisations supporting the wider needs of offenders.  And I’ve spoken to offenders and ex-offenders for whom learning has made a significant and positive difference to their lives. Some of their stories have been published in Our Time to Learn, highlighting the ongoing challenges faced by offenders in learning and how they were able to overcome them.

Each year, during Adult Learners’ Week, we also hear from a number of ex-offenders about the positive transformation learning has made to their lives. This year was no exception and a particular story that resonated with me was Sam Riley’s – whose short film is embedded below. Sam had a very negative experience at school, left with no qualifications and spent 25 years in and out of prison for gang and drug related crimes. He finally decided to break the vicious cycle he was in by taking up learning in prison. Starting with basic literacy and numeracy skills, Sam continued his learning journey when released, by volunteering with young offenders and by training to teach non-contact boxing to young people in the community. Sam is still working at youth centres and teaches young people to box. He plans to progress to a Level 3 Youth Work course and then a degree so he can one day manage his own youth centre.

Now I know why we are paying for  ‘criminals’ to learn. It’s not to make them better criminals, in fact the impact of access to good learning opportunities for offenders is quite the opposite – it makes them less likely to offend. Or as we say in the sector, learning reduces recidivism.

Those in the sector also talk about the seven pathways (nine for women) to resettlement or reducing re-offending. I say there is only one: Learning.