More, Different and Better

I was invited to a rather grand occasion at the weekend.  I am not an habitué of Oxford colleges, but I was invited as a guest to the Founders’ Feast at Nuffield College by a friend  who is a visiting fellow there.  The people gathered included the heads of the civil service and the BBC, the editor of the Guardian, deputy governors of the Bank of England, the director of Liberty and other members of the Establishment too numerous to mention.  I was placed for dinner next to A.H., (Chelly) Halsey, the distinguished sociologist who has been a fellow of the college since 1960.

Within moments of my sitting down he was telling me about the importance of adult education. Last year, at the age of 86, he had joined a painting class – seeking to develop a new skill.  His teacher was inspiring, challenging students to stretch themselves.  For ‘homework’ at the end of term she encouraged them to try a portrait of a famous person.  Chelly chose Ralf Dahrendorf, the former Director of the LSE, who had just died, and who had been in his youth a contemporary of Chelly’s at the LSE.  When he took the work back to his class, the tutor was so impressed she encouraged him to send it to the current Director of LSE.  He in turn thought it excellent, framed it and hung it in the college.  Halsey had never painted till well into his eighties.  He was keen to argue that adult education gives you a sense of purpose, thereby prolonging your life.  More important it fosters inter-generational communication.

His story was paralleled in a powerful video made for the launch of a toolkit produced for the Learning Revolution project Enhancing Informal Learning for Older People in Care Settings, led by Fiona Aldridge. Drawing on the first hand experience of volunteers and learners from Learning for the Fourth Age and First Taste the film tells the story of a woman of 93, denied the chance to learn Welsh at 7, now embarking on the fulfilment of a lifelong ambition.  It reports 75% reduction in the use of incontinence pads among residents who have taken up a learning opportunity.  It describes one older man, now absorbed in painting, re-engaging in conversation with other people for the first time in months.  As Kevin Brennan, the minister said, anyone who saw the film and met the learners would ‘get it’.  Learning gives dignity and enrichment in older life. 

Yet as Estelle Morris said at the launch we have still a major task to do to persuade society that older people should have an entitlement to the chance to learn.  Winning the case for older people’s entitlement to learn must surely be a key task over the next Parliament for NIACE and its allies.

Society is changing. It’s likely that in the future we will have to make do with less and learn to live, and consume, more sustainably. And it isn’t just our lifestyles that will have to change. Our values and expectations will too.

It’s important that we start to rethink the way in which we structure ourselves as a society, to find a different, more satisfying and less wasteful, way forward. We have to face some hard facts and ask some big, difficult questions.

This isn’t an easy thing to do, particularly at policymaking level. Politicians face a tough balancing act. Frankness can sometimes be mistaken for negativity, even passivity, in the face of change, and no politician wants to be accused of that, particularly in an election year. There are also pressures from the corporate world that need to be confronted. And the recent record of British politicians here is mixed, to say the least.

Nevertheless, if we are not realistic about the changes taking place, and set out plainly the implications of those changes, it will be difficult to be as thorough and as radical as we need to be in reevaluating ourselves and our society. And nothing short of that is what is going to be required.

There are, however, some welcome signs that alternative ideas, different takes on the sort of society that we want to see emerge from recession, are beginning to filter into public life.

As Anna Coote notes in March’s Adults Learning, economists are increasingly turning their attention to how we can manage with little or no economic growth. Economic growth, she writes, has depended on ‘a volatile mix of depressed wages and escalating material consumption’. The years of ‘growth’ were characterised both by staggering levels of personal wealth and by unprecedented levels of personal debt and some of the highest levels of poverty and inequality in the western world. People borrowed to consume what they couldn’t afford until, one day, the ‘credit bubble’ burst.

With the ‘climate clock’ ticking the answer is not to ‘shop harder’, Coote says, but to ‘get off the consumer treadmill’ and reduce our carbon footprint. She argues that a shorter, 21-hour, working week would make more jobs available, close the gap between the richest and the poorest in society, give us more time to spend with friends and family, and more time to learn. Learning, she believes, will have a vital role to play in preparing us to live better, more fulfilling lives with less.

As Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett argue in their important book, The Spirit Level (just out in paperback and reviewed in Adults Learning), it is equality, not wealth, which makes societies happier, healthier and more cohesive. Richer societies do not enjoy better health, education or wellbeing unless there is a narrow gap between the economically successful and the economically disadvantaged.

Societies with a bigger gap between rich and poor are not only bad for the poor, Wilkinson and Pickett argue, but for the rich too. People in such societies are more prone to depression, less trusting and affiliative, more preoccupied with status and consumption, and more wasteful. These countries are, on the whole, less pleasant places in which to live. However much we consume, lasting satisfaction, with ourselves and with what we have, remains the most elusive commodity of all. Happiness, in consumer societies, is designed to be fleeting.

In fact, as the recent Compass paper, The Advertising Effect, argues, there is an entire industry at work to prevent us from ever feeling fully at peace with ourselves. Brand messages and advertising (the authors estimate we are exposed to more than 3,500 brand images each day) are not merely designed to sell but also to create a ‘mood of restless dissatisfaction with what we have got and who we are so that we go out and buy more’.

One of the most interesting ideas in the Compass paper is that we need to ‘reclaim’ public spaces from advertising. Our everyday environment, it argues, should be free from ‘the pressure to consume’. Instead, we need environments that invoke in us ‘a feeling of real belonging and citizenship’, a sense of place that reminds us of who we are and where we came from. ‘It is time to take back our streets, towns and cities as places to be citizens rather than just consumers,’ it says. Such a move would be an important, symbolic, step towards a
restoration of the kind of civic culture that will be critical in adapting to the changes ahead of us.

Clearly, a pattern of escalating consumption, driven by economic inequality and advertising, and fuelled by reckless borrowing, is no longer sustainable (in this context George Osborne’s promise to ‘unleash the forces of enterprise’ sounds more like a threat). The simplistic equation of economic growth and the development of the good society, which has caused so much damage to adult education, no longer seems as obvious as it once did.
The ground is shifting and it’s important that we, in the adult learning sector, ensure the wider contribution of our work, clearly relevant to many of these emerging agendas, does not get lost in the grand narratives that shape the future.

There was a clash of ideas at a recent seminar hosted by NIACE, on Friday 12 February 2010, on the topical subject of ‘nudging and/or learning’ in personal finance. In recent years, the subject of behavioural economics has come to challenge many established ideas about the value and processes of learning.  Behavioural economists have asserted that there are limits to the extent to which behaviour can be altered by learning and that much behaviour is more affected by deeply engrained habits and predispositions.

The subject of personal finance has become the focus of much of this debate so we were very pleased to be able to host a discussion, sponsored by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and led by Dr Rajiv Prabhakar of the London School of Economics (LSC) and Alan Shipman of the Open University (OU). 

Other attendees were from a wide range of public, private, academic and voluntary sector organisations and were not backward at voicing their views.  Alan Shipman acknowledged that there were points of behavioural economics that needed answering and asked the question, “Why, when faced with overwhelming evidence of the investment outperformance of equities over property, do people still prefer housing as an investment?” 

There was some focus also on the methodological lightness of touch of some behavioural economists and Dr Omar Khan of the Runnymede Trust noted that, while behavioural economists have identified a number of behavioural traits such as status-quo bias and framing, there is yet little indication as to how individual traits are ‘chosen’ or any idea of how they are ranked.

This is an important discussion for everyone in education, not just those in financial learning.  Already, we have seen Government policies being heavily influenced by behavioural economics thinking – the decision to opt for automatic enrolment in the new Personal Accounts pension arrangements is just one example.  Everyone in education needs to be involved in this debate as it does indeed pose important intellectual challenges that will continue to seep into educational policy.

Read a summary of the seminar by Rajiv Prabhakar

View Alan Shipman’s presentation

View Rajiv Prabhakar’s presentation

These are challenging, not to say troubling, times for those working in adult education.

A few days after universities learned of cuts to their teaching budgets – cuts you will, no doubt, have read about at length in the papers – the Association of Colleges (AoC) revealed that further education colleges were to face a cut of £200 million to their adult course budgets. These cuts, though on a considerably more dramatic scale likely to prove devastating to both learners and institutions, caused barely a ripple in the mainstream press.

An AoC survey of colleges found that ‘adult learner responsive’ budgets were to shrink by an average of 16 per cent, with some colleges having to cope with a cut from the new Skills Funding Agency of 25 per cent.

The reductions, which come on top of year after year of cuts and a steady narrowing of adult opportunity, are likely to mean course closures and thousands of redundancies in the sector. The AoC estimates that 7,000 redundancies could result.

Colleges have reacted with shock to the size of the cuts, which, even in institutions which face the smallest reductions to their adult budgets (10 per cent), will directly hit courses considered by the Government to be essential to economic recovery. Affected provision includes courses in engineering and construction, and A-levels and GCSEs for adults. The reductions are difficult to reconcile with ministers’ oft-voiced commitment to the FE sector as a key engine of growth.

As Pat Bacon, President of the Association of Colleges, says in February’s Adults Learning, while politicians of all parties appear sensitive to the wider role of colleges – both in reacting to and understanding changes in the world of work and in giving young people and adults a second chance to engage with education – this recognition is not reflected in funding allocations.

With ministers ever keen to talk up the sector’s role in beating the recession, and the increasingly urgent need to respond to the challenges of demographic change, it is little wonder that there is a growing feeling across further education that things, in Pat Bacon’s words, ‘don’t quite stack up’ (you can read my interview with Pat Bacon in full in Adults Learning).

As public sector cuts begin to bite – the term ‘savage’ is becoming uncomfortably familiar – the gap between the rhetoric and the reality is likely to grow wider.

The latest cuts will impact directly on some of the least advantaged and most vulnerable learners. The recent report of the National Equality Panel revealed the grotesque reality of inequality in Britain – the richest 10 per cent are now 100 times as wealthy as the poorest 10 per cent – a reality which makes us, as a society, more divided, less happy and less economically productive.

The cuts to colleges’ adult provision will make equality, already a goal that is vanishingly remote, that much harder to achieve.

The Learning Through Life report focused strongly on the reshaping of the lifecourse. The Commissioners argued that the period from age 50 to 75 should be seen as a whole, a phase of life in which people remain active contributing members of society, with a varied mix of paid and unpaid work, learning and other activities. The idea that people move from being ‘employed’ to being ‘retired’ at a fixed point is out of date and should be abolished.

Although State Pension Age is fixed at 60 for women and 65 for men, most people do not now retire at this point, and people are staying longer in work. Many employers, including the whole Civil Service, have abolished compulsory retirement ages, and the proportion of people over 60 in work has continued to rise despite the recession.

One critical barrier to more flexible forms of retirement is the existence of the Default Retirement Age (DRA) introduced when age discrimination in employment and training was outlawed in 2006. Bizarrely, the Regulations which ban age discrimination still allow an employer to legally dismiss anyone at 65 for no reason other than age.

Campaigners have been lobbying to remove this provision, and the legality of the Regulations was challenged in the High Court last year. Campaigners were very disappointed when the Court ruled that the regulation on the DRA was legal, but probably few have read the judgment in full. Two very interesting and important points emerged last week, when the House of Lords debated an amendment to add the abolition of the DRA to the Equality Bill currently passing through Parliament.

The first was the Judge’s comment that if:

“… there had been no indication of an imminent review [of the Default Retirement Age provision], I would have concluded ….that the selection of age 65 would not have been proportionate. It creates greater discriminatory effect than is necessary on a class of people who both are able to and want to continue in their employment. A higher age would not have any general detrimental labour market consequences or block access to high level jobs by future generations.”

“If the selection of age 65 is not necessary it cannot therefore be justified. I would, accordingly, have granted relief requiring it to be reconsidered as a disproportionate measure and not capable of objective and reasonable justification in the light of all the information available to government”.

Later, he commented:

“I cannot presently see how 65 could remain as a default retirement age after the review”.

As Lord Lester commented in the Lords debate:

“the learned judge was saying that, because there was an imminent review, he would not go any further but he regarded the present default retirement age of 65 as disproportionate and essentially against the public interest.”

Effectively the Court was saying that keeping the Regulation was only lawful because Government is carrying out a review, and intends to abolish the DRA after consultation. If the result of the Review was to keep the DRA, this would clearly open the way for a legal challenge which might well succeed.

Last week, the Equality and Human Rights Commission added an important contribution to the debate about reshaping the ‘third age’ with a new research report on older people’s attitudes to work and retirement. They found that 62% of women and 59% of men in work after 50 would like to continue working after State Pension Age, and say they enjoy their work (they are not doing it simply because of financial pressures). Two thirds describe themselves as fit and healthy. A third of those working between 60 and 65 had done further training in the last three years. They saw the barriers to working longer as a matter of employer prejudice, and a lack of opportunities for flexible working.

Read NIACE’s response to the review of the DRA, which closed today. 

Read the EHRC report  Older workers: employment preferences, barriers and solutions by Smeaton, Vegeris and Sahin-Dikmen.

There are two ways, cultural critic and educator Raymond Williams reflected, in which the relation between adult education and social change can be interpreted. One is that adult education has been developed and altered by social change. The other is that adult education has been part of the process of social change itself.

More often than not, when we think about this relation, it is in terms of the first. As the economic climate changes, education priorities alter, new targets emerge, and providers must adapt, often in order to secure survival.

But that interpretation, Williams argues, diminishes adult education, for, he writes, ‘the central ambition of the process which was eventually called Adult Education was to be part of social change itself’. Despite its precarious recent history of underfunding and marginalisation, the constant reorganisation and the increasing levels of central planning and micro-management, ‘it has kept this ambition to be something other than the consequence of change’.

CONFINTEA, the UNESCO world conference on adult education and learning, which took place in December, produced plenty of evidence that adult education has, globally, become more marginal over the past decade or so, shrinking back, as Alan Tuckett observes in this month’s Adults Learning, to ‘its heartland in literacy for development’ – a change reflected in the narrowing of policy interests represented at the conference.

Yet there were grounds for careful optimism, not least in the unprecedented level of organisation among civil society representatives. It was here that links were made between adult education and global challenges like climate change and the financial crisis, suggesting a level of cooperation and solidarity that currently eludes the world’s political leaders.

A few days after CONFINTEA, the Copenhagen climate change talks began. The failure of those talks to agree any legally binding emissions targets makes grassroots engagement all the more important, and throws into relief the role of adult education – and this must mean all adult education, whether it takes place in a night class, in a college or university, in the workplace or in the community – in securing a sustainable future for us all.

Contributors to January’s Adults Learning, out next week, reflect on some of the ways in which adult education and learning can address these all-important issues, whether in simple practical terms (by joining the 10:10 campaign, for example) or, in Williams’ terms, by helping people build the kind of ‘social consciousness’ necessary to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century.

We are entering a period of unprecedented social and economic change. We face the future with a great deal of uncertainty. But we needn’t wait, watching from the sidelines, as the great and good decide our fates. Adult education – for so long, in the words of Alison Wolf, ‘the most unloved and invisible part of our education system’ – has an opportunity to contribute actively to the process of social change, working with different partners to produce a future society that is sustainable, fair, democratic and at ease with itself. There are signs, a few straws in the wind, which suggest some of these dots are beginning to be joined up.

Chapter 3 of the Learning Revolution white paper on Informal Adult Learning aspires to transform ‘the way people learn through technology and broadcasting’.

During the consultation over informal adult learning we argued hard that technology not only delivers the ‘stuff’ of learning but can also provide the excitement of the ‘stir’ of learning where people actually explore their ideas and test their understanding. The digital environment is now no longer a place only for viewers and passive consumers of information but can be a great place for people to learn through creating their own products and then sharing them with others. Our colleagues in NIACE Dysgu Cymru has just produced a very witty video which illustrates this point very well.

It is the turning of the tables from digital consumers to digital producers which really characterises the ‘digital revolutionaries’ who are emerging with Informal Adult Learning.

The recent publication of the Harnessing Technology surveys this year has shown just how far local authorities have now come in their use of technology for learning – 95% of those surveyed now have a written strategy for using technology and 68% actually review these strategies at least once every year.

We now have over 3,000 eGuides trained to use technology for adult learners and then to cascade their skills to colleagues. There has also been a significant investment in connectivity and hardware for local authorities in the last seven years so they really must be well placed to capitalise on the strategic potential of their digital learning capacity in the new strategic role of Lead Accountable Body for informal learning.

At Tuesday’s LLUK conference there was an interesting debate about the responsiveness of training to employer needs. As the discussion progressed, along largely familiar lines, it struck me that our discussions about training, and I suspect our data collection, usually fail to distinguish some very different kinds of activity.

For most purposes we ‘feel the width’ rather than measure the quality. We count what is provided in terms of hours of tuition or formal qualifications gained, or evaluate the processes of instruction, none of which are a very good guide to what has been learned, let alone what impact it has had on the business. This matters when we start asking (as we are increasingly going to have to do) whether the same results can be delivered more cheaply or rapidly using different technologies.

I suspect that a substantial proportion of what employers declare as ‘training’ (and for which many claim substantial corporate tax relief, as the Learning Through Life report points out) is driven by the needs of induction and regulation.  Without the former, employees cannot do the job, and without things like health and safety training they would fail to meet their statutory duties, but neither has much to contribute to the learning society or a knowledge economy. For the firm they are the bottom level of Maslow’s hierarchy.

A second large chunk is driven by other kinds of compliance – by licence to practice requirements in many occupations and by contractual requirements from customers. Only then do we begin to get to the kinds of training which are developmental, empowering the individual or the firm to do new and better things, rather than do the old things quicker or with fewer errors. I suspect we do not know how much of the ‘training’ effort of most firms falls into this last category, but it would not be surprising if it was a (small) minority of the whole.

We know from the work of people like Alan Felstead, Lorna Unwin and Michael Eraut that training can be developmental or constraining. We know that it can be freestanding (delivered in classrooms by teachers) or embedded in the processes of work, and that the latter is often more highly valued by learners and their employers. It can open new horizons and offer new possibilities, or simply teach people to do the standard things more efficiently. It can develop generic and soft skills (the ability to learn better, to work better with others, and to think clearly and creatively, or to make work more interesting and motivating) or to develop very specific technical skills.

While we continue to lump all these things together we will fail to understand what is really going on, and thus fail to make good policy. We will continue to use inappropriate measures of what is happening. Employers and employees will continue to suspect that what they are being offered is not a good investment of time and money, and they might be right. Perhaps it is time we tried to identify what we are really talking about.

Launching the international conference CONFINTEA VI, the Director of UNESCO, Irina Bokova, stressed the global importance of another key UN conference: the Climate Change meeting in Copenhagen that starts on Tuesday. “Now, more than ever”, she said, “education has a role to play in our understanding of climate change and how to better take care of our planet”.

As the horrors of the impact of climate change have unfolded in the public eye over the past few years I too am increasingly convinced that lifelong learning has a part to play in raising awareness and changing how we act for climate justice.  I will be at the Copenhagen conference; this is a key event for NIACE in our plan to reduce our impact on the environment and to embed education for sustainability across all of our work.  I will be working with colleagues from the international Council for Adult Education to promote the role that lifelong learning can play.   As the recent row over data demonstrates, now more than ever learning is needed to equip people with the critical reading and analytical skills they need to make sense of climate change information and the political spins influencing the debate.
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One of the biggest challenges for everyone is that the solutions are hard to pin down and what are sometime believed to be the right answers can shift as knowledge advances. In NIACE most colleagues are keen to take forward our sustainability work but it is fair to recognise that our progress has been jerky and we certainly haven’t yet convinced everyone that education for sustainability should be high on the agenda or that they should change what they do, especially when it cuts across their comfort zone.  Then the 10:10 campaign - to achieve a ten per cent reduction carbon throughout 2010 - came along and I wondered if we should use this as a catalyst for action.   NIACE, alongside a wide range of businesses and organisations, has signed up but this does pose dilemmas; not least - what if we ‘fail’ to cut our carbon by 10%. Of course we could worry about this and wait until we have the answers before we sign up. But as a learning organisation we view 10:10 as our climate change learning journey and seek to increase our knowledge, understanding and capabilities along the way.

But the journey we’re committed to can help us travel forward, even if we do take some wrong turnings, linger impatiently at hold ups and are forced into diversions along the way.

At the beginning of this journey a Jostein Gaarder quote has helped, ‘An answer is always the part of the road that is behind you. Only questions point to the future.’  As with the start of any journey finding the right questions to ask is the immediate challenge and I’m hoping Copenhagen will set us off in the right direction.

The December issue of Adults Learning, published next week, highlights some of the stark choices likely to face ministers, providers and practitioners in the coming months and years.

The past few years have seen a steady redirection of funds to an ever narrowing range of activities, overwhelmingly focused on the needs of employers. The CBI has called for this focus to be intensified further and the Government’s latest skills strategy, and the Skills Investment Strategy that supports it, do nothing to suggest that this trend in policy-making will change or be in any way moderated or off-set.

With public spending cuts on the way whichever party wins the General Election, things, to coin a phrase, can only get worse. They are about to.

The investment strategy, published with understandably muted fanfare a few days after the skills strategy, explains how the Government will fund an increase in ‘employer-responsive’ learner numbers with a big drop in ‘adult learner responsive’ numbers.

The number of learners expected to take part in ‘developmental learning’ next year is expected to shrink from 583,000 this year to 213,000, a swingeing blow to some of the most vulnerable and disadvantaged learners.

It could not be plainer that when ministers talk of ‘demand-led’ provision it is only the demand of employers that matters. As far as individuals in further education are concerned, central planning is the order of the day, and the Government shows no sign of extending the sort of trust routinely accorded to individuals and institutions in higher education to the FE sector.

An article from Mark Corney, published in this issue, opens the debate on some of the options ministers will be considering. He suggests a system of ‘personal skills accounts’ based on the compulsory tripartite funding of personal pension accounts, splitting costs between employers, employees and the taxpayer.

One thing is clear. With the public kitty close to empty, alternatives to public funding will need to be found, and hard choices will need to be made, by ministers and by providers. It’s likely that a good deal of very valuable work will be lost.

I was struck by a line from Raymond Williams, quoted, in a different context, by George Monbiot in the Guardian (Monday, 30 November 2009): ‘To be truly radical is to make hope possible rather than despair convincing’.

Adult Education, to quote Alan Tuckett, is, like theatres and libraries, ‘part of the furniture of a civilised and tolerant society’. It is beholden on Government to provide for it, though not, necessarily, to pay for it. In any case, it is clear that, for the foreseeable future, the public purse will be able to offer, at best, only limited support.

The settlement that secures the future of adult education within a flourishing, energetic democracy, must involve individuals and employers too, and it must be based on a frank and open-minded debate about what’s necessary for the good society, who needs to contribute and in what form.

These are urgent questions and the debate they should prompt needs to be serious and realistic. We hope our readers and members will help us advance it, within and outwith the pages of Adults Learning, throughout the coming months.