More, Different and Better

“Lurking in the childhood of anyone ambitious there is always the memory of some humiliation that sets them on the path of self-improvement,” says Boris Johnson (Telegraph, 19 July 2010).

He has a point. In over 20 years as an adult literacy teacher, I have heard countless stories from adults who remember a similar defining moment. A moment when they felt patronised or humiliated in the school classroom and made the decision – either consciously or sub-consciously – that education wasn’t for them. They pay a high price for this decision as research consistently shows a high correlation between poor literacy and numeracy with worklessness, poor health, poverty and crime. Perhaps even worse is the fact that poor skills are passed down from parents to children. This comes at a high cost to the tax-payer.

However, a competition between two methods of learning to read is not necessarily the answer. A recognition of the different ways that children learn and the different speeds they develop is much more helpful. One in five adults struggle with literacy and figures are far higher for numeracy. NIACE would welcome the opportunity to talk to Boris Johnson - or anyone else who’s passionate about this issue (as the Mayor of London clearly is) - about how we can help adults to overcome their individual barriers to re-engage with learning. How do we make sure all adults contribute to the Big Society and how do we ensure local people benefit from the new jobs provided, in London, by the new Westfield Shopping Centre and the Olympics?

His larger than life personality may have helped Boris to achieve by his experience, but for many who don’t possess his level of confidence and weren’t lucky enough to receive support to reach their full potential, their choice was to give up on learning. Adults who feel they failed at school need to be encouraged to return to education. Policies that support free literacy and numeracy provision provide flexible opportunities to learn, allowing those trapped in low-skilled, low-paid jobs to participate and attract adults at different life stages back into learning, are all crucial.  Spending money on adult education for those with the lowest skills should not be seen as expenditure but as an investment. An investment that will lead to great benefits for the whole of society in the long term.

Total Place was a key initiative during the last years of the Labour Government that aimed to radically re-structure the way public services were delivered. Pilot programmes in 13 areas were launched in 2009 with the aim of developing joined-up public services at a local level. The findings from the Total Place pilots were published in March 2010. They make interesting reading and can be accessed at: http://www.localleadership.gov.uk/totalplace/news/pilots-final-reports/

Total Place, as a name, may have disappeared with the change of government but the central aims of Total Place - services designed around the citizen rather than organisations and efficiencies created by joining up services – seem to have re-emerged as the ‘localities’ agenda. The themes of responsive services and efficiencies are likely to be driven even harder by the anticipated public sector cuts.

The launch of the ‘Big Society’ again stresses local solutions to the delivery of aspects of public services. Underpinning these developments will be a need for the new groups and alliances who will run the services to gain the skills required to take on these new roles.

So what does this mean for adult learning? Looking at the themes that emerged from the pilot schemes: citizen engagement, targeted services, multi-agency teams, needs-led services, working outside of silos - most of these will seem very familiar concepts to adult educators. Although only a few adult learning services were involved with the Total Place pilots, there are many adult learning services whose approach to delivery embodies these ways of working. Similarly a number of the concepts of the Big Society - such as empowerment, neighbourhood action and community development - will resonate with the work of adult learning services.

Adult educators have considerable expertise that could be used to help other public services reconfigure their front-line delivery models to meet the aspects of the Big Society and ‘localities’ agenda. We still await the detail but now might be the time to start thinking about how adult learning can deliver some of the skills and workforce development that undoubtedly will be needed if public services are to radically change.

A meeting of national agencies was convened this week by DWP to discuss how the Government’s digital inclusion agenda can be carried forward for people approaching retirement. The discussion provided an interesting insight into how different the model of Government being proposed by the Coalition might be.

Next week the Government’s digital champion, Martha Lane-Fox will launch her Digital Manifesto. It is likely to set ambitious objectives for ensuring that the 10 million people who are not yet internet users are online by 2012 (the Olympic target date for the “Race Online” campaign).

Building on the work she undertook for the last Government following last summer’s Digital Britain White Paper, Martha will call for a strategy which inspires people to want to go online, encourages and rewards those who do so, and supports people to do so through a wide range of agencies.  For older people, the benefits are well known – online access provides social engagement (especially with remote friends and family), home shopping maintains independence as mobility declines and can save money, Government services can be accessed more rapidly, and online information and support groups can help people pursue hobbies and interests, or seek shared solutions to problems ranging from health and finance to gardening or DIY. However, the argument goes, the benefits are not well understood by many older people, who need incentives to acquire the skills and access – or many older people simply don’t see the relevance of the internet to their lives.

The model of Government being proposed to carry this out may be very different from the one we have experienced in recent years. As one civil servant said “we are giving away all our levers”, influenced by, among other things, the advocates of “nudge” – or, sceptics might argue, “stick” as opposed to “carrot”.

The proposal is that, rather than planning and coordinating new services, Government should change the incentive structure, and only intervene when such incentives fail. Past strategies, based on planning structures for delivery of tuition would be replaced by a progressive increase in the incentives to go online to access Government services.  This might involve setting a date by which access to specific state services will be available only online, in the same way as the switch from analogue to digital television is being managed: announce the date well in advance, encourage producers to step up production of the new technology, encourage retailers to offer integrated sales and support, and provide extra support for the most vulnerable.

In the interim period, access to face to face and telephone support would be gradually scaled down, making switching progressively more attractive – and/or necessary.  Much of the support for learning will come at the most informal level, through family, friends, children and local groups. The role of Government (national and local) would not be to plan comprehensive strategies for support, but to monitor who is not getting access, and stimulate new services meet their needs.

It was suggested, for example, that by a specified date, all new applications for the state pension must be made online. This would create an immediate incentive for individuals approaching retirement to develop internet skills and find local access to the web (and many could be expected to buy a computer). It would also provide incentives for (good) employers to provide internet training for staff as part of a retirement package, and of education, and information and advice providers, to design appropriate training programmes, or to incorporate internet access into more general pre-retirement programmes. It would capitalise on the critical point where Government already writes to everyone, and ensure (at least in theory) that no one enters retirement unable to access the internet.

Similar ideas are being proposed at local level, where Government is planning to devolve control and organisational decisions to Local Authorities and the Local Government Association. The expectation is that it will be for Local Authorities to decide (within the limits of statutory duties) what services to provide in what ways, but that the imperatives of shrinking budgets mean that increasing use will be made of online delivery.  Again, the role of Local Authority will be to facilitate, rather than deliver services, to monitor who is being excluded by the new models, and stimulate creative responses to these needs.

We are told that Ian Duncan Smith is passionately committed to overcoming social exclusion and Eric Pickles to devolution of power to Local Authorities. These two are not necessarily compatible, and not all Local Councillors are likely to grasp, or support these ideas. How effective the mechanisms for monitoring who is excluded will be remains to be seen. And how committed all those involved will be to meeting the needs of the most excluded likewise, especially since all of NIACE’s research into media literacy/digital participation in recent years has shown the absolute correlation between the learning poor, the digitally poor and the economically poor. 

Moreover, following the advent of the Coalition Government, there has been a subtle - but crucially important - shift in emphasis for Lane-Fox’s role and the targets for Race Online 2012.  Originally aimed at engaging with the six million adults who are both socially and digitally excluded across the UK, the focus has now moved to ‘everyone’ who currently lives off-line.  So is this a case of quick (and instrumental) wins from ‘low-hanging fruit’ where priority is given to central government cost-savings and the so-called ‘tubes and pipes’ rather than to the creative, cultural and democratic participation elements of this important element of policy? Only time will tell. 

This is certainly a new model of Government, and as with so much of the current “honeymoon” agenda of the Coalition, it remains to be seen how far Ministers understand the practical implications of what they are proposing, and how much survives the media and political pressure which will inevitably come as people find services no longer available because of local decisions, or fail to access them because support for online access is inadequate. For adult educators there may well be a surge of demand – will we have the resources and the enterprise to respond quickly and effectively?  What will be our contribution to ensuring that the most vulnerable are not left out?

This Tuesday, it was great to attend the European Award for Languages ceremony arranged by CILT, the lead body for language learning.

It was even better to learn that one of the most imaginative projects to take the stage at the Emirates Stadium was a group of adults learning Welsh through an informal semi-structured social network. The Clwb Cymdeithasu Cymraeg - known as 3C to non-Welsh speakers - meets in Mold North Wales and has support from the University of Bangor. The great thing about this group is that activities are devised so that intermediate students can be stretched in their use of language, but fluent Welsh speakers are attracted to come along to share their language and social time together.

The group did seem to work very hard to get a good balance of social activity with just a few semi-structured, fun activities to provoke people to push their language skills to the limit. Welsh colleagues tell me that there are more language groups like this across Wales and indeed there are other groups where first language speakers mix socially with others who are learning their language.

It does make me wonder whether in such a multi-lingual country as ours, are we really doing as much as Clwb Cymdeithasu Cymraeg to learn languages from our near neighbours?

‘Philistinism is bad economics,’ Vince Cable said, in his first speech since becoming the coalition government’s Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills.

His defence of ‘education for education’s sake’ is extremely welcome, and chimes agreeably with various comments from his ministerial team, and particularly new Minister of State for Further Education, Skills and Lifelong Learning John Hayes, whose enthusiasm for adult education is sincere.

Both Cable and Hayes have made it clear that, for them, adult education is a priority. In his regular column for his constituency’s local newspaper, the Secretary of State said that in identifying savings in his own department he had sought to protect ‘key priority areas: science, adult education and post-16 vocational training’.

Nevertheless, while there is no reason to question the genuine warmth of the commitment, there is, equally, no basis whatever for complacency.

The £6.25 billion package of cuts announced last month – to ‘wasteful’ public spending – may have included a welcome redirection of funds away from Train to Gain towards apprenticeships and college buildings, but they will be painful nonetheless and represent pretty small beer compared to the cuts to come.

There is a real case to be made for adult learning as a priority for the coalition government as a whole. As contributors to the June issue of Adults Learning demonstrate, adult education will have a hugely important role to play in shaping the Britain that emerges from the financial crisis – particularly if it is to be a Britain capable of weathering not only the economic storm, but those swelling tempests of climate change and inequality as well.

To emerge strongly we need not only endurance, but imagination too. We need a vision, something more than a promise to stop things getting too bad by ring-fencing key frontline public services – a genuine far-sighted optimism about the kind of society we can be: fairer, more equal and more sustainable. For that we need both bread and roses – poetry as well as plumbing.

As John Field argues in the new Adults Learning, David Cameron’s aspiration for a ‘big society’ presents a real and challenging opportunity for adult learning to help flesh out what remains a fairly amorphous notion. For a sector much burdened by the previous government’s sometimes obsessive micro-management, the opportunity to set the agenda, to revisit and revise our mission for the difficult times in which we live, is one to be grasped.

The emergency budget will be announced on 22 June, still a fortnight away as I write. Substantial reductions are in prospect. Wherever they fall, there will be real pain and considerable hardship as a result, and, as many a past Secretary of State has discovered, the forces of philistinism may, in the end, prove difficult to resist.

Which is the best deal?

Buy one, get one free; three for two or 50% off?
200 free minutes and 200 free texts or 150 free minutes and 500 free texts?
A repayment, endowment or interest-only mortgage?

Numeracy skills and the ability to think mathematically are fundamental for life, work, active citizenship, digital inclusion and effective lifelong learning for all. The financial decisions we make impact on our day-to-day lives and our long-term futures, but 17 million adults in the UK have difficulty with numbers. Improving numeracy is key to the government’s employment and skills agenda, and underpinned by the refreshed Skills for Life Strategy, is the need to widen participation in numeracy learning.

“Achieving our long-term ambition for numeracy will be challenging. It will require a step change in the number of adults taking courses to improve their numeracy skills and a change in culture and attitudes regarding numeracy.”  Skills for Growth – the national skills strategy, BIS (2009)

There is an urgent need to galvanise key stakeholders in the drive to increase opportunities in maths learning, tackle the culture which says “it’s OK to be bad at maths” and improve the experience of  numeracy learning.  NIACE is carrying out a national review of adult numeracy teaching and learning that will draw on policy papers, research, and current practice. More than ten years on from the Moser report and despite the impressive successes of the Skills for Life strategy, improving the numeracy skills of adults still creates a particular challenge. While things are certainly moving in the right direction, this review will support key players to create the step change called for in Skills for Growth.

“Adult numeracy remains one of the most crucial priorities for the government and, because of how it impacts on individuals, families and communities, the whole of society.  This review is essential at a crucial time for the economy and the many challenges that lie ahead.” Lord Moser (2010)

The review is interested in:

• what the evidence tells us about the current situation regarding numeracy learning;
• where the gaps are in current numeracy provision; and
• what the key messages are for numeracy learning.

Papers are welcome from individuals and organisations to reflect on the current state of numeracy and envision a future where adults’ numeracy skills are stronger.  We are taking a broad view of what constitutes evidence. It might include research evidence; information about your organisation’s learning provision; or personal / organisational experience or views about wider issues connected with numeracy.  We hope this review will act as a catalyst for enthusing and generating interest in this critical area, please send thoughts and papers to numeracyreview@niace.org.uk.  The extended deadline is 5pm of Friday, 7 May 2010.

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.