More, Different and Better

We live in a society in which the family you are born into and brought up in is still a major factor in your chances of achieving in learning; our annual participation survey and many others (including the Government’s own National Adult Learning Survey) provide ample evidence of this. This matters because there are strong correlations between achievement in learning and success at work (and therefore wages), with health and well-being and with your children’s achievements at school and through life. Life chances are unequal because achievement in learning is unequal.

I don’t want to get all gloomy about this, not just because it is the festive season, but also because a lot is being done already to address this challenge.

This Government is, for instance, committed to greater social mobility and to providing support to those who need it most. I could point you to many speeches from Ministers about the importance they place on this and there are countless policies and millions of pounds spent to support the rhetoric. Government investment in Adult Learners’ Week and the Skills Show are great examples of promoting learning to inspire people; the BBC still has as its purpose to inform, educate and entertain. I could go on.

But this is not enough. With public funding under even greater pressure in 2013, my fear is that opportunities to learn are becoming scarcer for people who need a bit more time and money spent on them to succeed. I am thinking about the outreach work and the first steps learning which is required to entice people into learning, to provide the confidence and self esteem needed to get into the mainstream. If this happens then the inequalities will increase.

I have, therefore, three major wishes for Christmas. Number one is for the Government to commit to a new national learning participation target. They could set this out by age, geography, gender and class and agree to report on it and use it to inform future policy and spend. This would highlight what we all know about inequalities and would send out a firm and clear message of commitment.

My second wish is linked to this, because a simple next step would be to task Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) to take into account the participation figures for their emerging skills plans. So, LEPs would need to link skills with economic growth ambitions as well making the link with the participation and achievement levels of the adult population. This has to make sense for long run economic and social success; bringing together a vision of how the local economy will grow with clarity on what skills people need to develop to be ready for the jobs created.

My final wish is for more creativity and innovation in how learning is delivered and experienced. I would love to see more emphasis on learning rather than teaching; on supporting all adults to become self-directed, self-motivated, confident learners throughout their lives. New technologies are already helping this to happen. Our recent survey of older learners showed a big increase in the numbers learning on-line and the announcement earlier this month that the Open University is leading a consortium of universities into the world of MOOCs (Massive Open On-line Courses) is worth watching.

More, though, needs to be done within the world of learning for adults, within further education if we are to help more people learn throughout their lives.