Austerity or investment in learning and skills?
It’s been a busy few months at NIACE: preparing for Adult Learners’ Week, developing our proposals for the spending review, interpreting the figures coming out of this year’s participation survey, thinking about the impact of the benefit changes and skills for those in and out of work, working through the challenges in funding and structural changes and contributing to the growing debate on skills and economic growth in localities. All at the same time as considering the European context in our role as the national EU coordinator for adult learning. The list could go on and on, but we also see this through the lens of the change agenda playing out for many of our members and supporters at the frontline of teaching and learning in terms of changing learner profiles and needs, decreasing resources and the need for a new curriculum for difficult times.
One of our major roles as the national charity for adult education is to draw all of these issues together into a set of coherent messages about the role that learning and skills plays in people’s lives and to support the confidence in the economy – learning for work, to build resilience and for hope for the future of communities and families.
A key argument we are making in our spending review document – Spending Review Proposals – Learning for Adults - is that the UK should aspire to spend the OECD average on tertiary education by 2020, a date not too far away – it’s the end of the next parliament. The OECD average spend on tertiary education is 1.6% of GDP, the UK only spends 1.3% of GDP – 0.3% of the UK GDP is serious money, approximately £4.25 billion a year. We are also well below the European average of employer investment in skills – both critical when we think about economic growth.
You can imagine some of the serious discussions we have had about this: how can we be this ambitious at a time of austerity and cuts? How can we not be this ambitious when it is skills and learning that underpin the sustainable economic growth everyone desperately seeks? We have been very clear about the need for a changed narrative for current times and the need to quantify the benefits of adult learning – this is about the hard factual case of the net present value (NPV) of investing in learning and skills. It is about the national evidence on productivity and on wage progression, as much as the equally important impact on well-being and the wider benefits on learning. A quick look at the long term scarring effect on earnings of a period of not being in education, employment or training as young people tells us this is an issue that needs a radical long term re-think.
We present a list of practical and technical policy “asks”, but our main message is much bigger and simpler: we need a long term cross-party consensus that investing in adult learning and skills at all levels, not only provides the scaffolding to enable everyone to contribute in a vision of future economic sustainable growth and resilience that meets both local and national needs, but also shows savings on other budgets to make this happen. But this needs to be a consistent long term approach and not subject to continual changes in policy or tweaks in direction.
And if you have any doubts about what our call for increased investment in adult learning and skills means, just take a quick look at the achievements of the national and regional winners for Adult Learners’ Week, the reality of the human capital debate that it is impossible to ignore.
