Two in three of the jobs of the next ten years will need to be filled by adults and it is no time to be cutting back on provision. Indeed a million people, we think, are going to lose opportunities within a three-year period.
NIACE decided it would launch a Big Conversation asking how much learning for adults in the way of opportunities should there be. Who should pay for it? The government, employers, individuals? And who should pay what?
Broadly there is a general view that if it is vocational perhaps there should be more public support, if it is for personal development and pleasure there should be less. Learners on the whole think there should be more public subsidy. People who don’t join in on the whole think that people should pay for it themselves and yet here we are in an advanced industrial state knowing that year-by-year jobs in the real labour market require more and more skills. Certainly we need more plumbers in Britain but do we need pilates do we need tai chi. Do we need a chance to learn the languages of all the countries that Britain trades with? Do we need chances for people to paint, to draw, to learn music? I think we need all these things in Britain.
If you take up learning you are more likely to give up smoking, racial tolerance improves, you are less unsatisfied with your life, you are more stimulated by it, you are much less likely to get Alzheimer’s in its early stages, you prolong your active life, you keep healthier longer. Those are reasons why a society that is as complex and developed as Britain can’t see education as a wind up tool you do for kids.
We think that the government needs to rebalance what it spends on young people and adults. It is not that we are against spending on young people, that is excellent, but you can’t have it that overwhelmingly the expansion in the budgets of the last ten years have been designed for and gone to young people without recognising too that some investment in adults needs to complement that. It is not a matter of robbing Peter to pay Paul. One of the things that make the biggest differences to young peoples chances in life is their parent’s confidence in learning. So if we were only thinking about young people investing in adults makes sense. You can give people a start in life but that won’t last them a lifetime any more - when technologies change year by year, when working circumstances alter, when industries rise and fall. Every time a great industry like coalmining disappears people need to learn new tricks and you can’t prescribe it all at the beginning: things emerge. We need to adapt to them and a lifelong, lifewide learning strategy can help you get there.
We are asking in the Big Conversation ‘Do you agree with us?’, ‘What is your experience of taking part in Adult Learning?’, ‘How much do you think ought to be paid?’, ‘What do you think is a reasonable balance in public expenditure?’ The key issue we think is to try to get a new consensus about how much should there be and who should pay for it.