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Editor's Letter - December 2006

“Courses are closing, teachers are being made redundant and the focus on adults achieving vocational qualifications is ignoring what can be achieved through wider learning”

Unlike Tomma Abts, the German-born painter who won this year’s Turner prize, the Ashington Group of ‘unprofessional’ pitmen painters thought
abstract painting ‘not much cop’. Nevertheless, they would, I think, recognise Abts’ description of her working method as involving a combination of the rigorous and the intuitive.

Though reluctant to talk about their art – they painted what they saw and that was all – these painters nevertheless subjected their work to rigorous discussion within the group, each member agreeing to rules which included the acceptance of criticism. Beginning as a WEA evening class in 1934, the Group’s work was exhibited across Europe, becoming, in 1979, the first Western exhibition to tour communist China.

Could a group such as this one thrive today? It seems unlikely. As a coalition of 32 organisations – including homelessness charity Crisis, NIACE and the Campaign for Learning – has warned, opportunities for adults to learn are being cut dramatically. Leslie Morphy, Chief Executive of Crisis, says: ‘Courses are closing, teachers are being made redundant and the focus on adults achieving vocational qualifications is ignoring what can be achieved through wider learning.’

In an open letter to Gordon Brown, timed to coincide with the publication of the Leitch report on skills, the coalition calls on the Government to set targets ‘to increase participation in learning, year-on-year, across each and every age range, particularly among disadvantaged adults’ and to make ‘a dedicated adult learning budget available to colleges and other providers, including voluntary organisations which are committed to delivering high-quality learning opportunities to disadvantaged learners’.

The Ashington Group didn’t come together to develop their vocational skills, gain a qualification or change career. For Harry Wilson, one of the founder members of the group, painting meant ‘an outlet for other things than earning my living; there is a feeling of being my own boss for a change and with it comes a sense of freedom. When I have done a piece of painting I feel that something has happened not only to the panel or canvas, but to myself. For a time I have enjoyed a sense of mastery – of having made something real.’

Their work belonged to a tradition in which, in Mike Cushman’s words, ‘adult learning was sufficiently justified by the pleasure of learning in itself ’. The Government has, of course, funded a huge expansion of adult learning since 1997 but this has focused on a far narrower terrain.  ‘Learning now had to be economically useful and formally accredited,’ Cushman writes.

Something important has been lost though. For Cushman, this includes the loss of spaces in which individuals could learn about the values of others and new cultural identities – new understandings – could be created.

It is to be hoped that the Chancellor bears in mind these wider benefits of adult learning – to health, well-being, confidence, independence, to our ability to help ourselves and our families (a large number of the children of the Ashington painters became university lecturers) – when he considers Lord Leitch’s just published report on what skills and training are essential to the economic and social health of the UK.

Paul Stanistreet, Editor, Adults Learning