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Commentary - February 2007

The right sort of learners?

We need the middle classes to pay for their adult learning, but we also need the opportunity to learn to be open to everyone, says SUE MEYER

Someone once remarked to me that it was only adult educators who, faced with a roomful of keen, paying customers, complained that they were the wrong people. When the Government treats reductions in adult learner numbers as high as 700,000 as acceptable because the learners who are being reached are the right sort, this is clearly an issue worth revisiting.

A number of colleagues have told me that their job is not supplying yoga, bridge or languages to the middle classes but giving opportunity to people who live under the shadow of poverty and disadvantage. This is also the response of the Government when questioned about the reduction in numbers of adult learners: there may not be so many but the right people are learning (and the right things too) – limited funding means choices have to be made and if the desires of the middle class aren’t met then they can pay to repair their loss.

To me this makes as much sense as choosing between plumbing and pilates. There are two things going on that are related but not connected. One is the wholly appropriate wish to encourage individuals who value learning – and can afford to pay – to do so. This is critical to the development of a high volume system with a wide curriculum. Regrettably, competition within the system in the nineties has driven down prices. Providers have found it easier to stretch public funding than to collect fees and are now faced with an uphill, perhaps insurmountable, task in moving prices up at a speed that will deliver Government expectations while maintaining learner numbers. This is not helped by a view that the provision of learning for those able to pay is a less worthy task than providing for the dispossessed.

The second thing concerns provision for those who have least and what it is for. The Government is sure that what is needed is skills for jobs and level 2 – while the field is convinced that learning to enable engagement and increase confidence must run alongside this. In the absence of a foundation tier and a properly funded and thought-through outreach strategy able to use the talents of the voluntary sector in reaching disadvantaged adults, the small amount of funding for non-accredited learning is seen as necessary in meeting this need. For many, doing so is the real – and most worthwhile – task of adult educators.

Some of the images invoked in all of this need serious challenge. Who, for example, are the fabled middle classes gobbling up public money? The picture you get is of second home owners, qualified in accountancy, popping into the odd class when not ensconced in their Tuscan villas. The ones I meet in my evening class work in call centres or the local hospital, never got a language GCSE, but now can catch the odd flight to Pisa when there is a good offer on. How exactly are these people to find ‘private alternatives’ when most adults find locating even public provision a real difficulty and know surprisingly little about it and its costs?

And what exactly is the learning offer being made to disadvantaged adults? Clearly not bridge or yoga and, in my experience, not foreign languages either – much more likely a range of relevant and improving opportunities involving ICT, health and diet, confidence building and the like. Very far anyway from what you or I have to choose from in our lives or in our learning, and very different too from the political economy embraced by the working poor in the nineteenth century – much more like ‘really useful knowledge’.

The learning is dichotomised into, on the one hand, a consumer good that that middle class people can purchase, and, on the other, a force that will enable the dispossessed to make step changes to the lives of their communities, children and, quite possibly, the planet. Any connection between the two seems harder and harder to make.

However, I really believe that remaking the connection is vital if the best use is to be made of the money and resources. We need the middle classes paying and enjoying themselves, we want that enjoyment to be open to everyone, we need there to be as wide a range of opportunities as possible, and we need there to be real content in what is offered to all adult learners and real challenge in the mix of groups. We can’t make the money for learning for personal development support the outreach system needed to build the nation’s skills. Let’s hope the small print of the Leitch report sees this becoming a feature of the guidance service offered to adults. Then we can concentrate on robbing the rich and rewarding the poor with access to an exciting cocktail of challenge and delight in learning – we may even come to feel that this is a worthy as well as rewarding task.

Sue Meyer is Director, Programmes and Policy, NIACE

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