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Commentary - January 2008

Is this a price worth paying?

The Learning and Skills Council’s statistics for the last academic year make devastating reading for adult educators. We are witnessing the state’s retreat from investment in an informed and curious citizenship, says ALAN TUCKETT

This Commentary has lots of numbers in it – no apologies for that, since they map the scale of the retreat from a broad-based publicly funded education service for adults. Each December the Learning and Skills Council publishes data on the student numbers on programmes it funded in the previous academic year. This year’s figures for England show a drop from 3,886,100 to 3,166,400, or 18.5 per cent, in the numbers of learners over 19. This fall of 720,000 in a single year comes on top of a drop of 661,000 the previous year. Together, that is more than three in 10 publicly funded learning opportunities disappearing in just two years. For learners over 25 the drop is sharper. A third of all 25-plus learners has been lost between 2004/5 and 2006/7; and the drop in learners over the age of 60 is 40 per cent over the same period.

The biggest proportion of the fall comes from college enrolments. The fall in the number of learners over 25 was 45 per cent over two years; and there were 55 per cent fewer people over 60 in colleges between 2004/5 and 2006/7. There has been no comparable drop among under-19s. Their numbers are unchanged in the last 12 months. Two years ago, NIACE published a report on adult learners in colleges, entitled Eight in Ten. If we were publishing it today, it would be called Six in Ten and falling. Yet there has been scarcely a murmur from further education institutions in response to this shocking erosion of adult opportunity, since few colleges have seen budgets decline along with their adult numbers.

Even in Personal and Community Development Learning (PCDL), where there is a safeguarded budget, numbers have declined, from 638,300 in 2003/4 to 592,100 in 2004/5, to 476,200 in 2005/6 and 359,700 in 2006/7, and nothing in the reports from the field suggest that there has been a significant turnaround this year.

Prospects for adults wanting to study anything in further education outside the Foundation Learning Tier, Skills for Life and Train to Gain are even bleaker in the future. The Secretary of State wrote to the Learning and Skills Council in November, outlining budgets and planning assumptions for learner numbers for the period of the Comprehensive Spending Review, which begins in April 2008. It includes a new category of provision, ‘developmental learning’, roughly covering those bits of ‘other further education’ that cannot be squeezed into the Foundation Learning Tier. In 2008/9 the anticipated number of adult learners in developmental learning will total 497,000. By 2010/11 they will have shrunk to 116,000.

Again, in PCDL numbers are expected to shrink. The grant letter anticipates a fall in safeguarded learner numbers from 630,000 learners in 2008/9 to 585,000 in 2010/11. In 2003/4 the comparable student numbers totalled just shy of 896,000.

There are, of course, anticipated increases in the numbers expected to take advantage of chances to learn in the workplace through the Train to Gain programme. But the Government still has some way to go to fashion a learning offer that enough employers want to engage with for the anticipated numbers to enrol and achieve through the programme. The overall picture is devastating. The people who have lost provision include many part-time workers who cannot find time, or, often, opportunity to learn at work. They include people rebuilding confidence after a period of mental illhealth. They include carers taking a brief respite, older people in residential care, as well as thousands who will find difficulty in pursuing an interest with other people in a local setting. There are fewer chances to learn a language than there were five years ago; fewer classes where the mysteries of ICT can be unravelled; fewer keep-fit classes for an increasingly overweight nation. Of course, many learners will make arrangements to carry on their studies, making a private arrangement with their tutor; or using the Internet to manage learning at a distance. But neither route will easily attract those who benefited least from earlier education. When the tutor moves on, or the private group ends its work, where will the replacements come from? Far from the 1998 vision of a learning society, we are seeing a retreat from investment in an informed and curious citizenship. Narrow utilitarianism is rampant.

Of course, that is not the whole picture. But it is against this bleak background that the Government’s consultation paper on informal learning has appeared. There is a good deal to welcome in it. John Denham has a vivid sense of the multiplicity of contexts in which adults engage in learning, and a proper concern that the way government spends money in this area should support as rich a mix of opportunities as can be achieved. A clear implication of the paper is that funding should be re-balanced to provide for infrastructural support for voluntary sector and self-help learning, as well as what survives of public provision. It challenges us to think about quality, and about equity, to ask who isn’t reached by the patchwork of local offers, and how we can avoid creating a ghetto of skills study for the poor and excluded, leaving culture and fun for the affluent. They are proper, and welcome, questions. But they could scarcely come at a more challenging time for adult educators, as they survey the devastation of far too much of their lives’ work.

Alan Tuckett is the Director of NIACE

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