JUST back from a decadent weekend. Altogether too much good wine and food at my friend Helen’s sixtieth birthday celebrations in the Loire valley, and a chance to debate the place of life histories in social policy and education, albeit in my execrable French, with Alex and Denise in Poitiers. Amazing what a cheap flight from Stansted makes possible. And a reminder that travel can enrich the mind, and a change of scenery is a rich incentive to fresh insights.
In Chinon we passed a group of pensioners, concentrating on the story of Richard Coeur de Lion as they drifted round the town. A great advert, surely, for Saga, and its sister organisations, that offer learning journeys.
Nearer to home, Time to Learn, now published by City and Guilds, offers an extraordinary variety of short courses - each offering a combination of a good place to be and new things to think about. No bad thing in the present context.
Short-term residential colleges have been all but invisible to policy-makers for the past 40 years. Indeed their strongest advocate, Richard Livingstone, made his case for them during the long years of the Second World War.
Yet every year people make their way to Little Benslow Hills for music, to West Dean College for silversmithing, to Dillington in Somerset for landscape painting, and to The Hill in Abergavenny for any number of things.
Livingstone argued that it was necessary to get away from the rhythm of your ordinary life to see the world afresh. For many working-class students, going away to study was, for many years, the only option. The residential experience can be intense and it can change lives. That is what deputy prime minister John Prescott captured so movingly in his obituary of Raph Samuel, the historian who inspired generations of Ruskin students.
More recently, the growth of access courses has offered learners the chance to study at home, without the disruption that a year away at college means for many adults. It is hard to remember, now that such courses are a major route to higher education for adults, just how hard the fight was to get them accepted - first by individual institutions for individual courses; later as a nationally recognised standard.
Last week a leading champion of that fight, Maggie Woodrow died, suddenly. I knew her, and often argued with her, for 20 years, and was proud that she served on the National Institute of Adult and Continuing Education’s executive. Nowhere was there a more persuasive advocate for high-quality, properly-resourced opportunities for adults wanting to prepare for a course of study in HE.
Like the late Philip Jones, whose tenacity created and protected the mechanism for recognising access courses, Maggie Woodrow’s great strength was her willingness to be awkward on behalf of learners seeking a second chance.
Such awkwardness can be a good thing. Helena Kennedy provided a splendid example, at the Parliamentary bash for the Kennedy Awards scheme. She was scandalised that an award winner was unable to continue her studies to university, just because she is 54. Fifty-four is, of course, the witching age. Up till then the Treasury thinks it has got time to recover your student loan. After that, no chance. Even people prepared to mortgage their homes are unable to call on a state loan. For too many, this means that the new challenges, and fresh impetus to life a higher education offers is denied them, just when they can squeeze the time to study seriously.
Yet we know that learning, like exercise, prolongs active citizenship, delays morbidity, and saves the health and social services money. I have no doubt that Helena’s energy will make sure that this daft anomaly is addressed in the new review on student finance that higher education minister Margaret Hodge has announced.
Talking of announcements, none is awaited as eagerly as the Learning and Skills Council’s proposals for the new funding system. Will they offer incentives to widen participation? Will they punish institutions for having learners with interrupted attendance patterns? As ever, the demons of anxiety, fuelled by half-heard rumours, make everyone nervous. They are only likely to be quelled once the paper is in the public domain.
Another document about to appear - if a little delayed by the war - is the Performance and Innovation Unit’s policy paper on workforce development. I hope it develops on Chancellor Gordon Brown’s conference suggestion, that the time has come to move on from mere voluntary measures. Jim Sutherland’s work for the Fryer Committee suggested a mechanism for introducing codes of agreement between employers and workers in all sizes of firms - to ensure that training was on the agenda of every workplace in the country.
If it contains that, it will have been worth waiting for.
Alan Tuckett is director of the National Institute of Adult and Continuing Education
