For the last few days I have woken up with Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On? playing in my head. Not surprising really when you look at what is happening to adult learning opportunities across the board. There is evidence of a lot of activity but little consistency and shape to it all.
It is clearly welcome that the Government has put such a premium on widening participation in higher education. Pressures to include more working-class people in HE will tend to strengthen further education too, as the principal route to HE for adults from under-represented communities.
Less good is the way this commitment to widened participation is expressed as a government target. The pressure to get 50 per cent of 18 to 30-year-olds into some form of HE by 2010 will make life more difficult for adults over 30 seeking the same type of education.
After all, funding is finite and expansion of chances for young adults risks squeezing those for older people. Of course, having more people with early experience of HE is, in principle, a good thing.
But Britain is ageing fast. And it is not only in the Thames Valley where employers are trying to entice experienced early retirers back to the labour force - with offers of updating programmes - because of the shortage of young people.
HE badly needs a new initiative to help it serve the interests of older adults. We need loans and grants beyond the mid-50s. If targets are to drive everything, a little target for the other end of the age spectrum might limit the damage that the current, well-intentioned target risks creating.
In FE, the biggest danger is the search for tidiness. Chris Hughes, chief executive of the Learning and Skills Development Agency, has developed his thinking about the missions of FE colleges, and makes a persuasive case for them to specialise in the things they are best at - whether that is 16 to 19 work, adult access or work at the FE-HE boundary. The risk otherwise, he argues, is that colleges will be seen as institutions of last resort.
Margaret Hodge, too, is reported to value specialisation. And the Learning and Skills Council’s Centres of Vocational Excellence initiative tells the same story. I am not convinced. I worry about people who found education unrewarding the first time but want to put their toes back into the water.
The advantage of the cosmopolitan college is the range and variety it offers, and its flexibility in meeting the needs of individuals. Unlike Chris, I believe that an ideal mission statement for colleges at the heart of communities is that they are “institutions of first and last resort”.
The same pressures that privilege the young in current HE policies are there in the 14 to 19 policy. We already have area inspections for young people but not for adults, who comprise most of the college population. The inequalities in opportunities and outcomes highlighted in Helena Kennedy’s 1997 report persist.
But where is the strategy which commits every institution to widening participation for adults as well as the young? Five years on, we still have a long way to go.
Perhaps the Downing Street Performance and Innovation Unit’s second report, the Chancellor’s spending review, and the LSC strategy for workforce development will help, with a level 2 entitlement for adults that will open doors to paid educational leave. I hope so because workforce development, with voluntary participation by employers, continues to neglect the least skilled and most vulnerable workers.
At first sight, community-based adult education is in better health than usual. New buildings, capital grants, rising investment and a degree of enthusiasm in many local LSCs all augur well.
Even here, though, there are clouds on the horizon. The rationale for taking funding for adult and community learning into the LSC was to secure a reasonable offer for all, wherever they lived. Yet decisions about the volume, range and focus of adult and community learning provision are to be decentralised to local LSCs.
Initial plans suggest that few recognise the importance of the work to the council’s social and economic agenda. It is just one more dimension of the council’s challenge to be locally responsive and guarantee a minimum reasonable offer to all. But to get that balance right there needs to be more capacity in the middle so that good practice can be effectively shared and policy developed.
And then there is the voluntary sector, the new-look individual learning accounts and the new broadcasting legislation. There are opportunities - and real risks - for adult learners, with every ladder matched by serpents’
tails.
Alan Tuckett is director of the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education
