Jane Williams, the new post-16 standards tsar, got off to a flying start at the launch of the new Department for Education and Skills’ teaching and learning initiative in post-school education.
The event had a reassuring tone of enquiry and exploration, and civil servants were evidently in listening mode. Jane Williams’s strengths lie in emphasising that the work she will lead needs to be developed as a collaborative task, with practitioners and managers as well as policy-makers shaping and refining the work.
She demystified the role of mandarin, telling us her own professional journey, and communicating a passion for learning and for the importance of learners’ perspectives. She showed a refreshing awareness that change will not be achieved all at once.
It was a long way from the smack of firm government and truncated timetables for implementation that seemed for so long to frame debate.
The focus on teaching and learning in the consultation paper Success for All is really welcome, but it will still be hard to secure the time to get things right.
Politicians are keen to make a difference, within the attention span of the electorate. Yet some things do not benefit from being rushed. Adults bring such a diversity of experience to their studies, and have such a wide range of goals, that they will never have the full range of their learning needs captured by a national curriculum put together at speed, and with the schools’ model in mind.
We need time to build a culture in the learning and skills sector where every teacher and mentor is a confident, reflective practitioner, engaged in real dialogue with learners about their journeys. Of course, the recent public panic over A-levels highlights the risks of rushing too quickly at change, so perhaps there are real grounds for optimism.
One minor quibble about the set-piece presentations, though. You could have listened all morning without realising that adult education services in local authorities and the voluntary sector were part of the remit of the Success for All agenda.
It can be demoralising for colleagues to have their serious, professional work systematically ignored. This was, of course, exactly the point David Gibson, chief executive of the Association of Colleges, made at the Conservative party conference, when he pointed out the Tories’ failure to call for excellent colleges as well as excellent schools and universities.
Silence too frequently leads to neglect. This was brought home to me the next day, when the DfES announced the welcome “golden hello” initiatives for new recruits in shortage subjects in colleges. This was a necessary balance to the measures taken to boost school recruitment. Alas, it did not extend apparently to adult education services, many of which have full-time and fractional posts in exactly these shortage areas.
There is a risk that in seeking to solve one problem, the Government will create another. Big fish, the schools, eat first. Once their appetite for shortage subject teachers is slaked, colleges, which are less politically visible and therefore medium-sized fish, can eat. And when will the minnows in the adult and community sector get to the table?
The same systemic Darwinism is at play over capital expenditure, investment in mapping the occupational competences of staff, investment in staff development and learner support. Yet local authority and voluntary sector providers play a key role in extending the reach of the system, and do a good job at meeting the expectations of their learners.
Involving them last in all these investments sells these learners short. What, then, is to be done? A more strident lobby for the less formal parts of the system might work - but risks squabbles among the sectors, just when co-operative ways of working are back on the agenda.
The findings of the DfES-sponsored Wider Benefits of Learning Research Centre may help, too. Its work is beginning to firm up the links between participation and good health, engagement in learning and likelihood to commit crime.
Alternatively, adult educators could opt for patience. The census showed that there are already more people over 60 than under 16 in Britain.
Demography will undoubtedly lead to a review of policy goals as we seek to squeeze more years of labour market activity out of the baby boomers, and as we realise that learning is cheaper than visits from the doctor or the social worker.
We need to work convivially on teaching and learning, and to complain together until we get the system that supports all providers across the sector and beyond.
Alan Tuckett is director of the National Institute of Adult Continuing
