Happy new year: at the last moment I was spared a visit to the Christmas pantomime in Bradford, where they were doing Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, so I sloped off to catch a movie at the National Photographic Museum instead. I heard all about the play afterwards, of course, taking delight in my son, Lewis’s enjoyment of the belly laughs. For the next 24 hours, “Oh yes you did”, “Oh, no I didn’t”, punctuated all our conversations.
Perhaps I should have gone. It would have been good practice for getting back to work after a six-week sabbatical. This was brought home to me by the Learning and Skills Council’s Christmas card. Few cards generate such intense debate as this one has. Its cover message is clear and bold, but alas misleading: “The saddest thing about this Christmas card is that seven million people in this country couldn’t read it if they tried.” Key words are picked out in tabloid red. Inside it says: “The best thing about this Christmas is that we will be working to change that” followed by season’s greetings from the council. Of course, no one can object to the centrality of the core message - literacy matters, and it is reassuring that it is a top priority for the council.
I cringed when I received the card. Certainly, there are millions of people who need help with basic skills. But the architect of the International Adult Literacy Survey, on which our seven million number is based has pointed out that 70 per cent of those with the lowest scores in the American sample read a newspaper once a week or more. The same is likely to be true here. To overstate the exclusion of people with reading, or spelling problems does not help. I felt like calling on the pantomime dame’s help to say to the council “Oh yes they could, or at least a fair number of them could, and do.”
And then there is the tone of the card. Who is the audience? I felt it was unlikely to include many of the seven million. This is not a small point.
If we are going to crack the literacy problem in Britain, we need to make strengthening reading, writing, spelling and maths normal, adult activity.
We need to move away rapidly from seeing people who need to strengthen skills as inadequate, and start to capture and include their voices in the shaping of the services made for them. As one of the first literacy students I was involved with in the 1970s, Roger Weedon said about his concerns about studying: “I’m not reading Andy Pandy - that’s a racing certainty.”
Now, I know it was only a Christmas card. And the council is right to recognise the importance of its mission in basic education.
Fortunately, it also has a remit for listening to learners. As that work gets into full swing, issues like tone will surely be fine-tuned.
Back in Bradford, I found that having narrowly escaped one sort of in-service training I had let myself in for another. The movie I caught was Jean-Luc Godard’s “L’Eloge d’Amour”. Early on, the auteur figure at the heart of its rather fractured narrative asks: “What is the definition of an adult?” He reflects that while everyone knows what youngsters are - so that we define them by their youth, by what they share in common with other young people - and while everyone recognises older people’s distinctiveness, it is immensely difficult to sum up what constitutes an adult. Is it a common set of experiences, or evasions?
I think some version of the same uncertainty affects public policy-makers, when considering the needs of adult learners. Too often, the world over, “adult” gets narrowed to “labour market participant”, with the result that the curriculum of adult learning is similarly narrowed to those things employers recognise as useful; and the planners of the system often have little experience outside the vocational. But as the Godard film demonstrates eloquently, it is elsewhere that the largest questions about the meanings of our lives, the nature of our relationships, and our ability to learn from experience are played out.
The complexity and diversity of adults’ experiences, challenges in life and curiosities make for a rich arena for learning. That complexity brings with it a bewildering variety of forms for learning, often brilliantly fit for purpose. It happens in reading groups, libraries, cinemas, and pantomimes as well as colleges and workplaces. But currently, only a small proportion receives public funding, and with it public scrutiny. For learners, that may be a mixed blessing - but for planners the challenge is to know enough about what works outside the limits of publicly-funded provision to support different and innovative work where they meet need.
Alan Tuckett is the director of the National Institute for Adult Continuing Education
