Chris Hughes, the chief executive of the Learning and Skills Development Agency, argues, persuasively, that further education colleges should focus on their core mission of vocational education. If they spread themselves too thin, so the reasoning goes, they can lose clarity of purpose.
Learning related to the world of work is distinctively the responsibility of FE colleges. No other publicly-funded institutions will supply enough joiners, programmers and engineers to the labour market. He is right, too, to suggest that colleges that lose sight of the needs of their local economies pay a high price when employers turn to the private sector to meet their needs.
The argument makes me nervous, though. I have no disagreement with a central focus on the vocational, but what does that mean for everything else? Years of work with adult learners has taught me to be cautious of tidy missions. You could see the notorious schedule 2 of the 1990s - which divided post-school education into well-funded, certificated work and poorly-funded, uncertificated courses - as just such a tidy-up initiative. It failed because you cannot tell the purpose of a student from the title of a course, and learners pursue their own logic in their learning journeys.
For communities most excluded from the labour market, it is essential that colleges and other community-learning agencies recognise the need for opportunities that start from where the learners start, and involve them in the shaping and managing of their learning. That is a key lesson of the Adult and Community Learning Fund, which is just about to launch its sixth round of bids.
Another lesson is that many people have forgotten the skills of outreach and negotiation necessary to such work. As the Social Exclusion Unit report on skills recognised, many of the poorest communities have little contact with any institutions. Such work is some way from the labour market, but it is vital if the twin goals of economic engagement and social inclusion are to work.
At the further educationhigher education interface, a focus on vocational education would, of course, let foundation degrees and access courses in nursing and accountancy through.
But what would it mean for those broader access programmes in the humanities and social sciences. Large numbers of my colleagues have found that studying history, literature and sociology were perfectly effective foundations for successful working lives.
Their experience also points up the problem with what counts as vocational. In a world where today’s job-specific skills have a shelf life of five or 10 years, the really important skills are in learning and in transferring lessons from one context to another.
For adults with learning difficulties, further education colleges share with other providers a wider responsibility - to secure for people as full a life as possible, access to the skills of participation in civil society, including work, but not narrowly focused on it. Indeed, you could re-read the Tomlinson report on inclusive learning as the case for embedding vocational education in a wider, richer concept of a learning institution.Tomlinson is, of course, worth revisiting - and I look forward to a Learning and Skills Council review of its lessons for the new enlarged sector.
Then there are all those vocations which relate to, but are distinct from, the paid labour market. The bulk of carers in the UK work without pay, yet without their effort there would be a huge increase in the demands on public finance. How far is the role of FE limited to the work carers do, and how far to their broader needs? I know if I were dependent on a single person for my contact with the world, I’d want him or her to be as widely educated, stimulated and enriched as possible.
The same is true of family learning. We recognise the value in training professional staff who work with younger children, but we are only now seeing the richness offered by the family as a site of learning. The Pre-School Learning Alliance has a powerful record in helping parents enrich their own learning as well as their children’s. The same goes for many primary schools. Surely there is work for colleges in this field.
We should cast the vocational mission in a rich soup of other engagements with employers, unions and the wider society - much as colleges now do. There is an uncomplicated and uncontested solidity in the role of community colleges in the United States. They offer something for everyone. It would be good if we could recognise that our own colleges do just the same thing.
Alan Tuckett is director of the National Institute for Adult Continuing Education
