Michael Barratt Brown was the founding Principal of Northern College
It was reported in The Guardian: Higher Education on 10 February that the government had decided to scrap their long promised White Paper on lifelong learning and publish a discussion document instead, not even a Green Paper. This is the White Paper that David Blunkett said was to be at the heart of 'Education, education, education!'
John Edmonds, General Secretary of the GMB Union, was at the same time reported to have expressed himself as disappointed at the seeming abandonment of the promised 'training revolution'. And Baroness Helena Kennedy, author of the report Learning Works, commissioned by the Further Education Funding Council, expressed her dismay in very strong language at the abandonment of action in favour of more discussion.
'We have the know-how. All we need are the political will and the resources to make it happen. Lifelong learning can be meaningless rhetoric unless we get behind it with real policies and resources ... The trickle down theory of education is not working ... It remains true that if at first you don't succeed, you don't succeed.'
Ministers, the baroness said, had got it completely wrong if they thought the middle-class voters did not realise the importance of education and spending money on it. 'If you are worrying about how it will play in Bognor, then "bugger Bognor!".'
As a first step towards a White Paper on Lifelong Learning, the National Advisory Group for Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning, set up by David Blunkett, published its first report last November, entitled Learning for the Twenty-first Century, and authored by Professor R.H. Fryer, Principal of the Northern College.
The Guardian report quoted John Edmonds as saying that this report, which proposed leaving training to voluntary efforts by the employers, 'was awful -- no, it wasn't as good as that. We have tried voluntary methods since the abolition of the training boards and it doesn't work. Some companies train -- the vast majority poach'.
The review of the Fryer Report that follows makes the same point as John Edmonds, but emphasises the many positive proposals in the Report which, as Baroness Kennedy says, only needed the political will and the resources to implement. The Treasury is seen standing behind the authors of the Report to ensure that they did not commit the Government to too much spending. But, according to The Guardian report, even so
'the Treasury took fright at the financial implications of lifelong learning and insisted on downgrading the document. Employers have also expressed concern about the costs of training that might fall on them, while universities and colleges have been more concerned to fight for their share of any extra funding rather than present a united front to the government'.
That is of course only hearsay, but if it is true it is quite absurdly short-sighted of them.
The Discussion Paper on Lifelong Learning cannot be viewed on its own. It is intimately bound up with the discussion on the future of Higher and Further Education. These have been the subject of two major reports -- the report of the Committee chaired by Sir Ron Dearing and the Kennedy report already referred to. The three of them together reveal the crisis in British education and present the case for tackling the crisis within a perspective that is fundamentally flawed. The flaw is financial. All three committees have had to work within warnings from the Treasury that there would be no more money and threats from the employers that they could afford to contribute no more.
We have been warned of what to expect, when on 25 February 1998 the Labour Government publish their discussion document on Life-long Learning together with the Government's responses to the Dearing Report on Higher Education, the Kennedy Report on Further Education and the Fryer Report on Lifelong Learning.
Mr Blair promised in his election speeches that he would put at the top of his Agenda: 'Education, education, education', not incidentally a new Gulf War. Did the Treasury question such extra expenditure on military activity?
And, since the Election, the Education Secretary, David Blunkett, has made great speeches about a revolutionary change in our culture to embrace lifelong learning, and promised us the White Paper on the measures to bring that about.
Mr Blair was right in his Election speeches to emphasise education. The UK stands in the last place but three of all 25 industrial countries in a League Table of spending on education as a percentage of national income, whether this refers to all spending or to public spending (see Table 1). School attendance among 16-18 year olds is below the European average, and so is enrolment in higher education as a proportion of the relevant age groups (see Table 2 and Table 3).
All three reports, to which the Government is responding, recommend an increase in government spending. They all draw attention in the most serious possible manner to the low rate of participation in the UK in further and higher education and the low level of education of the work force. The figures they quote are appalling;
Side by side with this story of continuing inequalities in educational opportunity, there is growing inequality in provision.
It now appears from reports in the press, such as The Guardian Higher Education report of 10.02.98, that rumours of what the Government intends to announce on February 25th are causing widespread dismay throughout the colleges. The message is that there will be no more money.
We already know from earlier announcements that the students are to pay not only for a quarter of their fees, which the Dearing Report recommended, but also for all their maintenance costs while they are studying, which Dearing did not recommend.
Not only is the Treasury resisting any further moneys for further and higher education, but the employers are refusing to contribute anything more, although the benefits for them from a more educated work force lie at the heart of the argument of the Dearing Report.
Employers in the UK pay less in taxes, social security contributions and other indirect labour costs, which include vocational training, than the average for other industrial countries; less than in any other country, excepting only Denmark, in indirect labour costs (Table 4).
Employers are significant providers of funding for learning, but, according to the Kennedy Report, people with little achievement or qualifications are the least likely to have access to employer-sponsored education and training.
All three reports to which the Government is responding have gone to great lengths in spelling out the mechanisms for expanding participation in further and higher education to move towards a system of lifelong learning for all. Great care has been lavished on developing methods of co-ordination, networking and partnership, and the application of new technology in learning and assessment. A national framework for credit exists in all but name. There are national standards for quality and assessment already in embryo. Individual learning accounts are but one means of giving potential students a pathway to learning. But they depend on contributions from Government and employers as well as from the students themselves. Without that all the talk about 'stakeholders' collapses in idle rhetoric. There is a place for vision in imagining a learning society, but there is a time also for action.
Anyone who has troubled to read the three reports with care and attention, as I have, will know that the time for discussion is long passed. As the Kennedy report puts it, 'We know how to widen participation -- now we need to make it happen'. There are hundreds of examples of effective ways of attracting new participants into further and higher education. Many of the major obstacles like the restrictions on studying for the unemployed, can easily be overcome, if funding can only be stepped up. The argument used by David Blunkett for making the full-time students pay for their education, that it was not fair on the part-time students who had to pay, must be turned around. It is not fair on the part-time students that they have to pay. It is not only not fair for any to pay; it is not sensible. The whole community loses at least a half of its potential intellectual capacity through the failure of the educational system.
The Dearing Committee speaks in several places of the need for a new 'compact' between individuals, employers and government in the provision of higher education. 'Compact' must imply an agreement between the parties. The Committee should be taken at its word and the Government should ballot school Sixth Forms and part-time students starting courses.
Better still, since this new Labour Government appears to have a penchant for referenda, let them organise a referendum on higher education. There could be three questions:
Nothing could do more to arouse public interest in the current provision of higher education and its future contribution to a good society than the argument which would take place in the campaign leading up to such a vote.
A similar set of questions could apply to Further and Continuing Education, with the appropriate payments inserted (something which we should know anyway).
Next section - Part II - The Dearing Report - Why should the students pay?