This is the first report of the National Advisory Group for Continuing Education and Lifelong Learning, authored by Professor R.H. Fryer, and dated November 1997; it has no publisher or printer's imprint. This report by the Principal of the Northern College is a magnificent tour d'horizon of the whole area of continuing education. It opens with a catalogue of horrific facts which reveal how
'the UK is not at present a learning society, nor does it have a culture of lifelong learning or even a training culture' (quoting from a recent observation of the coordinator of the Economic and Social Research Council's Learning Society Initiative).
Here are the facts it reveals of lifelong learning in the UK:
The challenge is overwhelming. The educational divide is but one example of the gross and growing inequalities in British society -- not just more provision for some and less for others, but different levels of provision for the few and the many. Education has a particular importance as the origin of so many other social divisions. The report quotes the Committee of University Vice-Chancellors and Principals:
'Social cohesion, whereby a sense of solidarity and common interest binds a healthy society is best engendered by education. As the economic need for a more highly educated and skilled workforce increases, the undereducated will fall even further behind than they are now. We cannot risk increasing the gap between those with high skills and those with low skills -- or none at all. The uneducated will become disaffected and disfranchised. Widespread alienation poses a threat to the stability of society. Education is not cheap, but ignorance carries high social and economic costs.'
Fear is not the best motive for charity, love is a better one, but, if the response is to open up society to all rather than closing it down with zero-tolerance and razorwire netting, then it may prove effective. The report does not dwell over long on the threat to law and order of social breakdown. Nor does it rest the case for lifelong learning simply on the demands of a competitive economy, which the Dearing Report on Higher Education tended to emphasise. It deliberately rejects what it calls 'crude, entirely market-driven and sometimes threatening rhetoric which has too often informed the debate about change at work ...' and it could have widened this to embrace all the many forms of change which surround us today, and in particular the place of work in our lives.
By far the greatest imperative in our society today for the adoption of a culture of lifelong learning is that the era of lifelong waged employment is ending. The distinction between work and leisure was never a sharp one. We work in the garden, in the kitchen, in the studio and at many sports and hobbies for which we are not paid. But for most men and increasing numbers of women around eight hours of the day five or more days of the week for 40 to 50 years of our lives have been given up to employment that is not self-directed. These hours and years are being steadily reduced and by the application of more and more machinery to the production of the necessities and many of the luxuries of living. This process will go on; indeed, it must go on if paid employment is to be more equitably shared and unemployment reduced. Filling the gap in satisfying and creative ways will demand for most people a quite unaccustomed development of internal resources, which only education can supply.
The report quite correctly gives great emphasis to 'the contribution which learning can make to enabling people and organisations to cope with far-reaching transformations, some of which we have scarcely yet discerned and turning them to advantage.' And it refers to many of the changes in the nature of work, the greater employment of women and the radical alterations in family and community life. While the report recognises the value of education in helping men and women to face change through the 'capacity to reflect on experience' so as to make sense of it and be prepared for change and be able to make changes, it largely overlooks the most radical change of all -- in the shortening of working lives.
Given the scale of the challenge, the report offers a disturbingly long list of groups which are unrepresented across the whole range of post-school education and training: unskilled manual workers, part-time and temporary workers, people without qualifications, unemployed people, some groups of women -- notably lone parents, and those on lowest incomes; those living in remote or isolated locations; some ethnic and linguistic minority groups; older adults; people with learning difficulties and/or disabilities; people with literacy and/or numeracy difficulties; ex-offenders; disaffected young adults, and notably young men.
The report avoids the modern tendency to think only of individual improvement -- a return to Samuel Smiles -- and sees lifelong learning as essential to strengthening democracy and community development. Jacques Delors is quoted at the beginning of the report in words which should set the tone for all that follows:
'There is a need to rethink and broaden the notion of lifelong education. Not only must it adapt to changes in the nature of work, but it must also constitute a continuous process of forming whole human beings -- their knowledge and aptitudes, as well as the critical faculty and ability to act. It should enable people to develop awareness of themselves and their environment and encourage them to play their social role at work and in the community.'
The report then sets out to propose a strategy for the new government over the next five years to promote lifelong learning in the UK for the many not just the few and to win widespread support for the fundamental change in attitudes at all levels of society that would be required. The report does not seek to evade the fact that this will cost money:
'Over the lifetime of this Parliament the aim should be', so it is recommended in the report, 'step-by-step to increase the total volume of funding deployed to support lifelong learning by Government, other public authorities, employers, charitable bodies and individuals themselves.'
Instead, however, of proceeding to draw up a shopping list of desirable initiatives, the report follows the now familiar New Labour procedure of stating those 'core principles' which should 'underpin the vision, drive strategy, shape policy and inform practice at all levels.' The principles are seen as providing the vision of a culture of lifelong learning.
The Treasury is evidently watching and the eight principles are general rather than specific:
- Coherence: lifelong learning should constitute an overall educational strategy for the Government' -- from school on to old age and as a concerted effort to create a learning culture;
- Equity: lifelong learning should be for the many, not the few' -- accepted as a normal part of life, with targets set for widening participation;
- People before structures: learners should be the focus of policy and good practice' -- with provision of information, guidance and support and the development of a national credit framework;
- Variety and diversity: learning should be for the whole of life and life enhancing' -- involving the acquiring of skills, knowledge and culture, for individual improvement and community development;
- Lifelong learning should engage the whole of Government' -- that is all departments not only the DfEE, and in an unusually intimidating if somewhat mixed metaphor, the report recommends:
'Government should also be prepared to use the whole panoply of its powers, as both carrots and sticks, to secure the development of a learning culture for all, including funding and resource allocation, legislation and statutory intervention, according to their likely effectiveness in furthering its strategy.'
- Quality and flexibility: the quality and flexibility of provision for lifelong learning will be paramount' -- innovation being encouraged but not too much and subject to inspection and self-assessment;
- Effective partnership: new opportunities for lifelong learning can be promoted through effective and inclusive partnerships' -- with a strong emphasis on coordination and agreed criteria for cost-effective provision;
- Responsibility: lifelong learning should be a shared responsibility' -- the government establishing overall strategy after due consultation with (New Labour's favourite) 'other stakeholders', and government considering what 'arrangements, including in the fields of fiscal and taxation policy, might be used to stimulate and support those who can show their own acceptance of responsibility ...' (that phrasing should not disturb the Treasury);
The report recommends that these 'core principles should be subject to widespread consultation and further refinement' and should apply to 'the implementation of the four flagship projects already announced by the Government (the New Deal, the University for Industry and Individual Learning accounts, and the National Grid for Learning) and 'should also underpin the responses to the Kennedy report on widening participation and the Dearing reports on 16-19 qualifications and higher education.'
Applying the Principles
The main body of the report consists, then, of the application of these 'core principles' to the actual reality of the British educational system. What should we make of it, given the stated aims of creating a learning society where nothing like it exists except for a small elite and in a few exceptional and quite small enclaves like the Open College Federation, the WEA, the residential adult colleges and a number of Employee Development Programmes like the Ford Motor Company's EDAP scheme? The report is clear about the obstacles -- financial and physical and attitudinal, finding a motivation for the under-represented and generating confidence in the very possibility of successful learning among those who had failed in the past. It shows deep understanding of the barriers to learning set up by institutions which appear to many people to be totally alien and unsympathetic.
What the report then misses is the greatest barrier of all to continuing education, although it was recognised at the beginning as one of the facts of the British system -- and that is the absence of opportunity for all those in less skilled or part-time jobs of receiving from their employers paid release from work for studying. A commentator on the Kennedy Report is quoted on the way the system works: 'If at first you don't succeed, you don't succeed.' The divide is impasssable; there are practically no second chances.
The report is addressed to the Government for incorporation in a White Paper on Lifelong Learning. The report assigns to government the responsibilities of supporting the vision of lifelong learning, establishing the overall strategy and allocating appropriate resources. The Borrie Report on Social Justice is quoted: 'Lifelong learning is at the heart of our vision of a better country.' Now, a strategy is a plan of action; and resources, as it is said, must be appropriate to the action. The heart of the report lies in the proposals for government action. What do they amount to?
There are four main proposals: for
- creating a framework for all tertiary education 'to develop coherence, effective coordination and clarity of links and pathways between different forms and levels of provision and attainment;
- dismantling barriers to participation and achievement, including government regulation of the unemployed, fiscal and taxation policies and failure of interdepartmental collaboration;
- setting new national targets for both participation and achievement, that include non-vocational as well as vocational elements;
- establishing a new national body -- a 'Lifelong Learning Millennium Foundation', to promote innovation, disseminate good practice and 'pump-prime' new initiatives -- to draw on lottery funding with matching public and private sector funding.
The Question of Public Funding
The report is insistent that 'more money is needed', that 'a strong and convincing case needs to be made for additional public funding' and that 'the aim should be to increase the overall level of GNP devoted to learning at all levels.' It rightly suggests that the increase should be phased, and proposes the following phases:
Phase 1. Moneys saved from treating student loans as investment and from treating human investment as capital assets in national accounts should be reinvested in post-school learning;
Phase 2. The Kennedy Report proposal that the millennium lottery fund be succeeded by a learning fund, with learning put at the centre of the Millennium Dome;
Phase 3. The Political Parties to include in their election manifestos proposals for increasing public, employer, individual and other funding of lifelong learning.
The Treasury should have heaved a sigh of relief at that list and at what follows in the report in its quite modest suggestions: for shifting funds within further education rather than increasing funds available, for the extension of means-tested student loans to part-time students, for retaining European Union funding and for VAT exemption on education provision including books. It is proposed in the report that there should be a 'key role for local authorities', but it is also recognised that they have no money, and the report adds:
'It would prove prohibitively expensive for Government immediately to commit large amounts of new funds to meet the full range of learning aspirations of local communities in the short run. Much will be expected from the creative use of existing resources, and from new resources released by imaginative partnerships.'
Public-private funding partnerships are recommended with individual students themselves, with voluntary organisations and other learning providers like libraries and professional bodies and institutions of higher education and with employers. As all these bodies apart from the employers depend largely upon public finance, we are back to the choice which the Dearing Committee on Higher Education faced between charging the student and dunning the employer. The report expatiates at some length on the need to motivate men and women for entering a learning culture and on the means for doing this through the media and starting in the school years. But the groups which are so poorly represented in lifelong learning are unlikely to comprise men and women who enjoyed school, who can afford to pay student fees or be prepared to incur large loans. So what about the employers?
The role of employers
The Dearing Committee, while basing its case for more money for higher education on the needs of a competitive national economy, chose nonetheless to find the money from the students and not from the employers. By way of returning the compliment, since the Fryer Report fully recognises that there are other reasons for education than economic competitiveness, it might have been expected that the report would have recommended that this time the employers should be asked to pay. But no, the section on 'Lifelong Learning at the Workplace' largely lets them off the hook.
'It is reasonable', the report concludes a section on funding, 'to expect employers to fund task specific or job related learning. Employers with, perhaps, some support from Government should also fund parallel and transferable skills learning. There is, however, a strong case for individuals contributing to their personal development learning.'
The old grant/levy system under the Training Boards is dismissed on the grounds that 'training officers spent more time in chasing the grant and avoiding the levy, than in providing training'. This supports the Report's emphasis on the need for consulting and educating employers, but it does not argue against a compulsory levy. The old system was ended as part of government deregulation and industry cost saving and leaves an unfilled gap. In its place the report suggests a 'Code of Good Practice for Workplace Learning', which would propose the drawing up by employers and employees and their organisations of 'Workplace Policy Statements', the establishment of 'Workplace Learning Committees or "Forums"' and the conclusion of 'Workplace Learning Agreements'. There are no sanctions for employers, although there are for the unemployed. For those newly entering employment the report recommends the Government's New Deal, the Work Skill projects for the Job Seekers' allowance and the Gateway programmes in the Welfare to Work process. It is early days for passing judgement, but first reports do not indicate a large take up of training opportunities.
Much emphasis is placed in the Fryer Report, as in the Dearing Report on Higher Education, on the responsibility of the individual student, and by Fryer in particular, on the proposal to establish Individual Learning Accounts contributed to by government, employers and individuals, although he adds that these 'should not be used to shift responsibility for learning entirely to the individual'. It is hoped that employers will respond to a requirement to report on their investment in learning, but it is recognised that government will have to lead the way, for example by offering entitlement to free provision up to the equivalent of NVQ Level 3.
What is fatally missing in the Fryer Report is any proposal to the government that Paid Educational Leave should be made a statutory requirement on all employers. The government appears to have accepted the recommendation that goes back to the Hadow Report of 1918, reaffirmed in the Butler Act of 1944, but never made a statutory responsibility on employers or local authorities, that all workers between the age of 16 and 18 should be released from work for one day each week to attend courses of general education. Nothing has been said about paid educational leave for the over 18s and this is a major hiatus in the Fryer Report.
It would have been particularly valuable to confront the argument that such statutory requirements on employers can only be placed upon the larger employers, which leaves out the Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, just where many of those with no opportunities for learning at work are to be found. The SMEs are said to be unable to afford such provision. There is no doubt that account should be taken of the varying resources of different employers, but as the chairman for 12 years of a small trading company in a highly competitive market, I did not find it impossible to provide day release for staff members on a rota system and indeed found such education both rewarding for the individuals concerned and for the company. But then we did not pay fat-cat salaries to our directors and we had no shareholders to pay dividends to.
Education and the Community
If there are difficulties in persuading employers to fund workplace education, even in their own economic interests, the difficulties are infinitely greater in funding community education. Local authorities are everywhere strapped for cash and voluntary organisations desperately concerned just to keep people alive and housed, let alone educated. It is a fact that would astound our parents and grandparents that, with a national income three times in real terms what it was fifty years ago, we say that we can today only afford to find a smaller proportion of that income for health and education and other community needs than before. The Fryer report is right that a major educational programme is required among the electorate, to argue for the needs of the community, which implies a challenge to the greed of the individual, so sedulously cultivated by past governments and through every media of modern communication. It would help enormously if a counter programme of social education could start from the top with government support, but so deep and widespread is the culture of greed that acts rather than words will be required to alter it.
There is, of course, much that regional bodies, local authorities, educational institutions and voluntary organisations can do to encourage and to coordinate the provision of lifelong learning, and to provide guidance and advice, assessment and auditing and staff training and development. There are many wise words in the Fryer Report on these matters and on measuring achievement through coherent credit frameworks and on the new technologies available to support learning. But reading the report leaves at least one reader with a feeling of dissatisfaction, almost a sense of despair. Is this really all we are asking for from a new Labour Government after eighteen years in the wilderness and half a century of struggle for continuing education since the Butler Act of 1944?
Institution Building and the Culture of Learning
The report has a very important section entitled 'Building on Success', in which it reviews some of the educational successes of recent years. These include not only the improvements in achievement in schools, the growth in numbers of young people remaining in education beyond the minimum leaving age, the dramatic expansion of further education and of students in higher education, including very many more mature students, the hugely successful Open University, the Federation of Open Colleges, the employee development programmes at Fords, Rover and Unipart, the expansion of trade union education, the role of the TECs, the continuing provision of the WEA and the Adult Residential Colleges with more, and more diverse, programmes and many other national, regional and local bodies.
The fact is, however, as the opening section of the report makes clear, that this is a minority culture. Worse than that, it compares badly with experience in most other advanced industrial countries. And worst of all, there is not a single one of the achievements just listed that is not today under serious threat from financial restrictions. Numbers staying on at school are for the first time going down, inequalities in educational provision in schools are widening, applications for university places have fallen this year, especially disastrously among mature students, and look to fall further next year, the Open University and open colleges are grossly underfunded, employee development programmes have not spread across industry, trade union education has lost its government funding and is withering, WEA and other adult education lives from hand to mouth dependent increasingly on a middle class clientele of the already educated and failing to reach out to the educationally underprivileged in our society.
It is perhaps unfair to criticise the Fryer Report at this stage, before all the National Advisory Group Task Groups have reported. The report ends with a requirement from the Government of a 'clear statement' of 'the vision, principles and strategy it intends to pursue ... the strategy [to] be accompanied by an action plan, including time tables, targets, monitoring arrangements and costings.' Should the Advisory Group not have made a preliminary stab at such an action plan? Its terms of reference include advising the Secretary of State, inter alia on the preparation of a Government White Paper on lifelong learning. Without a White Paper, is there to be no action plan with time tables, targets and costings?
No new idea or set of new ideas has ever succeeded in gaining the support of men and women, except through the establishment of institutions for developing, propagating and disseminating the idea. This was true of all churches, of universities, of scientific bodies, even of political groupings. It must be the same with the idea of lifelong learning. There are, fortunately, quite a number of centres of continuing education, although they receive little mention in the report. They are well documented in the Kennedy Report on Widening Participation in Further Education. They are usually part of universities, and enjoy, if that is the word, a rather lowly status.
There has been one area of growth in continuing education in recent years and that is in the proliferation of business colleges and staff colleges for management. It is to be hoped that British business will be more successful as a result, These however provide facilities for the already educated. The only similar facilities for the less educated are in the adult residential colleges. During the life of the last Labour Government one more such college was added to the short list of seven, thanks to the massive commitment of local authorities in the North of England. Something more should be added under this Labour Government.
The report refers to the projects already announced by the Government as 'the four flagship projects', the New Deal, the University for Industry, Individual Learning Accounts and National Grid for Learning and proposes a New National Lifelong Learning Millennium Foundation. This, it is suggested should be based on proposals of the Kennedy Committee for a Learning Regeneration Fund, drawing on Lottery money with matching public and private sector funding. The Millennium Foundation like the University of Industry is given a clearly defined prescription for its contribution to lifelong learning, which reads like the articles of association of professional and scientific bodies. The list of functions of the University of Industry all start with facilitating words -- stimulating, supporting, brokering, commissioning, providing 'kite marking', engendering provision. Likewise, with the Millennium Foundation, the words are similar -- fostering, supporting, encouraging, disseminating, 'pump-priming'. But is this enough? There is no suggestion of a centre for actual forms of provision specifically for preparing all those who will be involved in making life-long learning a reality, whether by teaching, training, instructing, conferring, researching, preparing materials, information technology and all other forms of communication
If we are to imagine, not hundreds of thousands of men and women, but millions involved in lifelong learning, in hundreds of different institutions, then there is the need for some central point or central points in different regions, where those who wish to become involved in assisting this expansion can go to study. It may be taken as unfortunate to use the military and business simile of the staff college, but that is what will be needed. At these centre points, there will need to be an experienced staff, residential accommodation, and all the library and computer facilities for courses in many subject areas and at many levels for the explosion in learning that is envisaged. The adult residential colleges have some of the experience that is needed, but it has to be built upon.
It may not be politic to propose new institutions which in a period of tight finance may be seen to be taking funds away from existing providers. But it may be helpful to put forward ideas for the development of departments or centres for continuing education in existing institutions that provide post-school age education and to specify the requirements -- what kind of courses of study and research, what sort of training programmes, what levels of staffing, what periods of study, what facilities, what numbers for viability, what costings, what funding from employers, students, and others besides government. To be fashionable, and of course cost effective, it would be necessary to propose to appropriate educational institutions that they should bid for grants.
Perhaps we shall have detailed suggestions for these sorts of questions from the task groups and from later reports, if such work is not preempted by the limited nature of the Government's response. From all previous experience, however, it has to be accepted that it is not on the basis of generalities but only of detailed prospectuses, work plans, staff profiles, resource requirements and costings that funds are made available for educational initiatives. Those who have shown themselves so adept at such specifics in the past should not abandon specifics for generalities on this occasion. Let us hope that it is not too late for them to change tack.
First section - Foreword