Shifting power to the learner
Decades of reform have resulted in a system of further education that treats adults like children, with limited control over the qualifications they choose to pursue. Learning accounts – operating like any other bank account, but used only to pay for learning – would shift power back to the learner and help create a genuinely demand-led system, argues ALISON WOLF
B
ritish governments have long been convinced, in the face of over- whelming contradictory evidence, that they can predict the future. You might think they would be disabused by the financial crash, our limping economy, and the yawning gulf between the Treasury’s current expectations and its confident predictions in times of plenty.
Not a bit of it. They still think they know what will happen, for years ahead, far better than the rest of us. This conviction drives the whole of the country’s adult education and skills system and, in doing so, explains why governments treat both adults and employers as rather stupid children and tell them exactly what to learn, and how to train. This needs to change. Money must follow learners, not government contracts, and so create a genuinely demand-led system. Governmental delusions have laid further and adult education waste. They have also created an appetite for change. This is true even though professionals and institutions are exhausted by decades of interference, bureaucracy, and the endless restructuring of quangos, inspectorates and government departments.
If you look at the choices that young people in England, France, the USA, or other countries, have made in the last few decades, it is clear that they have a far better grasp of what the labour market values than governments do. They queue up for the courses and qualifications that are valuable and largely turn their backs on new initiatives created by central government departments
20 ADULTS LEARNING APRIL 2010
with theories about how education and the labour market ought to behave. Adult workers, when asked what they would like to study, choose completely different things from the low-level NVQs that are currently foisted on them. We cannot tell what would have happened if they had been able to follow their preferences over the last 20 years, but the NVQs devised and funded by government have been of no obvious use to most of them. Meanwhile, teenage girls have been subject to repeated government campaigns urging them to go into construction, engineering, metal work. They have taken no notice, which is fortunate for them, given the declining job opportunities and soaring unemployment in these traditionally male occupations.
Sensible decisions Many people are uneasy with the idea that adults or, more specifically, non-graduate adults can make sensible decisions for themselves. In arguing for parentalism and planning, they tend to refer to extremely ‘hard cases’, such as recent immigrants or families in which there is a multi-generational history of disadvantage. But there is actually no reason to suppose that even these groups cannot make decisions for themselves at least as effectively as distant government officials make decisions for them. I propose new financial and regulatory
structures which allow colleges to choose exactly what to offer, including their own awards, and do away with most existing quangos while still safeguarding quality. More
importantly, we must also give learners direct access to education subsidies through the creation of genuine learning accounts. The current government’s latest initiative is a new form of centrally planned provision relabelled as ‘skills activism’. So I am not expecting ministers to endorse this tomorrow. But it is clear that support for structural reform exists not only among educators, but also in the awarding bodies and the quangocracy itself.
Learning accounts – real learning accounts – would operate just like any other bank, building society or Post Office account, but be used only to pay for learning. That could be anything from bricklaying to maths A-level, computer programming to philosophy: the learner chooses. People would pay money into them, and the government likewise.
One analogy is Gift Aid, where the government tops up our gifts to charity with additional funds. Learning top-ups would go into individuals’ own accounts, at levels that varied both with individuals’ circumstances, and with the size of the further education budget. When the money is actually used would be entirely a matter for the account holder – again, like any normal bank account. And with the learner in control, a far simpler system of inspection and accreditation of learning providers could also be achieved, as my new report outlines in detail. One of the major justifications for govern- ment micro-management and planning of further education is that people do not have the information, or, indeed, the ability, to
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