COVER STORY
make good choices about what they should learn. Instead, they need governments and professional advisers to design courses, place restrictions on what people can choose, and provide detailed advice on options. Adult learners generally disagree. Although they may value advice, especially from teachers and colleges, they rarely recount good experiences from dedicated ‘career services’ or advisers. Two of the few large-scale pilots of adult learning vouchers compared different delivery approaches: with and without accompanying formal advice. Both found that an overwhelming majority of voucher recipients did not request advice and counselling if given the option of using it, or doing without. Moreover, making attendance at orientation and advice sessions a compulsory part of the scheme significantly reduced uptake of the vouchers.
Adults have clear ideas about what they
are interested in, and about where their self- interest lies. This is generally just as true of recent immigrants with limited English language skills as it is of native-born adults. Immigrants are very clear about their language skill requirements, and about whether and how far publicly provided tuition gets them to the levels they need for labour market success (the fact that some groups are unable to access English for Speakers of Other Languages provision does not mean that they do not want it and cannot evaluate its quality.) In the case of native-born adults, the options they would like to take up, given a free choice, are often very different from those that are identified by government as of high priority and eligible for high subsidy levels.
Good choices Given the poor record of the government’s own choices in raising either young people’s or adults’ earnings, it is not obvious why one should assume that it is a competent judge of what people should learn. The evidence suggests the opposite, while also supporting the argument that individuals are, by and large, much better able to make good choices for themselves, and find relevant and trusted advice, than any bureaucracy can hope to be. It is hardly surprising if governments cannot develop and update a complete range of suitable courses and qualifications for the whole post-compulsory, non-university sector of a country with a population of over 50 million (in England alone). And, indeed, they cannot. As a result, our current system is hugely expensive, sclerotic, and has failed to achieve its own narrowly defined economic objectives of raising individuals’ earnings and employability, and national productivity. On the basis of these arguments, a demand-led system would require the following infrastructure, which would address information and competition issues, and place certain constraints on where people can use further education and
APRIL 2010 ADULTS LEARNING 21
Richard Olivier
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