main report of the NIACE-sponsored Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning. The gloomiest aspect for me is not the cuts, savage though they are. It is the splintering of the public domain, especially at local or regional level, and the consequent difficulty of making the linkages that would give us a fully functioning system of lifelong learning. The reinterpretation of higher education
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as a commodified market is one aspect of this, but not the most important (by the way, we should at least mark the accompanying shift towards a much more level playing field for part-time students, something we have long been arguing for). No, I’m thinking much more of the further degradation of local government, of the outsourcing of services and of what looks likely to happen to the NHS, unless the Liberal Democrats actually find a voice on this. This makes collaborations such as that between education and health services – a key linkage in any lifelong learning system – so much more improbable. Paul Holmes, recently recruited from the accountants KPMG to be the policy director at Number 10, has declared his view that the boundaries between public, private and voluntary sectors should be dissolved. I’m not sure where that leaves shareholders, and how we decide who should be paid, but he seems deadly serious. Payment by results should be introduced right across the public sector, and ‘this empowerment agenda will have to be forced on to public sector organisations in the early stages to break the tendency to structural inertia.’ This needs to be done ‘in a holistic and systemic way’. Holism and systemic change are things we argued for in Learning Through Life. But the chances of greater coherence and cross-departmental collaboration emerg- ing from a marketised payment-by-results transformation are minimal.
Public value It doesn’t rule out the arguments for ‘public value’ which we made in Learning Through Life – for example the financial as well as social benefits of investing in offender learning or innovative provision in residential settings which save on health and social care. I still believe that these kinds of calculation, which show how much the public purse can benefit from collaboration between services such as education and health, could be a powerful means of influencing public policy. But if the public policies themselves are in effect dependent on what happens in the market, then it becomes much more difficult to translate the implications into effective action on the ground. So, even if stakeholders see that there are benefits to be gained from collaborating – as the lamented Total Place initiative began to show clearly and in practical terms – they may simply not have
am sometimes asked how I see the pros- pects for lifelong learning now that 18 months or so have passed since the publication of Learning Through Life, the
the tools to do it. That’s the gloomiest part. The picture is
somewhat brighter elsewhere. We are on the verge of an interesting debate on who are the emerging communities of practice in lifelong learning. Who are the new professionals in the field, and how do they relate to previous generations of adult education workers? More and more, we shall need to be alert as to who the new entrants are in the field, and how their energies relate to existing provision. I’m thinking here obviously of those who use new technologies and media to open up learning opportunities, including through private market-based provision (I have no total opposition to markets, only where they are inappropriate). But, more significantly, perhaps, we need to rethink the relationship between professionals and volunteers, and to work out what roles learners themselves might play in managing and delivering learning opportunities.
Division of labour This – rethinking the division of labour between professionals and others – could be seen as something driven by costs and cuts and the smoke and mirrors of the Big Society. But there is something deeper here, linked to a long tradition of volunteering in adult education. I need look no further than the Working Men’s College, with which I’m associated: set up over 150 years ago with tutors who all worked as volunteers in a spirit of nineteenth-century paternalism, now with a professional complement of paid staff and home to students from a huge array of diverse ethnic communities. Many of them have skills which they want to offer, and we are thinking more systematically about how we can draw them in. In this context, Jay Derrick led an interesting discussion on the notion of craft, at a recent conference on Remaking Adult Learning, which he develops in this issue of Adults Learning. His argument, inspired by Richard Sennett, is that we can think of teaching (generally, but specifically in relation to adults) as a craft activity, characterised in the same way as traditional crafts such as violin-making (his example) are: commitment to quality, mastery of technique, longish apprenticeship with no short-cuts, and so on. I’m not quite clear whether Jay means this
as a metaphor, or as something which offers practical guidelines for the development of teachers of adults. The issue here is whether the very notions of craft and ‘professionalism’ imply exclusivity; along with the quality comes standard-setting, after all. Which brings us back to the relationships
between public, private and voluntary sectors. I don’t agree with Mr Holmes that the boundaries are there to be dissolved, but they do need rethinking and maybe recasting.
Tom Schuller is Director of Longview and co-author of Learning Through Life
APRIL 2011 ADULTS LEARNING 13
c Richard Olivier
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