Further education This article is more than 18 years old

Learning for learning's sake

This article is more than 18 years oldQualifications are not the be-all and end-all of further education. For some people, learning simply helps them to survive, says Richard Bolsin

One possibly unintended consequence of targeting funding for adult education almost exclusively towards qualifications and specific skills is a squeeze on funding for more general adult education.

The mistaken assumption may be that this is all leisure and recreational provision - line-dancing, dog obedience and yoga classes. Inclusion is less of a priority, and adults who are interested in their personal betterment find courses that used to be available have now stopped, or have become too expensive and exclusive.

We certainly need a skilled workforce, but to sustain our economic performance and to attract further inward investment, we also need confident individuals and confident communities. For many, that sense of self-belief and engagement stems from participation and success in serious evening and day classes run locally in libraries, church halls, schools and wherever else people naturally congregate. Active learning leads to active citizenship.

For example, a sizeable number of people, many of them young, face multiple challenges, often including homelessness and drug misuse, leading to personal breakdown and loss of self-respect. They may lead almost invisible lives. Their goal is to survive to the next day. They may never have experienced success. Qualifications and employment are, for the time being, beyond their grasp. Volunteers and organisations working with these groups - often in highly effective, complex partnerships - invest huge amounts of time and resources in engaging them in regular routines and patterns that will enable them to reconstruct their lives.

Although the government and the Learning and Skills Council recognise that "first steps" provision is needed for these people, it is already far out of their reach. Their "learner journey" fails even to be conceived. Much more planned resource is needed for these people to resume constructive lives and to be able to contribute effectively to society.

What about older people? Many adults have a deep aversion to the formality of paperwork and qualifications. In recent years, they may have tolerated them because "the funders want it". Now funders want much more from the learner to help pay for the skills strategy. The goal for many older learners is often to sustain independence, in their lifestyle and physical and mental health. Education lets them keep active faculties that would otherwise decline. By engaging in voluntary activity in this way, many of them will also provide the mortar that holds local communities together. Without it, not just in cities but also in rural areas, we see only too often the vacuums that enable more intolerant groups to foment and incite hatred and unrest, which in turn leads to ghettos and blighted local economies.

Where are these needs identified in the skills strategy? Provision of this sort, usually through liberal education and humanities classes exploring issues of culture, faith and citizenship, is unlikely to be properly funded in many parts of the country after this year. And yet, with an increasing, ageing population, is it not essential to encourage and develop activity that will reduce dependency on health and social care? In rural areas, the contribution made by voluntary organisations such as the Women's Institute, the University of the Third Age and the Workers' Educational Association, as well as local adult education services, is particularly under threat.

Jamie Oliver recently led a successful uprising over healthy eating in schools. Wouldn't it be sensible to build on this by offering parents and children opportunities to learn together how to create simple, nourishing meals from natural ingredients? The benefits are almost beyond imagination, but this sort of provision is at risk of being squeezed out.

The chancellor of the exchequer and the director general of the Confederation of British Industry extol the necessity for Britain to spearhead the knowledge economy, where the values of innovation and mould-breaking are so important. Imagination and flair will be needed more than regulation. Yet the funding that is linked so remorselessly to easily measurable, skills-related outcomes is unlikely to produce the free-thinkers needed, while provision that could do so is being squeezed out.

The skills strategy is important, and so is provision for the increasing numbers of young people staying in full-time education and for adults lacking basic skills. But have the consequences been fully understood?

Much of the provision I have illustrated results from complex partnerships of volunteers, organisations, colleges and adult education services working together. It takes time, effort and resources to engage the hardest to reach. It will be impossible if the same organisations are expected to chase alternative funding, which will often be from multiple sources, short-term and require a substantial investment of time and resources in bidding. Once the partnerships and the provision cease, the infrastructure will be lost and be very difficult, if not impossible, to recover.

Our continuing economic success depends just as much on this provision as it does on a well qualified and skilled workforce.

· Richard Bolsin is general secretary of the Workers' Educational Association

Explore more on these topics

• Further education

ShareReuse this content

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJ2UqrCiwMiopWhqYGWCcLnAsmZqb1%2BbwrPAx56pnpylmK61tc6n