Improving Learning, Skills and Inclusion

The Impact of Policy on Post-Compulsory Education

Frank Coffield, Sheila Edward, Ian Finlay, Ann Hodgson, Ken Spours, Richard Steer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9781134043576
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Didattica
• Subtopic: Didattica generale

How can opportunities for teaching and learning be improved to ensure that many more people participate, gain qualifications and obtain decent jobs? Will government policies enable us to achieve these goals? What new ideas do we need to ensure a more inclusive, equitable and efficient learning system? These are some of the main concerns which underlie this thought-provoking book coming from a major research project looking at how policies affect learners, tutors, managers and institutional leaders in Further Education Colleges, Adult and Community Learning centres and in Work Based Learning sites.

Post compulsory education in the UK has been constantly restructured by the New Labour government and has been subject to considerable policy turbulence over the last few years. This book attempts to understand this important but poorly understood sector by both talking to students and front-line staff and by interviewing the officials responsible for managing post-compulsory education and lifelong learning.

By examining the sector simultaneously from the 'bottom up' and from 'top down', the authors show how recent policy is affecting three disadvantaged groups - 16-19 year olds who have fared poorly in official tests at school; unemployed adults learning basic skills; and employees at work learning basic skills. The authors conclude that there are serious failings and suggest principles and features of a more equitable and effective learning system.

Part I
What are the issues?

Chapter 1
The turbulent world of learning and skills

Introduction

The media would have us believe that the topic of learning and skills and of vocational education and training is not ‘sexy’, so they ignore it. Yet our national performance in these areas will influence how prosperous and how fair the UK will be in the future. The official story runs as follows: we are currently the fifth biggest economy in the world, having already been overtaken by China; and within the space of a few years we are going to be overtaken by India as well. How well placed are we to meet this challenge, particularly if these countries pay low wages for the production of high-quality goods and services? On the debit side, we have a history of under-investment in training and a long tale of under-achievement at school. On the plus side, since 1997, the Labour government has devoted more time, energy and resources to the learning and skills sector (LSS) than has any previous administration. So, can the LSS significantly improve the performance of those learners who have been failed by the education system? Will all the young people and adults who study hard to gain vocational qualifications be rewarded with well-paid jobs with training? Can tutors improve the quality of their teaching to ensure that many more people participate, gain qualifications and obtain decent jobs? What new ideas do we need to create an inclusive, equitable and efficient learning system in this country?

These are some of the main concerns which prompted us in 2004 to begin a study entitled The impact of policy on learning and inclusion in the new learning and skills sector, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), as part of the Teaching and Learning Research Programme (TLRP).¹ New concerns appeared during our research: for example, are the government’s new plans for the sector a move in the right direction or do they pose too high a risk of destabilising long-standing institutions like further education (FE) colleges and centres of adult and community learning (ACL)?

For three and a half years we have tried to understand this sector by simultaneously examining it both from above, by interviewing the officials responsible for it, and from below, by talking to students and front-line staff. Before introducing our project in Chapter 2, however, we need to explain the emergence of the LSS, its main achievements and challenges, its new economic mission and how it is being constantly restructured by government. We also set out to test how well this new sector treats three groups of disadvantaged learners because we thought that this was a good way of judging its claims of being both efficient and equitable. But first we shall introduce the fascinating, turbulent, insecure but desperately important world of learning and skills; a world which remains invisible to most politicians, academics and commentators because, with very few exceptions, neither they nor their children have ever passed through it.

We have chosen to introduce the main issues and debates in this world by providing a brief history of the Learning and Skills Council (LSC), as the fortunes of that organisation are central to all the stories we wish to tell and they provide prime examples of the constant changes that course through the sector. We will then broaden our focus by discussing the main achievements of the LSS, its complexity and two major reviews of its future. Next, instead of attempting to introduce all the major themes with which this book is concerned, we have decided to plunge the reader into the thick of one major controversy – the move to a ‘demand-led’ system – as that will serve to bring into the open most of the main tensions, debates and anxieties in the sector. This approach also enables us to introduce the main players in the unfolding drama that is post-compulsory education and training in England.

The chapter ends by describing and critiquing the new model of public service reform which the government introduced in 2006. To help any readers who are new to this world, we will explain every initiative and spell out every abbreviation when it is first used (we have also included a list of all such terms at the beginning of the book). Our aim, moreover, is to be even-handed by, for example, welcoming the government’s achievements as well as criticising it constructively for its failings.

A brief history of the Learning and Skills Council (LSC)

In 2001 the Labour government introduced a bold reform, which integrated under a new body called the Learning and Skills Council a disparate range of learning opportunities in FE, community and adult learning and work-based training for young people and adults. The LSC was given the power to plan, fund and regulate all education and training post-16 with the exception of higher education; and its significance can in part be judged by its budget, which in its first year was £5.5 billion and which by 2007–8 had more than doubled to £11.4 billion. These are enormous sums of public money, but enormous too are the responsibilities for over five million full- and part-time learners in 385 FE and sixth-form colleges, in school sixth forms and in ACL (with one million people in the latter); for 1,000 publicly funded training providers; for sixth-form and tertiary colleges; for over 250,000 apprentices and those taking National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs) in employment; and for over 246,000 full- and part-time staff in FE colleges alone (DfES 2006a).

Although the LSC has been in existence for only six years, it is already possible to distinguish three distinct phases in its development:

• the first phase, from 2001 to 2003, when its main functions were planning and funding;

• an intermediate phase, from 2004 to 2006, when a business model and a regional tier of administration were introduced;

• the third phase, from 2006 to 2007, concerned first with the move to a demand-led system for adult learners, and, since June 2007, with the forthcoming transfer in 2010/11 of around 60 per cent of its budget for14–19-year-olds to local authorities.

Before we expand on each of these phases, we first need to explain why the LSC was thought necessary and how it was brought into being. When Labour came to power in May 1997, it inherited a diverse array of activities and organisations responsible for post-compulsory education and training apart from higher education:

• the Further Education Funding Council (FEFC), which funded and inspected FE colleges;

• the seventy-two Training and Enterprise Councils (TECs) in England which organised government-funded training and workforce development alongside other enterprise activities;

• school sixth forms, funded by Local Education Authorities (LEAs); and

• ACL run by LEAs and other voluntary and community organisations.

While New Labour had a strong focus on lifelong learning, it did not have plans for large-scale structural change. It soon began to see a case for structural change, however, because of the weaknesses it perceived in funding and planning (e.g., the TECs had seventy-two different funding and planning systems) and in inspection and quality control (e.g., there were three separate inspectorates operating in the same area: FEFC, the Office for Standards in Education (OFSTED) and the Training Standards Council). A White Paper, Learning to Succeed: a new framework for post-16 learning, published in 1999, summarised the arguments for change thus:

There is too much duplication, confusion and bureaucracy in the current system. Too little money actually reaches learners and employers, too much is tied up in bureaucracy. There is an absence of effective co-ordination or strategic planning. The system has insufficient focus on skill and employer needs at national, regional and local levels.

(DfEE 1999:21)

Some of our interviewees widened this attack upon the previous system. One official, for example, admonished the TECs for ‘creaming off’ funds from government training programmes to resource their own initiatives; another thought the general quality of the training TECs organised was poor and that some had abused their in...

Table of contents

• Improving Learning TLRP
• Contents
• Boxes and figures
• Authors
• Series editor’s preface
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Part I What are the issues?
• Part II What does the research show?
• Part III Overall implication
• Appendix How we did the research
• Bibliography
• Index