An Adult Approach To Further Education. (And my moans about adult education)

27Mar10

This is Professor Alison Wolf, potentially one of my tutors next year, talking about her latest monograph An Adult Approach to Further Education. From a personal point of view, it’s nice to see someone you might be studying under on YouTube (even if the camera keeps annoyingly zooming in and out). But also, for me, it’s good to have someone as senior in this field articulate what I always just felt was going wrong with further education.

For most of the summer holidays when I was an undergraduate I worked in enrolment in a further education college. The college offered a wide variety of courses, from BTECs to Foundation degrees, CIM courses, A levels, Skills for Life, then, yes, those things Wolf talks about like Train2Gain… Equally, at the college there was a diverse range of students. Not diverse, however, in the way that whatever class you walked into would be composed of students of every hue, faith, class, income, etc found in London, but rather simply the range of students reflected the range of courses. Indeed, the profile of a student attending any particular class was often so uniform that within about 10 seconds of a student coming up to my desk I would usually have a very good idea of what course they were doing. Middle class with a designer handbag? most often CIM paid for by employer; Somali, with kids in tow? entry level ESOL; Indian accent? then a postgraduate diploma in hospitality management; Chinese/Vietnamese? overseas fees for English or A Levels; Polish guy? evening ESOL; Polish girl? AAT or dental hygine; young black woman? NVQ hairdressing; sixteen year old girl? BTEC performing arts or hair & beauty; sixteen year old boy? BTEC public services or sports science. Getting in to the habit of sterotyping students, and very often down strong racial and gender lines, is not really something to boast about, but it’s quite easy to do when the pattern of students is so consistent.

What I think this really reflects, though, is how little choice there is in further education. How your income, socio-economic status, and, although more indirectly, ethnicity too, dictates what you study. Sure, the make-up of students in a class is going to be somewhat reflective of the type of funding available. Higher education, you have to pay for yourself, either with a student loan or not, so on the foundation degrees you’d tend not to find students on Income Support. Professional courses tended to be paid for directly by employers, hence most students would be in full-time, professional employment. A-Levels, in the day there’d mostly be 16-18 year olds; in the evening the older students who’d stumped up the cash (most often doing Chemistry in the hope of getting into med school…). For those on lower incomes and on benefits there were plenty of courses they could attend free of charge, except for a negligible enrolment fee. However, even though perhaps the majority of students enrolling were students going onto these vocational courses, I’d venture that this was the sector with the least amount of choice.

To put it crassly, the impression I gained was this: If you were unemployed, with few qualifications and in receipt of JSA you enrolled on a course. It had to be under 16 hours a week of course, else your JSA payments could be stopped. The subject you studied didn’t matter a great deal, I don’ t think. For the likelihood of you going into employment in a sector relating to your qualification, appeared to my perspective – and my very unimformed, onesided perspective I have to say – minimal. The amount of people taking a nail art course, for instance, surely didn’t seem to make any sense to the number of beauty salons/nail bars out there or out there and in need of skilled staff. One could berate the government from a more ideological perspective for their apparent notion that the economy can be planned though providing certain types of education. But when the delivery end of this is the production of a glut of manicurists the notion seems more pitiful. And evidence that will perhaps stand up to more scruitny, or at least be considered evidence rather than my prejudice towards nail art technicians, is the serial use of these courses. By that I mean students who repeatedly enrol on such courses, because, one speculates A) either the courses are not fit for purpose and do not make students more employable, or,B) it’s quite a laugh doing hair and beauty courses for a few hours a week for free.

I will explore that rather right-wing, knee-jerk answer B I gave another time. Although I do have to say that is at least the impression gained from my experience; that the nearest thing to a classic adult education service, where you can go to learn a skill for personal interest is found on these kind of courses. I should also add though that it’s not the quality of these courses I’m mocking either, for I have seem them produce quality results too: students winning awards, and getting decent, related jobs. That they appear to be the only option for education for many people on the dole, I do have reservations about though. Seeing a student’s enrolment history over the last few years consisting something of a childcare qualification, then Swedish massage, then nail art, then airline ticketing, all whilst on Job Seekers Allowance, makes you wonder. Is the provision of niche vocational courses the answer to unemployment? Do such qualifications make someone more employable? Do these people want to be studying these courses?

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Tags: adult education, alison wolf, benefits, choice, decentralisation, economics of education, education, further education, king's college london, opinion piece, public spending, qualifications, training, trying to be a social scientist (and failing a bit), waste