The Pursuit of Competitiveness
May 13th, 2008
Views: 607
Posted by ChrisG at 9:54 am
The BBC reports that the numbers of adults engaged in lifelong learning is falling, reversing the preceding trend of an increase in participants, following NuLabour’s “commitment” to funding new adult education courses (which they recently reneged on, cutting funding and ).
The report from NIACE, along with most journalism on the topic, risks disguising another trend in adult education provision however, in a way exemplified by this paragraph of the BBC report:
The government is committed to a major programme of increasing the skills of working adults and youngsters, so that Britain can compete with the fast growing economies of China and elsewhere.
How well such a programme is served by slashing funding is one question. Another consideration however is the effect that the Government’s commitment to certain kinds of education (”training” for “key skills”) has had on the patterns of provision as such: the perceived need for competitiveness has in effect acted as a massive drag on the provision of lifelong learning.
Extra funding for adult education, as anyone working in the area will tell you, has been provided according to very strict conditions. Accreditation and assessment provide the framework: a higher level of funding was provided for courses claiming accreditation, and accreditation is granted and maintained on the basis of the number of students per course completing a set assessment. This means than non-accredited (and therefore non-assessed courses) become a luxury which only larger and more established adult education institutions can afford to offer. In other words, all courses are assessed for their viability (and “quality”, used in its shiny-eyed, exhortatory, managementspeak sense) on criteria which are derived from the “key skills” class of courses, which are designed to provide GCSE-level training (filling the skills gap that the CBI and Institute of Directors can be counted on to whinge about every summer).
The problem is that (as I remember very well from my own experience in adult education, teaching philosophy classes) the number of students completing accredited and assessed courses tends to be eroded by the imperative to assess, assess, assess. Students who have been out of formal education for thirty, forty or fifty years may feel very intimidated by being asked to write an essay of 1500 words; others may not have the time, or may simply feel that the ethos of learning is actively hampered by defining their participation in terms of a unit of written work designed to demonstrate “learning outcomes” (and who could blame them?). The only (desperate) solution institutions tend to offer is a separate “study skills” module, designed to persuade individuals that they can jump through the hoops placed before them by the course auditors, and can even look forward to receiving a certificate to demonstrate their flexibility in the skills required for hoop-jumping.
Across the four courses I taught each year for two years, the vast majority of students refused to do the assessment. I allowed them to do so, caught between the desire to let them learn as adults and follow their own interests and preferred modes of participation as far as possible, and the knowledge that the end result would be a steady erosion of the viability of provision in my subject at the institution where I taught.
That there are fewer students in adult learning across the board now may well be the case, but I suspect that the Government’s paternalistic zeal for conditionality and auditing may have produced a far more negative result: namely, a reduction in the range of opportunities to try different subjects. Once again, the rhetoric of choice, and the machinery through which “choice” is provided, act to firmly restrict people’s access to genuinely enriching choices – here, ones which allow them to meet with others to think and talk about their daily experiences in a context different to most of those they’ll generally encounter.
I like the idea of a hoop-jumping certificate. I fear it is only a matter of time although I suppose one already exists, though in a different name (how about a Maccers A-level, or a seal trainer I suppose).
However, the idea that lifelong learning is being subordinated to the economy, skills gap and competitiveness (etc, etc) must be a given. Sad to relate but there ain’t no profit in adult ed philosophy courses not when we’ve got a billion plus Chinese in ‘competition’. (Has anyone thought about co-operating with these buggers? just a throw away thought) As you say, everything has to be measured according to ‘key skills’ criteria squeezing the last drop of wit, imagination and individuality from ourselves, draining us of all reason and hope (or at least that’s what I felt when I came across it).
I did once come up with the notion that we are now living within some sort of capitalist communist system. Whereby you are simply slotted in to your economic niche as soon as you can make a profit, flogged for all your profit-making worth and then retired to flounder in some goddam awful rest home for the terminally uneconomical (Scarborough perhaps). Given that we are supposed to be in fear of our (economic) lives from China (which in practice means what exactly?) I suppose again if this might be the case, because people wanting to return to learning after the decades you mentioned become a threat, nae a subversion to the system. You can’t make a profit if your studying (or at least, not as much). What if instead of ‘from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs’, we have ‘from each according to his profitability, to each according to there’s’. Thus only the virtuous as defined as those that contribute to profit can only enjoy the successes of the country, bugger the rest, and bugger you if you want to study philosophy. And as I appear to be hurtling into a previous rant, I’ll stop right about now.
Can you send me any current e-mail address please. You are either willfully ignoring me (boo, hiss and an evening with Boris Johnson as punishment) or I’m using a redundant address.
Sorry Al, I’m not ignoring you – I owe you an email, which work, side projects, marriage and children allowing, you shall receive very soon.
The thing with the idea of “competition” is that it long ago became an idea which could be used to justify practically any cost. It replaced all those notions of efficiency, preference-satisfaction and so on by which utilitarians used to set so much store and which now appear quaint by comparison. Although in the process it became largely meaningless: does it mean comparative advantage? If so, then we can’t compete with the Chinese in any meaningful way, as we have no indigenous manufacturing capacity. This kind of fact wouldn’t be changed if every single school leaver left with 12 A* GCSEs.
And if by competition is meant some mysterious process by which we get to be better than anyone else at developing some cutting edge technology or other, then this is hardly well-served by a majority of people being able to read and write to a certain standard – in fact, it’s best served (as it is now) by public funding of specialist educational institutions and international collaboration with the Chinese, Russians, Indians, Japanese and maybe Americans which is going on all the time anyway.
Or maybe it means the kind of “competition” that apparently goes on all the time between “world cities” for conference business, tourism and so forth, which seems to be envisioned (by journos and politicians at least) as a kind of mad rampage in which a more or less constant number of more or less well-heeled people go dashing around from world city to world city, pulled this way and that by which location has the highest building, the swishest conference facilities, or the hugest airport. Which again has nothing to do with “skills”, unless the entire population of each world city is drafted en-masse into low-paid, low-status service sector jobs… ah, maybe that’s it.
But that still leaves the rest of the population. And that suggests the process of education is still about more than “competition”; the government has ultimately to justify it as being about something along the lines of “enabling people to play a full part in society” or somesuch.
And that lets the philosophy, archaeology and ceramics tutors back in, waving the tools of their trade belligerently and demanding cash.
You seemed to pull the rhetoric of ‘choice’ out of a hat towards the end – the rest of it seemed to be more about the rhetoric of empowerment, skilling and indeed competitiveness, which are more obviously at odds with providing actual choices for actual people.