Burnham could create a new dawn for further education and lifelong learning

The vision that Andy Burnham has laid out of the future is refreshing, particularly his assertion that education is a key to growth, hope and opportunity.

Central to this vision I would like to see the revitalisation of further education. I have many reasons to believe in the life-changing importance of FE. Here are some of them.

Given Burnham’s emphasis on opportunity and hope, I would like to tell my own story. I failed my 11 plus and left school in 1965, aged fifteen. Ten years of dead-end jobs followed.

At the age of twenty-five I went to my local FE college to enquire about studying for some evening class O-Levels. They had just started a new full-time course for mature students and encouraged me to apply. After a year I had gained four O-levels; another year, three A-levels. My local authority gave me a grant for these two years.

I was then accepted to study social sciences at the University of Bath.  FE, and then university, completely changed my life – it gave me hope and opportunity. Since those times in the 1970’s the opportunities for older people to follow such a path have diminished considerably.

After graduation I started as a part-time lecturer in FE teaching something called liberal studies to day and block release students, including plumbers, electricians, carpenters and joiners, motor vehicle engineers, and many others. These people were on proper, well-recognised and funded apprenticeships. I soon became a full-time lecturer and my local authority funded day release to study for a Certificate in Education

I taught in FE for 22 years. In 2002, after a tasty redundancy offer, I joined the FE teacher training team at my local university. I gained an MA in education studies and, before retirement became a senior teaching fellow in the university’s department for education, health and sciences. I have published several books on learning and teaching in further and higher education. All this might sound like bragging but I am proud of what I did and the way an FE college set me on the path.

I would very much like to see FE providing opportunities for people of all ages to study, train and retrain. This will become especially important when the idea of a job for life has gone, with technological shifts causing the economy to change more rapidly than ever before. In short, lifelong learning will become crucial. Former education secretary David Blunkett had a vision for this in his 1998 green paper The Learning Age.

In 1993, FE colleges were taken out of local authority control and forced to become independent entities. Reductions in lecturers’ pay, reduction in courses and general decline in the status of further education colleges followed. Perhaps Andy Burnham will consider giving local mayors more control of funding, curriculum and management.

I would also like to comment about his desire to put an end to the academic and vocational divide. This is a socially constructed divide reinforced by class prejudices; Professor Alison Wolfe said that vocational education was often regarded as ‘a great idea for other people’s children’.

Clearly skills are vital to personal and economic growth, but the phrase ‘learning and skills’ seems to imply that skills are for people who can’t manage learning. We should only talk about ‘education’ and ‘learning’. In the future people will need to learn, unlearn and re-learn throughout their lives.

My final wish for FE is a revitalisation of its role in building communities and bringing people together. I remember the times when non-vocational courses such as painting, woodworking and yoga were well attended, and relatively inexpensive. People learned, made friends and enjoyed themselves; they didn’t even have to undertake a qualification!

Let’s make further education central to life and learning again.