Adult education has faced constant batterings in the past 20 years, says Alan Tuckett. But, like ground elder, it will continue to pop up through cracks in the system.

“There’s no such thing as adult education – it is all further education,” the civil servant charged with the legislation that incorporated colleges once told me. To prove his point, he designed a programme to limit public funding to certified courses listed in an appendix (schedule 2) of the 1992 bill.

Faced with the end of public support for liberal education for adults, the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, working with local government associations and the Women’s Institute (WI), organised a campaign to change the bill. Around 400,000 people signed a petition in three weeks and 9,000 WI branches mobilised members to write to MPs.

Within six weeks the policy was ‘clarified’ — national funding for courses of national priority would go through the new Further Education Funding Council (FEFC); other uncertified classes could be funded by local authorities. FEFC funding expanded, local government was cash-strapped — with the result that French for pleasure classes became level one to qualify for national funding. Local adult services became mini FE providers riding the expansion of the sector — and proving the civil servant’s point. A new industry emerged, offering credit to community-based courses, and provision where learners might negotiate the curriculum reduced in number.

However, in the mid 1990s, finance ministers of countries in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development became intensely interested in lifelong learning as a means to secure economic advantage, and successive Conservative and Labour governments sought to encourage outreach and participation to people turned off by learning the first time round.

Then Education Secretary David Blunkett’s faith in the holistic benefits of adult learning, helped the sector

The Kennedy, Tomlinson and Moser reports, backed by then Education Secretary David Blunkett’s faith in the holistic benefits of adult learning, helped the sector to identify, reach and provide successfully for groups of adults under-represented in FE. The high water mark of public policy for adult learning was reached with the remit letter given to the new Learning and Skills Council (LSC) that took over from the FEFC and the training and enterprise councils in 2002.

But the business people charged with overseeing the LSC had radically different priorities; Blunkett moved off to the Home Office and, before long, utilitarianism became the order of the day as year after year we were exhorted, through yet another skills strategy, to shape up and get qualified. Meanwhile FE funding continued to expand and post-25 funding stalled and shrank — one million adult learners disappeared from publicly-funded provision in three or four years. In came the deadweight funding of the Train to Gain programme where, among other things, the LSC paid the Army for basic skills teaching it was already doing in order to hit targets. Still, Train to Gain did reach people in work in their 40s and 50s.

Late in the decade John Denham, the Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, put energy — though little cash — into a renovated community learning policy that sought to celebrate and encourage learning outside formal provision, in universities of the third age, libraries, museums, reading groups and voluntary associations.

But the bankers’ excesses and the onset of the recession scuppered any hope of a real renaissance and inhibited John Hayes, the incoming Tory Skills Minister, from financially backing his and Business Secretary Vince Cable’s vision for learning for its own sake.

So, here we are, with post-25 numbers leaking from colleges, a bleak spending round in prospect, and reasons to be cheerful in short supply. Yet adult education, like ground elder is resilient, and pops up through the cracks in the system, whatever the planners may want.

Alan Tuckett, president of the International Council for Adult Education, former chief executive of NIACE and a visiting professor in lifelong learning at Nottingham and Leicester universities

Incorporation has brought about many changes in FE, but the sector is still being outstripped by the pace of technological change, fears Bob Harrison

My first experience of teaching with computers was in the 1980s at Sheffield’s Stannington College with young mechanics.

The classroom had 16 BBC computers and the students enjoyed the ping-pong game as part of their Friday afternoon general studies lesson.

Today, mechanics fix cars run by computers and carry pocket devices with more memory, processing speed, connectivity and capability than all those BBC computers combined.

Incorporation did little to slow the pace of technological change and the break from local authority control did little to ensure the pedagogy kept pace in all but a small number of brave and innovative colleges.

Pioneers included Ray Shuker, who formed the National Information and Learning Technology Alliance, and John Gray, a founder member of the National Council of Education Technology, which later went on to become Becta (formerly the British Educational Communications and Technology Agency).

The biggest change followed the Higginson Report in 1996. It set a framework for Information and Learning Technology development across FE, leading to the establishment of Becta and attempts by the then Department for Education and Skills to develop an e-learning strategy.

But there was little sustained focus on FE until Becta developed a “next generation learning” awards scheme, established an exemplar network and spent more than £1m on an online self-review tool.

Just as this was having an effect, the incoming government in 2010 scrapped more than 100 quangos with Becta and the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency top of the hit list.

A handful of staff transferred to the newly-formed Learning and Skills Improvement Service (LSIS) along with online assets and other resources.

Tragically, LSIS didn’t have the understanding, capability, leadership, nor vision to realise the value in those assets and eventually the cessation of its funding was announced.

JISC (formerly Joint Information Systems Committee) continues to provide infrastructure support through Janet (formerly Joint Academic NETwork) and continued professional development, pedagogical and technical support through the Regional Support Centres, but its main eye is on higher education.

So, gone are the days of state interventions such as national strategies, ring-fenced funding and national quangos.

The last Association of Colleges technology survey in 2012 pointed to little progress and indeed suggested colleges “were being hampered from delivering the government’s policy aims because of their inability to use technology effectively”.

Things have taken a turn for the better with Skills Minister Matthew Hancock having taken a personal interest.

He has formed an action group to support colleges’ attempts to use technology.

There is much to be done, however. My grandchildren will leave school in 15 years. They will leave classrooms that have no pens, no paper, no books, no rows of desks, no whiteboards, no printers, no desktops, no ICT suites.

But they will be used to learning analytics, gesture computing, onscreen assessments and instant feedback, speech-to-text and text-to-speech recognition and personalised blended learning programmes accessible every day, all day and night, year round.

I hope they will have the choice of going to an FE college, but if progress made since Incorporation is anything to go by, I am not sure they will.

Bob Harrison, education adviser for Toshiba Information Systems (UK) Ltd, consultant with National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services and chair of the Teaching Schools Technology Advisory Board

When Dick Moore (pictured) left Sheffield College to join a dotcom start-up company in the US he had the bright idea of putting his daughter through the GCSE English online course delivered by his old college.

“She got a GCSE A grade after one year of study,” he says. “And the crazy thing was that on returning to the UK her school made her sit GCSE English again.”

He tells the story to illustrate a point about the lack of joined-up thinking in the system. He’s not the only one. Other parents have been angered that their school demands a child resits — particularly if they are bright — because, otherwise, it doesn’t count towards the school’s performance league table figures.

For Moore, trustee of the Association for Learning Technology, whose career has spanned teaching IT, running MIS and supporting learning technology, “it illustrates the inertia in the system at every level.”

He adds: “There is some stunning work going on around the world and in the UK and no area needs it more than FE.”

FE was already making swift strides forward when Incorporation came along, says Moore, and there was every reason to expect a thoroughly coherent national system to emerge around Information and Communications Technology (ICT).

But what emerged was piecemeal and still requires radically new thinking.

“As an educational technologist from the 1980s, I remain convinced of the potential that ICT has to transform the yield of education systems in the same way we have seen significant benefits delivered in health and manufacturing,” he says.

“In 1996–97, I led a consortium of South Yorkshire colleges [Sheffield College, Doncaster College, Northern College, Rotherham College of Art and Technology, Thomas Danby and Barnsley] and put together a bid to connect them all to each other and to the Janet [formerly Joint Academic NETwork] system.”

The move from local authority funding ‘was the pivotal moment when the FE sector had to become computer-literate, including the sector managers'”

Moore realised that to make e-enabled learning happen they needed three things:

• Infrastructure — to communicate

• Skills — to change the pedagogy

• Services — to deliver teaching and learning to the workplace and homes of students and employers

This was radical — before the Mosaic web browser or the WWW service on the internet had been built.

Moore moved to Sheffield College to work with the team that was developing a course to re-skill teachers in the “fabulous” Lettol Course, “which is still delivering 12 years on and in my opinion should have been compulsory for every new FE lecturer six years ago, or do we think the internet as an education medium is a passing fad?”

It is not only in teaching and learning that ICT should have brought more coherence to FE, he says.

The move from local authority funding to a national formula funding scheme and the Individual Student Record “was the pivotal moment when the FE sector had to become computer-literate, including the sector managers.”

The whole debate around “user requirement for management information in further education colleges” and managing resources in FE “pointed at a rationalist view of the world that could incrementally improve the quality of provision across the nation,” he says.

While the idea was very solid and showed great promise, the close coupling of the statistical return and financial return led to “an over-complex bureaucracy that had audit rules published after enrolment was closed, a system that steered the sector by looking in the rear view mirror on volumes that were 18 months out of date.”

Convergence of funding that followed put much pressure on colleges, which helped, but at some cost.

“Colleges spent quite significant sums of money buying systems staff to replace what had been a reasonably accurate statistical return,” says Moore.

“The fact that we don’t have a national web-based system for recording student funding still surprises me.”

Ofsted is just the most recent of the bodies tasked with inspecting further education — but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best says David Sherlock

The English FE sector bears the imprint of its local authority past, when our national provision was unplanned and very uneven in quality — but although it remains unplanned, extreme variations in quality are a thing of the past.

The evening-out and general upgrading of quality was what the Further Education Funding Council (FEFC) inspectorate and its successors, the Training Standards Council (TSC), the Adult Learning Inspectorate (ALI) and Ofsted, were introduced to achieve.

The person who did more than most to create robust FE colleges was Terry Melia, FEFC’s first chief inspector.

He inveigled people like Janice Shiner and me to join as regional senior inspectors.

Our teams had a stiffening of former HMIs as well as former college principals and vice principals who had the experience essential for credible inspection.

And our associate inspectors worked directly for FEFC and, almost to a man and woman, were current FE staff.

A trawl through the FEFC archive held by the Institute of Education should convince anyone of the liberal and collaborative tone of its inspection framework and the very high standard of its college reports.

They might benefit inspection today. FEFC never attempted to sum up a large institution in a single grade. Melia understood that, like their counterparts in universities, some college departments will always be on the rise, some at the peak of their powers and some on the downward slope.

The trick was to identify which, so that would-be students could make an informed choice of course, not just college.

Equally, he was clear that inspection was a snapshot. Any idea that one could use it to make judgements about ‘failing teachers’ as did his contemporary, Chris Woodhead, in schools, or to gaze into the crystal ball and divine a college’s capacity to improve, were inherently flawed.

As with colleges, so with the rest of the extended FE sector — quality was all over the place, but today private providers are just as well regarded as colleges. They perform just as well and are increasingly seen as playing a complementary role to colleges.

The success of the ALI was, like that of the FEFC inspectorate, due to our convincing providers that we were on their side, acknowledging that education and training were hard.

Nothing contributed more to making that message convincing than ALI’s Provider Development Unit which helped providers that had fared badly at inspection to make the first, difficult, steps towards recovery.

What we have now is an FE sector in which too many providers are too small to be viable”

So what remains to be done today? Not more inspection.

Just as the universities and polytechnics did before it, and on shorter timescales, the FE sector has outgrown inspection and should progress to serious self-assessment independently verified by a sector-owned peer review body.

Higher education’s QAA offers a convincing model of how it should be done, the government’s commitment to deregulation provides the right environment and the proposed Charter award carries the means to do it.

The unfinished business is planning for sustainability.

What we have now is an FE sector in which too many providers are too small to be viable, wholly dependent on public funding and heading for the financial buffers.

Wales is currently in the latter stages of planned rationalisation to create fewer, stronger colleges; perhaps a third of the original number.

The much-admired Australian TAFE institutes were created through multiple mergers of local colleges to create institutions big enough and strong enough to stand on their own feet, in creative consultation with state governments rather than being at the mercy, as John Hayes put it, of “impersonal instructions from a remote bureaucracy”.

A parallel suggests a need for 140 or so FE colleges and a reduced number of private and charitable providers, all working together.

The project for the next 20 years?

We need to work towards a real, viable, autonomy rather than the echo of local authority control which remains at the heart of the incorporated colleges of today.

David Sherlock, director of Beyond Standards