The skills white paper pledges to “make lifelong learning a reality”. But for this to happen, the adult lifelong learner needs three things: A positive experience of compulsory education, confidence in their ability to achieve success in learning, and assurance that improving their skills and qualifications will enhance the quality of their life and/or increase their earnings.
The first two often go hand in hand. Getting the qualifications at school or college to progress into a well-paid career gives people an ongoing self-belief in their ability to achieve good results. This is true for around two thirds of the school population.
Quite rightly, the document focuses on the 31 per cent who don’t progress well and asks: what can be done to improve non A-level education to get more pupils enjoying and succeeding at school?
Their answer – to replace all technical and vocational qualifications at level 3 with V Levels – addresses only a small part of the problem. The curriculum and assessment review’s recommendations to provide the diversity of young learners with stronger routes to a variety of positive destinations – not only “going to uni” – is much more promising.
The white paper barely touches upon the third prerequisite for the adult lifelong learner – seeing the relevance of continuing formal learning to boost careers. There is only passing reference to an adult careers advice. And in contrast to the moves to simplify 16-18 vocational education, a vision is presented of an adult skills system of labyrinthine complexity.
Adult learners will be confronted with a smorgasbord of options: College-based adult courses, sector skills packages, bootcamps, sector-based work academies, lifelong learning entitlement (LLE) courses and new “apprenticeship units”.
These will be overseen at national level by the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Education supported by Skills England; at sector level by “sector coalitions” of employers, providers and government; and at local level by strategic local authorities through engagement with local skills improvement plans and control over devolved adult skills funds.
Providers and those responsible for local delivery strategies are questioning how all these training products and services will be effectively coordinated.
And how will students navigate this? Who will provide the lifelong learner with what they most need – clarity over which new learning and qualifications will give them the best returns on their investment?
The answer must surely be to build a greatly enhanced careers advice information and guidance (CIAG) service, accessible to adults across the country – a “UCAS for adults”.
Online services won’t be enough; such a service will need to interact with colleges and adult education services and have regular face-to-face contact, just as UCAS web-based information is backed up by a network of advisers in schools and colleges.
Adult learners are an enormously diverse group who may not have had positive prior experiences of education, with varying readiness for further learning.
A good quality national adult CIAG service will come at a cost, and in the current financial climate it will be challenging for providers to find additional resources. But the transfer of skills to DWP provides opportunities.
The hubs for much of the Great Britain Working initiatives are local Jobcentres, which until now have been focused on helping unemployed clients find immediate short-term jobs. Giving them a wider remit to look at the longer-term skills needs and ambitions of their clients would enable the development of a stronger network of CIAG services properly resourced to Gatsby standards, and fill some of the gaps, especially for “left behind” adults.
In this respect the merger of the National Careers Service into JobCentre Plus announced last year is very positive. It will bring a new influx of skilled professionals with the right attributes to help deliver a service with real impact.
It was also encouraging to see a Jobcentre in Waltham Forest College held up as an example of good practice following DWP secretary Pat McFadden’s visit; we need more of this synergistic thinking.
The white paper’s proposals provide many of the jigsaw pieces for a properly joined-up lifelong learning strategy. But there are bits missing, and the pieces cry out to be connected to make a coherent picture – of an education system that encourages the lifelong learner to thrive.
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