Many labels are used for the forces and factors that are
reshaping our economy and the world of work, and are likely to do so in future.
Among many others, these include: the knowledge or learning economy; Artificial
Intelligence and robotics; globalised production and supply chains; precarity,
flexibilization and the “gig economy”; inequalities at work and between those
in and out of work; climate change, global ecological crisis and
“sustainability”.
The Centenary Commission is exploring what need to be done not
only to ensure an adequate supply of, and demand for, economically-significant
“skills”, but also to build an adult education system that addresses all
aspects of human life – for personal growth and social and democratic
development, as well as for the economy, competitiveness and productivity –
amid this economic, technological and social turbulence.
I started jotting down some notes in preparation for this meeting, but these grew very
quickly into an extended list of Theses on C21st Lifelong Learning, organised as responses
to the questions posed by the Commission. Here, for what they are worth, they are:
a) What do the changing nature of work and the
labour market imply for the future of adult education?
- Work has always had important lessons for education, which is always misleadingly thought of as only taking place in formal institutions: ‘Working, learning and innovating are closely related forms of human activity that are conventionally thought to conflict with each other. Work practice is generally viewed as conservative and resistant to change; learning is generally viewed as distinct from working and problematic in the face of change; and innovation is generally viewed as the disruptive but necessary imposition of change on the other two.’ (Brown and Duguid 1991)
- Education through practice (including through work) is a model for serious learning of all kinds. Modern working situations often throw up problems to be solved, or require new customised plans to be developed, often in collaboration with colleagues who are specialists of different kinds. These activities are not necessarily seen as learning, but to work in this way requires learning behaviours and produces learning, even though that is not the purpose. Learning through practice requires unstructured time and appropriate facilities for thought, talking with colleagues, and sharing and reviewing ideas and proposals for new courses of action. Some of this activity can be structured and formalised, but my research (Derrick 2019) suggests that unstructured informal spaces and time are necessary for the formal work to be most effective.
- To make hard and fast distinctions between adult education for work, citizenship, or leisure is largely meaningless in terms of the ways in which adults experience learning – these contexts are ‘entangled’ in the lives of individuals and groups, and these entanglements are understood and experienced in myriad different ways by different people, and continually ‘managed’ by them, for better or worse.
- Rapid technological change in workplaces and in the social, political and economic environments within which organisations operate has begun to change employers’ ideas about learning, and the role of employers in supporting the learning of their employees, though there is a long way to go. Government at both national and local level could do far more to promote productive ideas about learning and productivity in a changing world to employers. This is emphatically NOT just about providing formal courses of study in work time, though these may be appropriate on occasion. It is more about the physical organisation of the workplace, its social culture, and the design of work processes (Brown and Duguid 1991).
- One approach to developing policymaking that supports organisational and employee learning at the same time as attacking intractable social, political, economic and technological problems such as climate change, is that of the Institute for Innovation and Public Policy at UCL, which advocates mission-oriented planning and policy initiatives, using government power purposefully to ‘tilting the playing field’, so that employers are incentivised to collaborate, research, build capacity and innovate (Mazzucato 2017). IIPP points to the US govt decision in 1963 to put a man on the moon by 1970. Whatever the initial reasons for this decision, the programme produced a high level of learning and innovation for decades afterwards, and US economy benefitted enormously from the product development and the skills and capacity developed through that programme. The key characteristic of suitable missions is that they are complex and multi-faceted. Adult learning possibilities and potential could be built around ‘missions’ of various kinds, including for example caring for the elderly and infirm, eliminating plastic in households, improving air quality in cities, etc.
b) How can adult education contribute to
making the world of work (and the world as it is reconfigured by the changes
taking place in the economy) better and fairer, and to making people more
resilient, productive and happy at work?
- Change in society and in the workplace highlights the importance of supporting learning not just for entrants to adult society and the workplace, but for everybody, whatever their situation with respect to work. Critically we need to find ways to highlight and if possible provide support for semi-formal and informal learning throughout life.
- All contexts and activities educate people, mostly in tacit ways, for better or worse. Policy needs to consider how it can support contexts so that they support rather than inhibit useful learning, whether this is within formal contexts of education or not. The concept of ‘expansive or restrictive environments for learning’ (Fuller and Unwin 2004), developed for workplaces, can be usefully extended to any context, including material or organisational environments of any kind, but also to cultural and policy environments.
- Models of state support for informal exist but are under threat everywhere: public libraries, public museums and art galleries, public parks, allotments and sports facilities. Schuller, Tuckett and Wilson’s (2018) call for A National Learning Entitlement: Moving Beyond University Tuition Fees would be another example of this kind of unstructured and enabling entitlement. The call for a Universal Basic Income is another such proposal.
- The kind of imaginative thinking that is needed is illustrated by Hans Rosling’s 2010 TED talk on ‘The Magic Washing Machine’. He argues that the spread of literacy among poor communities can be associated with people’s access to washing machines.My point here is that these facilities indirectly provide largely unstructured and relatively unmediated resources for learning, and are thus models of for the types of informal and social learning which have been unnoticed or ignored by both policymakers and, for the most part, educational and social researchers.
- The rationale for the establishment, provision and sustaining of these facilities by both public and private finance from the Victorian period onward has not changed, and had similar objectives to this Commission. These facilities, together with a stable, equitable and properly funded public schooling system, run primarily at a local level, effectively support the ability and potential of people not just to adapt their lives to a world being configured by economic change, but to contribute to that configuration.
- What is needed is a framework of imaginative and relatively unspecified entitlements that can be drawn on as flexibly as possible, to support individuals and groups of adults in fitting the widest range of productive social and educational activities, both formal and informal, into lives crowded with continually changing combinations of family and community responsibilities as well as work commitments. These ideally would include entitlements in various possible forms under the headings of funding (money), access to facilities (spaces and resources) and ‘time-off’ to study (time).
- 21st society and the 21st century workplace now function within a global digital economy. The new types of risk associated with the development of platform capitalism and the proliferation of automated and robotic systems do not in my view invalidate the basic ideas of, for example, Albert Mansbridge, Richard Tawney and Raymond Williams about the relationship between adult education, politics, work and society, they just makes the need for a policy framework informed by these ideas more urgent. In the contexts of these particular risks a fundamental element of a productive environment for adult learning will be an appropriate and effective legal framework for the appropriate protection of individuals from the anti-social uses of such technologies.
c) How adequate are current systems and structures of educational
provision
(public, private, not-for-profit) – and including funding, governance
and
management – for meeting the economic and social challenges society will
face in
the future?
- Systems and structures need to be designed to support and enrich learning through practice, and learning through participation. People should start learning programmes by being celebrated for what they already know and have already achieved, rather than on their supposed deficits.
- A person’s education is another word for their life. Education for work, or citizenship, or leisure - these are largely false distinctions in terms of the ways in which adults’ lived experience – these contexts and purposes are ‘entangled’ in the lives of individuals and groups, and these entanglements are understood and experienced in myriad different ways by different people, and continually ‘managed’ by them, for better or worse.
- Learning needs to be seen as seamless human activity, whether they are at work, at home, purposefully or accidentally learning, on their own or with others.
- Certification is hugely significant for someone who gains a certificate for the first time, even if it has little objective value in the labour market.
- All social activity has learning and development potential.
- The systems we have had up till now have never been designed for part-time adult learners, but always for full-time children and young people. Systems that work for part-time and learners will also work better for full-time learners.
- These systems have only recognised learning when it has been formalised into courses and programmes, rather than as a process of development which evolves uniquely as the learner goes through life.
- The systems and structures of their schooling, for better or worse, shape the attitudes and motivation towards, and understanding of learning affecting every adult. For the future, probably the most important area to redesign, develop and adapt, for supporting productive adult learning, is the form and regulations surrounding initial schooling. In particular, the political fashion for ‘command and control’ management of schools from the DfE, aiming to produce change through successive waves of short-term, unresearched curriculum initiatives, as successive governments have done since the 1970s, has been very damaging. It has supported the widely-held idea that education is exclusively associated with highly defined formal programmes leading to certification, and that no other learning is worthwhile.
- Systems are needed which recognise that adult education needs to be supported directly and indirectly, for better or worse, by locally-based networks of interdependent organisations and resources; networks within which local employers, whether public or private, are active and involved and which are supported, co-ordinated and governed locally within enabling national frameworks of funding and regulation, and which allow for local distinctiveness to emerge and flourish.
- A key part of what is wrong at present, and not just with our schooling system, is our obsession with a particular kind of public accountability. This is much less about moral accountability than about financial accountability to the tax-payer, ie an accountant’s version of accountability. This has led to a public sector measurement industry, which is enormously expensive and for which the evidence of effectiveness is debatable and slim at best. This is problematic for a number of reasons:
- It takes up a significant proportion of the workload of every education practitioner, community worker, which could otherwise be used for teaching or supporting students or making use of community networks to support people in their learning
- It promotes a false idea that learning is about getting things ‘right’ and ‘wrong’
- It focusses on pre-defined outputs of learning processes, and ignores all other outputs, both desirable and undesirable
- It promotes the idea that measurements are objective and do not need interpreting and/or scrutinising for bias
- It leads to the elimination of learning opportunities that are open-ended or in other ways cannot demonstrate their value in narrow pre-defined terms
- It leads to the elimination of valuable educational activities for perverse reason
d) What key recommendations would you like to
see the Centenary Commission make?
- Design and implementation of a framework of imaginative and relatively unspecified ‘enabling entitlements’ that can be drawn on as flexibly as possible, to support individuals and groups of adults in fitting the widest range of productive social and educational activities, both formal and informal, into lives crowded with continually changing combinations of family and community responsibilities as well as work commitments. These ideally would include entitlements in various possible forms under the headings of funding (money), access to facilities (spaces and resources) and ‘time-off’ to study (time).
- A specific element of such a framework would include a scheme along the lines of Schuller, Tuckett and Wilson (2018) on an entitlement for formal study.
- A renaissance of subsidised public sector facilities that directly and indirectly supporting learning, including adult education services, public and culturally neutral meeting and social spaces, childcare facilities, libraries, museums, parks, allotments and sports facilities in terms of funding and attention.
- More spaces people can walk into without being asked any questions or to give any information about themselves, like a park…..
All contexts educate people, mostly in tacit ways, for
better or worse. Policy needs to
consider how it can support human activity so that it supports learning as far as possible,
whether in formal contexts of education or not. Fuller and Unwin’s concept of ‘expansive or
restrictive environments for learning’ (2006), developed for workplaces, can be
extended to any context, including material or organisational environments of
any kind, but also to cultural or policy environments.
My view is that we cannot ‘ensure’ an adequate supply of
skills for an uncertain future. This
kind of thinking is a symptom of the technocratic mindset we have been using in policymaking and planning for a better society.
What we can do is support the development
of environmental conditions
which will optimise our chances of improving a wide range of
skills and
capacities, and which at the same time will produce a whole range of other
societal benefits.
References:
- Brown, J.S., and Duguid, P. (1991). Organisational Learning and Communities of Practice: Towards a Unified View of Working, Learning and Innovation. Organization Science 2 (1), pp 40-57
- Derrick, J. (2019). Learning, innovation and ‘tacit pedagogy’ in workplace practice: a comparison of two high-performing organisations in different sectors. Unpublished EdD thesis. London: UCL Institute of Education
- Fuller, A. and Unwin, L. (2006). ‘Expansive and restrictive learning environments’, in K. Evans, P Hodkinson, H. Rainbird, and L. Unwin (eds), Improving Workplace Learning. Abingdon: Routledge
- Mazzucato, M. (2017). Mission-oriented innovation policy: challenges and opportunities. London: UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP). Available at: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/bartlett/public-purpose/sites/public-purpose/files/moip-challenges-and-opportunities-working-paper-2017-1.pdf
- Rosling, H. (2010). The magic washing machine. TED talk, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=42&v=BZoKfap4g4w
- Schuller, T., Tuckett, A. and Wilson, T. (2018) A National Learning Entitlement: Moving Beyond University Tuition Fees. London: UCL Institute of Education Centre for Learning and Life Chances in Knowledge Economies and Societies (LLAKES). Available at: http://www.llakes.ac.uk/sites/default/files/63.%20Schuller%20Tuckett%20%26%20Wilson.pdf
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