WEA in Ofsted annual report magazine

As mentioned in a previous entry, Ofsted's magazine for Adult Learning - 'Talisman'  has a summary of Adult & Community Learning Provision which includes the following article (written by us!) on the WEA. I thought it would be worth copying here at the end of 2008:

"The WEA is Britain’s largest voluntary sector provider of adult learning, reaching 70,000 individual learners in England each year, plus a further 10,000 or more in Scotland. We organise courses in local venues in hundreds of communities through the shared values of our volunteers and staff. Much of our funding comes from a single contract across England with the Learning and Skills Council, which we manage through allocating targets amongst our nine regions (coterminous with the Government Regions) and monitoring performance.

Our provision

The best quick way to describe our provision, which includes a vast range of course subjects across the country, is through our three educational strands. Every WEA course in England its in one of these three strands, through which we plan to meet the intentions of learners and the different contexts within which they make their choices about joining courses.

 §         Second Chance to Learn: this is about adults with ‘few if any educational qualifications’ and helping them gain nationally recognised qualifications. Thus it will range from ‘first steps’ to – potentially – an Access to Higher Education Certificate.

 §         Community Involvement (46% of provision): this is about helping adults achieve a wider range of outcomes through purposeful education. These include improved health and well-being, better communication skills in situations like signing and lip reading, extending volunteering in schools, activism in unions and other roles and the capacity to take part in community activity etc. Again there is an emphasis on disadvantaged students but using a wider definition that includes health, social, economic and other factors.

 §         Cultural Studies (36% of provision): this strand is designed to attract all adults with a ‘love of learning’ who want to develop an understanding of a subject for ‘its own sake’ and wish to be involved in the planning and delivery of the provision.

 Self-assessment, inspection and improvement

The WEA in England is inspected as one provider - leading to large inspection teams. Over the last four years we have developed a peer network of educational managers who work together to lead self-assessment and improvement. This arose from the organisation and support needs of inspection but soon developed a continuing value to the WEA. Self-assessment and inspection can be costly and complex compared to single-site or single-city providers. We use teleconferencing extensively to manage the communications involved and the Ofsted team used our teleconference system for end of day 'meetings', with inspectors calling in from up to six locations. 

As we have improved our work over the years, we have come to value this networked management approach. We supplement this with standard data and performance measures and have improved our work by focusing on key strategic or systemic improvement objectives. We have found that identifying the right big improvement issue and then working as a team on actions needed is more effective than creating very detailed, centralised plans. This is particularly important given capacity issues created by increasing regulatory demands often designed around full-time young learners on full-time qualifications.

 The WEA is a highly responsive provider of adult learning. Our partnership working is extensive and almost second nature. We are a committed mission based organisation, but we want to be judged by external standards too. We are proud that the impetus of external inspection combined with the fantastic commitment of staff, tutors and volunteers means we continue to improve our provision and remain a distinctive provider and non-conformist voice for adult education in a period of great turbulence and uncertainty."