100 years ago on June 4th 1913 Emily Wilding Davison walked in front of the King’s horse in the Derby at Epsom to protest against the continuing denial of votes for women in Britain.
She died four days later from the impact of the collision. The WEA sent flowers to her funeral “with deepest regrets”.
Voting was extended to women in 1918 after the First World War. Davison was one of the most radical and active of the suffragettes and, along with others, had endured terrible brutality from the police and authorities in prison and on demonstrations. Looking back from today, it can seem extraordinary that the extension of the vote to women was resisted so strongly by the state. However, their struggle was seen as part of a wider challenge to the power and property of the ruling classes that characterised the first part of the 20th Century.
The centenary of her death has been widely marked but the issue she fought for is still important. Voting levels are dropping in UK elections. We can all mark this centenary by encouraging everyone eligible to register to vote.https://www.gov.uk/browse/citizenship/voting.
You may be on the register but are you sure your children/grandchildren are? If you teach for the WEA can you remind your students? If you’re a student – talk about it with others in your class.
The WEA supported a campaign to recognise Emily's sacrifice, and following the intervention of presenter Clare Balding, this year’s Derby Day organisers have commissioned the campaign to make a short photo and textual montage about Emily Davison and the suffragette struggle for the vote which will be shown on all the big screens at this year’s Derby.
The WEA’s vision: a better world – equal, democratic and just can only be achieved through an active and educated democracy. The WEA believed that in 1913 and there is much we can do today.
I attended the Solidar network meeting in Paris with WEA President, Colin Barnes. The WEA has had little involvement for a number of years with international sister organisations. Recently, including at our 2011 Conference in Nottingham, we’ve begun to meet with Solidar www.solidar.org a network of 56 social purpose education organisation across Europe largely in the non-formal sector. The main theme was around the ‘social dimension’ of education and training.
Our aim is to understand more about the work of organisations in this network and how Solidar brings them together around issues and projects. The meeting in Paris was funded by their work and brought representatives from 15 EU countries together. They was a remarkable range of organisations including the Nordic WEA’s, popular education movements in France, Spain and Italy as well as training organisations dealing with Work s Councils, Youth and Social work.
The scale of some of these organisations is extraordinary. For example, ARCI in Italy www.arci.it has over a million members running everything from popular culture and community theatre to anti-mafia projects. In France and Spain the organisations have mass memberships from teachers, social workers and youth workers with a broadly progressive, social integration agenda.
I was pleased at how practical the event was – and the common ground between many of the organisations. Essentially, we looked at three or four themes through practical examples. These included:
Inevitably these were political issues in education and training that consciously looked at social exclusion in the community and workplace and the role of non-formal learning in addressing it. TSL (the WEA in Finland – www.tsl.fi) are examining how to transfer the Union Learning Rep and Community Learning Champions model from the UK.
Solidar’s Education Experts Network seeks the views of its members on what issues and projects to develop. It largely looks to a model of sharing practice between partners, publishing the results of the work and sharing the outcomes through round table dialogue. This event looked at progress with priorities set a year ago: General skills and competencies; Intercultural dialogue and integration and Development education.
In the past I’ve been very sceptical about working with partners across Europe. However, this event has changed that. I think links around practical projects like this would enhance what we do in communities and projects here. There would be real benefit in involving WEA tutors in these discussions – I can imagine a couple of ESOL tutors really finding these exchanges rewarding. Solidar provides an effective secretariat for a vast network of popular education organisations. Clearly there are massive challenges: the EU budget is under pressure and the situation in many of the countries involved is grim for public and third sector organisation and their clients – Latvian and Romanian colleague gave a real insight into their current position and, of course, conversations with Greek and Spanish colleagues showed the day to day situations they are dealing with.
I’m now aware of a much bigger network of European organisations who share the WEA’s mission. Most important was they shared the same concerns and wanted to share practical approaches to working with disadvantaged communities wherever they were. Second most important (to hopeless me) was they all spoke in English throughout!
A voluntary sector adult education charity with over 60,000 members, thousands of volunteers in local areas, branches and projects, all supporting programmes of classes across the country, professionally taught, bringing thousands of adults back into education each year. This statement, and all the elements within it, is a true description of the WEA now. However, for many volunteers, tutors and staff it doesn’t always feel that way. Why is that?
The WEA is a fantastically dispersed organisation and perceptions of it can be quite local. It’s also a pretty old organisation and many who’ve been involved for a while know its weaknesses. These are often raised in points to me as I’ve been to WEA meetings across the country: why doesn’t the WEA have a stronger profile? Surely all these members aren’t really involved. Who is deciding what in the Association? Why do you keep sending all this stuff I’m not interested in?
In my new role as Director of Membership, Volunteering and Marketing I need to address these questions – but also need to remember what a remarkable organisation the WEA is. For example, alongside our voluntary branch structure, there is a more hidden network of volunteering that supports teaching and partnership work in disadvantaged communities all across England, Carers in Plymouth, Archaeology in Yorkshire, digital inclusion in the East Midlands, classroom support in Slough. We need to find ways to recognise that more, learn from it whilst allowing it to flourish where it is.
The Membership, Volunteering and Marketing strategy is addressing issues like these. The direct resources for this work are modest; but saying that doesn’t take account of the nature of the WEA or the skills and commitment of its tutors, staff and volunteers. By setting up some simple networks I hope we can share ideas and move forward more quickly. New technology can help: almost 30,000 WEA members have reliable e-mail addresses and over 40% of those members open e-mails we send to them. WEA News has a small physical print run but over 16,000 people download it from our website. I think it means we need to focus on making communication interesting, relevant and, where possible, two way. We need to engage more with our huge membership, discover their interests, not assume these will be the same as existing active volunteers. We need to offer them opportunities to connect with one another as well as encouraging more of them to consider giving time to the WEA or raise money to help our work.
Inevitably, the key issue here is communication. That needs to build relationships, use new and old methods, be true to the WEA and help everyone get pleasure from contributing to the Association’s work. It can’t be a centralised, head office approach but it can be coherent, strategic and make sense to everyone involved wherever they are.
We may never get 60,000 people to all be actively engaged with the WEA, but if we got 1% of that number every year as new activists that would bring the resources of 600 new people to assist the WEA in its work - 60 per region leaving aside volunteers who come to us through other routes! I think that’s a reasonable ambition for a voluntary movement and I thank all of those who have helped develop this work so far.
With the passing of New Labour and the recession, government through ‘big (rubber) levers of power’ has largely been discredited. Years before David Cameron launched the ‘Big Society’ and the localism agenda, David Miliband had talked about ‘double devolution’ of decision making down beyond the local authority level. Now, in FE this is presented as new freedoms to be responsive to communities – apparently quite a change from the certainties of the Leitch Report (written by a former banker).
Has this ended years of confusion in FE between needs and interests of adults with needs and interests of regulators? BIS and the Skills Funding Agency actually talk about ‘freedoms with results’ and rapid contract interventions if ‘results’ aren’t there. This has its parallel in the payment by results of the Work Programme. Leaving aside the contradictions in this I think the Prime Minister’s interest in the Big Society is genuine. Few are arguing the old Blair/Brown ‘we know best’ approach any more – even if they think they do.
Internationally, there’s currently a massive globalised expectation on (and demand from?) working people to get skills through qualifications, at both technical (FE) and HE level. 75% of New York subway ads are about training and qualifications; buses and billboards in Kowloon are the same. Some employers value skills - in Swindon, Honda preferred to retain staff in 2008-09 rather than make redundancies because of the training they’d invested in them. John Field has argued for years that lifelong learning is no longer something cosy or worthy but an imperative on workers in globalised capitalism.
Across Britain, the USA and elsewhere, middle level jobs are being rapidly stripped away leaving a thinner middle class (in pay/benefits terms) sandwiched between a largely insecure working class and the rich ‘overclass’. This is accelerating as the ‘insurance’ provided by the welfare state is hit by austerity. In Cleveland, Ohio this month over 70,000 people dropped out of welfare payments onto food stamps after three years out of work. A high proportion of them were home owners in the suburbs.
In the face of the ongoing Global Financial Crisis (GFC), you’d think there would be an upsurge in workers’ educational activity in this country. However, after four years of recession and financial crisis there is little of the activity that was seen arising in the WEA even during the early 1980s, let alone in the earlier part of the last century. In reality the capacity and institutional infrastructure that supported birth of WEA has gone. The conditions in which the WEA grew included:
The loss of the above has led to a much reduced sense of active democracy. Today, networks of individuals acting locally have often been replaced by networks of professionals working within central government initiatives, looking for bids, drafting ‘deliverables’, totting up ‘beneficiaries’.
This loss of an infrastructure of local democratic institutions with their expectations, committee culture and decision making has been said to have individualised working class people into either aspiring or ‘lumpen’ behaviours/cultures. But these are longstanding trends (at least since 1976 economic/political watershed) and now sit in context of the GFC. This crisis likely to lead to despair and social unrest within which new organisations (reactionary or radical) emerge.
In terms of adult education we’ve seen the limits of a government led professionalisation agenda (and its successor – government endorsed, professional ‘self-regulation’) and yet we all know that one of the most critical elements in successful adult education is great teaching by tutors who are engaged with and understand their students and their communities.
In the historic independent working class education model (however true in reality), great teaching engages with communities and their organisations, learns from all participants, attends to their interests rather than ‘banking’ information or knowledge (however radical) with them. This was centre of Freire’s approach.
The GFC has thrown up new debates and arguments. These have been rapidly spread around the world through the Occupy movement and slogans like ‘we are the 99%’. Within that, the publication of research around the consequences of income inequality in ‘The Spirit Level’ has been significant in concisely capturing the essence of inequality whilst supporting the argument with researched evidence. There has been a remarkable response to it in public debate and from the three main political parties in England. Incidentally, the Tea Party movement in the USA seems to correlate the same issues and reach exactly the opposite conclusion: i.e. income inequality is due to individuals not getting educated, eating badly, committing crimes, getting pregnant too soon, not moving to get work, etc. Of course, they don’t make the comparisons with other developed countries that makes the Spirit Level presentations so simple/effective.
However, the Spirit Level audience is probably a professional one, concerned at the impact of the GFC (on them as well as society). The Spirit Level premise is simple: Income Inequality leads to many social ills, but it’s one that most working class people across the world probably know already – things are unfair and the ruling class isn’t necessarily on your side. In Telford in the early 1980s unemployment reached 20%. The Trades Council called a public meeting which was well attended. The Trades Council Chair (a TU lecturer) introduced the meeting by reading from The Sunday Times an article about unemployment in the Midlands. After a few moments he was heckled by people saying they knew all that but what should be done?
2011 seems to have marked a turn in people’s reaction to the GFC. Disillusion with politicians (as well as the collapsed reputation of banking, journalism and the metropolitan police) is repeated in countries across the world. In that sense, 2011 may be like 1968, 1945, 1919. Within the Arts, some argued that the impact of 1968 didn’t appear until 1974/5. Could there be new structures and ideas emerging now. The Occupy protests put education workshops and debates high on the activities organised to pass time in the encampments.
Adult education and its organisations still need to immerse themselves in working class communities – to see what people think, build a continuing relationship and a changing programme that reflects the issues arising from the relationship. That doesn’t exclude working with state agencies and others in authority but it does require close working with working class communities to understand them and develop the case for sustained work and resources from an authentic point of view. This is a challenge when you need to win contracts, make bids, etc. but it is fundamental to an organisation’s reputation in those communities and that builds its reputation above them at local, regional and national level.
The task for an independent adult education is the same as always. To be successful, its work and behaviour needs to be respected by the community, be on their side, in an open and democratic way – not a subcontractor for the state.
England is very different than 100 years ago. It’s not the GFC that is the biggest challenge to independent working class adult education; it’s the disappearance of local networked infrastructure and decision making in which it can flourish. Can new structures develop in a different networked world?
At last week's LSIS Strategy Day the Council and Board heard from Sue Pember (BIS), Geoff Russell (soon to retired CEO of Skills Funding Agency) and Lorna Fitzjohn (Ofsted). There was a lot their short presentation had in common and I'd sum it up as 'Freedom with results - with speedy intervention if no results'. The FE sector is being given more freedom but interventions around concerns will quickly lead to notice of withdrawal of funding.
The meeting came shortly after the renewed 'satisfactory is not satisfactory' debate as Michael Wilshaw proposes 'Improvement Required' as its replacement. Lorna Fitzjohn drew out some points from the 2011 Chief Inspector's report. In particular the number of serially 'satisfactory' providers. The new expression may be intended to get governing bodies to act. She reported that 'satisfactory providers' often have very poor action planning, ill-informed governance, principals who don't know enough about learners. Again she urged self critical self assessment designed for the provider, showing they know their own work and are taking improvement actions.
There were no inspections in the year reported where teaching and learning was outstanding and this was critical to why so few providers were outstanding overall. Sue Pember had also commented on governance saying: "The new role of governance is crucial. We need governors who can really govern and manage performance of institutions."
Effectively, between them, the emphasis could be summed up as Teaching, Learning & Assessment (TL&A) combined with Leadership, Management & Governance (LM&G) - all within the 'new freedoms'.
It's a big turn around from the last 10-15 years of complaince and centralised planning. They seemed to be asking whether providers were ready. Lorna said that in 'satisfactory' providers, when compared to School Heads, FE leaders are 'managerial pre-occupied - not thinking enough about teaching and learners'.
Lorna's presentation is available here: Download Presentation - OFSTED
The 10:10 annual update (instead of an annual report) shows that, even after two years, there is momentum in the idea of making efforts around percentage reductions in CO2
You can read their update here - very enjoyable and full of simple ideas. We need to get this back up the agenda in the WEA after a pretty good effort in 2010.
FE Providers around the country got an early Christmas present today as their results from 'learner views survey' of the Framework for Excellence (FFE) were put into the provider gateway for them to check before publication. Once out, learners will again be able to compare 'data' before chosing where to study. I'm not absolutely certain that learners across the country will have been holding their breath for the outcome of this year's survey and we'll all have to hold it a bit longer for the outcome of the massive telephone survey of learner destinations
Many providers will have been expecting this to be the last round of the dismal, costly and meaningless FFE with the publication of 'New Challenges, New Chances'. However, it seems like BIS (which the communication renames the department of 'Business, Innivation and Skills') intends to respond to years of criticism of the Framework for Excellence by renaming it the 'FE Public Information framework' so it perhaps it will live on in a zombie format.
Still, in these hard times, maybe its a good thing that social research consultancies continue to get Government business through make-work schemes like these. A new equivalent to the Keynesian approach of digging holes and filling them back in to keep the economy going?
On the other hand, perhaps it was all just an A level stats project that got a bit out of hand.
New WEA Interim Strategy for Membership, Volunteering & Marketing was approved this week. It was the outcome of work across the autumn with colleagues around the WEA. The Strategy has the usual three year goals and one year action schedule. Essentially, we want to: develop and engage more with our members across the country; clarify and build voluntary activity; ensure WEA governance is effective and democratic; build more systematic campaigns and alliances; improve promotion and marketing so more people get involved in the WEA; improve fundraising to support our work and improve communication across the Association.
Should set me up for the next year's work after 12 months of change in the Association.
Ofsted's Annual Report has some key messages on Adult Community Learning. Holex has identified these:
- that over 75% of the ACL providers inspected during 2010/11 were found to be good or outstanding (compared with 55% across the learning and skills sector as a whole)
- that, notwithstanding this, there is no room for complacency (more could be done, eg on progression monitoring, and in "sharpening" self-assessment)
- that teaching and assessment (which will be even more important under the proposed revisions to inspection from September 2012) still lacks "sparkle" - over 30% of ACL providers were found to be Grade 3/4 in this element, and none were outstanding.
The full report can be found here.
I thought the points on quality of provision were the most interesting about ACL:
I guess it would be hard to disagree with an emphasis encouraging outstanding teaching which is both challenging and fun. Years ago one of my kids said 'fun' was a word you can't completely trust, citing 'Fun with Maths' and 'fun-sized Mars bars' - but nice to see it in an Ofsted report, nevertheless.
Just read the HOLEX extract from in the BIS New Challenges New Chances Reform Plan published today: http://www.bis.gov.uk/assets/biscore/further-education-skills/docs/f/11-1380-further-education-skills-system-reform-plan.pdf
Here's the bits on Informal Adult & Community Learning:
Community Learning
BIS funding will continue to support a universal a community learning offer, with a wide range of learning opportunities available to all adults in England.
The consultation endorsed a new, clearer commitment to using the public funding subsidy to support access, and progression in its widest sense, for people who are disadvantaged and who are furthest from learning and therefore least likely to participate. In the 2012/13 academic year we will pilot different locally-based ‘community learning trust’ models to channel Adult Safeguarded Learning funding and lead the planning of local provision in cities, towns and rural settings. If this proves to be an effective model we will roll out community learning trusts across England to begin full operation from summer 2013. The new trusts will take account of the views of local government, local communities and local business leaders to ensure the purpose and objectives for the budget are implemented in ways that meet local need. A prospectus will be launched in the spring 2012.
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Purpose of Government Supported Community Learning:
· Maximise access to community learning for adults, bringing new opportunities and improving lives, whatever people’s circumstances.
· Promote social renewal by bringing local communities together to experience the joy of learning and the pride that comes with achievement.
· Maximise the impact of community learning on the social and economic well-being of individuals, families and communities.
Objectives
- Focus public funding on people who are disadvantaged and least likely to participate, including in rural areas and people on low incomes with low skills
- Collect fee income from people who can afford to pay and use where possible to extend provision to those who cannot.
- Widen participation and transform people’s destinies by supporting progression relevant to personal circumstances, e.g.
- improved confidence and willingness to engage in learning - acquisition of skills preparing people for training, employment or self-employment
- improved digital, financial literacy and/or communication skills
- parents/carers better equipped to support and encourage their children’s learning
- improved/maintained health and/or social well-being.
- Develop stronger communities, with more self-sufficient, connected and pro-active citizens, leading to:
- increased volunteering, civic engagement and social integration
- reduced costs on welfare, health and anti-social behaviour
- increased online learning and self organised learning
- the lives of our most troubled families being turned around
- Commission, deliver and support learning in ways that contribute directly to these objectives, including:
- bringing together people from backgrounds, cultures and income groups, including people who can/cannot afford to pay
- using effective local partnerships to bring together key providers and relevant local agencies and services
- devolving planning and accountability to neighbourhood/parish level, with local people involved in decisions about the learning offer
- involving volunteers and Voluntary and Community Sector groups, shifting long term, ‘blocked’ classes into learning clubs, growing self-organised learning groups, and encouraging employers to support informal learning in the workplace
- supporting the wide use of online information and learning resources
- minimising overheads, bureaucracy & administration