Finding a balance in funding for learning

The recently announced funding allocations for Colleges and providers from September make disturbing news for adult learning. They include a total of £200 million of cuts (for individual institutions, between 10% and 25% in relevant budgets) for non-Train to Gain provision for adults that falls under the ‘Developmental Learning’ heading, which covers partial qualifications that are often the very ones employers want their employees to gain, non-accredited learning aimed at widening participation, independent living skills programmes for learners with learning difficulties and disabilities and other flexible programmes which the LSC’s guidance described as ‘support(ing) our wider priorities and ambitions in creating a culture of learning’. Such a culture of learning across a wide spectrum appears now to be a luxury the Government believes we can no longer afford.

Some will argue that this is quite proper: younger people need the greatest investment in their development if they are to be productive, contributing members of society now and in the future. Younger people have many more years to work, paying taxes and thereby helping support those of us who are older and hoping for a long and secure retirement.

But there are several arguments against this approach. Firstly, it is based on out of date demographic assumptions. Our population is growing but ageing, fewer young adults are entering the labour market, and more people are spending a higher proportion of their lives outside it – through part-time work, extended retirement or fulfilling unpaid caring roles, for example. But the proposed pattern of spending assumes that the young population is continuing to grow and that older adults are no longer contributing members of the labour market. In fact, however, the majority of the workforce of 2025 is already in the workforce now. Too much concentration of funding on young people risks ignoring the fact that we may all need not only to update, but actually to re-qualify over the course of a working lifetime. If we are serious about developing a new and different knowledge- based economy, this must surely imply widely available, easily accessible learning opportunities for many of the current workforce now and in the future.

The cuts also ignore the issue of the time in people's lives when they are most ready and able to benefit from learning. For some, especially those who have rejected school or even spent some time in custody, that time is unlikely to be end-on to compulsory schooling. Surely these potential learners should be able to 'cash in' on some entitlement to learning later, when they are ready? To make this unavailable through cuts to the most flexible forms of adult learning provision is effectively to write off many of those who have benefited least from the education system to date.

Furthermore, investment in adult learning is acknowledged to bring a much broader range of benefits than the straightforwardly economic – as Tom Schuller and David Watson argue in ‘Learning through Life’: ‘learning is linked to all kinds of desirable outcomes, both individual and collective. Learning makes people healthier, happier, more active citizens and so on... But the effects also spill over into wider society. For the most part, and in very general terms, we all benefit from each other’s learning as well as our own.’(p 61)

The Campaign for Learning is opposed to these disproportionate cuts and has alternative proposals for savings which would not inflict such damage.

Tricia Hartley, Chief Executive, Campaign for Learning