Education, enclosure and the rediscovery of the commons

^{Photo: Charlotte Stanistreet}

Driving recently on the A69 between Carlisle and Newcastle I began to experience an odd sensation of constraint, a sort of tightening in my chest that settled uncomfortably in my stomach like a thick knot of tangled rope. Although I was surrounded by farms and woodland on every side (it’s what some would call a scenic route), I realized none of it was accessible. For the most part, I could see little beyond the high hedgerows that told me in an uncompromising way that I could venture no further. Wanting to give my dog a run before we reached the ferry port in Newcastle, I turned off the main road, driving several miles looking for somewhere to stop and give him a few minutes’ exercise. I found more of the same: narrow roads abutting private housing and farms. Vast swathes of agricultural land were fenced off and untraversable; invisible, practically. I was struck by how meagre the access given to the public was, the awkward, twisting roads and scant walkways, leading either to private property or to the next unwelcoming, closed-up village. Nowhere to walk, nowhere to play, nowhere to gather. Here, I felt, was a place created not for the people who lived in it, but for those who owned it, at whose pleasure these less-fortunate citizens lived and worked. I could see no public spaces, no means of physically engaging with the landscape, no scope for acting on or changing it. I had little sense of what lay beyond the hedgerow. But I knew it was off-limits: private and forbidden. I did not belong. I was in a country I did not know and had not seen, ever, despite living there almost all my life. I had a strong physical reaction to this realization, something akin to claustrophobia, a kind of anxiety – panic, almost. The feeling of repulsion and alienation I had stayed with me long after I had left.

I have been thinking a lot since (and trying, not always successfully, to write) about the privatized nature of the British landscape and the reasons it looks and feels the way it does. The most important formative event (or series of events) shaping Britain’s countryside was, of course, the enclosure movement. The enclosure of the commons – the privatization of common land and resources that had previously been under come sort of collective, participatory control or management – began in England in earnest in the fifteenth century, accelerated in the eighteenth century (with the Industrial Revolution, which depended on it to guarantee its supply of natural resources) and was effectively complete by the end of the nineteenth century (though in the outposts of the Empire to which enclosure was exported it continued well into the twentieth century). The example was followed in other European countries and in the rest of Britain, with similar results (enclosure in Scotland took place largely in the eighteenth century when thousands of people were forcibly evicted from the Highlands to make way for sheep farming – the famous ‘clearances’). Here, as in other acts of what E.P. Thompson described as ‘class robbery’, England took a notable lead. A series of acts of parliament enclosed open and common land, creating legal property rights and restricting use of (and access to) once-common land and natural resources to a single, wealthy (and soon to be much wealthier) private owner. Between 1604 and 1914, more than 5,200 individual acts of enclosure were approved in England and Wales, enclosing 6.8 million acres. Communal rights were abolished. It was a seismic shift in how working people lived and made a living and in how they related to each other and to the land. It created wealth and power on a scale hitherto unimagined and began the unravelling of the complex threads that tie us to one another and to the natural world.

The consequences were dramatic, painful, bloody, and utterly divisive. Whereas, prior to enclosure, much farmland was collectively worked in the form of strips managed by tenant farmers during the growing season and made available for grazing animals and for other uses during the remainder of the year, enclosure meant this land was taken out of collective control, handed over to a wealthy landowner and developed, usually for single-use purposes. Walls and fences were erected, communities were erased, people were turned out of their homes and a vast pool of landless, impoverished workers was created. Urban slums began to develop. Working conditions were horrific. Starvation was common. Enclosure was bitterly resisted. People fought back. They were ruthlessly put down. Draconian new laws were introduced. Dissenters were hanged and quartered. Power relations between masters and workers were changed irrevocably. Social relationships were transformed, too, particularly those between men and women (as described by Silvia Federici in her brilliant book, Caliban and the Witch). It took hundreds of years, but people learned to live with this unequal and unnatural distribution of resources. They mostly accepted their new and (for women, especially) much diminished roles. They settled for a life working to pay off the debt on a tiny parcel of land they might one day own outright or paying rent on one someone else did (squeezed somewhere into the six per cent of the UK that is actually built on). They became docile, compliant, domesticated, content with their lot. The process of forgetting – what Federici terms the ‘enclosure of knowledge’ – began. We straightened our ties and sang the national anthem. We got dewy-eyed thinking about queen (or king) and country. We wept when princesses died. We made a virtue of our meekness. We knuckled down. It was as if none of this had ever happened. It became normal.

The main justification for the upheaval of enclosure was, of course, economic. Common land was often termed ‘waste land’ – revealing the prevailing attitude to commonly held land and forms of property sharing – and was considered unproductive and inefficient, prone to inevitable decline and depletion. This is the so-called ‘tragedy of the commons’ – Garret Hardin’s since discredited (but still hugely influential) thesis that common land use would lead inevitably to depletion and ruin. Individuals would inevitably take from the common lot in pursuit or protection of their own interests, overexploiting to prevent someone else from doing so, and decision-making about land use would inevitably be riven with conflict and disagreement, as individuals would act in their own self-interest rather than for the common good. Putting land into private hands, by comparison, would ensure a sustainable, planned use of agricultural land and enable an increase in food production and supply, benefitting all and thus offsetting the pain inflicted by land expropriation (theoretically, at least – in practice, landless workers faced centuries of acute privation, wage slavery and inhuman working conditions, which continue in many parts of the world). Furthermore, it was claimed, the single-use private cultivation of land would be more efficient and facilitate greater innovation in farming and food production.

All of this is contestable and largely ignores evidence of how the commons were, in fact, managed prior to enclosure and how, in practice, cooperation often trumped rapacious economic individualism. However, even if we accept that there is an economic rationale for enclosure and that it did bring some benefits in farming production and food supply, it is important to recognize that this argument for enclosure is ideologically skewed in one direction and overlooks many of the other advantages of the communal use of agricultural spaces, as Federici observes: ‘It protected the peasants from harvest failure, due the variety of strips to which a family had access; it also allowed for a manageable work-schedule (since each strip required attention at a different time); and it encouraged a democratic way of life, built on self-government and self-reliance, since all decisions – when to plant or harvest, when to drain the fens, how many animals to all on the commons – were taken by peasant assemblies’ (p. 73). Besides the promotion of ‘collective decision-making and work cooperation’, the commons were also ‘the material foundation upon which peasant solidarity and sociality could thrive’, in the form of festivals, social events and other gatherings, and were the centre of the social life of women (ibid.). The commons sustained life and community, but it didn’t make anybody rich.

The persuasiveness of Hardin’s ‘tragedy of the commons’ argument for enclosure – as opposed to, say, the rather more likely thesis that enclosure was driven by the acquisitiveness of some very wealthy individuals, further enriching them while creating an army of poor, exploitable labourers with no means of subsistence – rested largely on a one-dimensional view of human beings as essentially self-interested economic rationalists (who never talk to each other!) and discounted both people’s capacity to cooperate in sensible ways and their capacity to find value in non-economic activities (there are, of course, many examples of communities working together successfully to sustain their environments, in some cases over thousands of years). Enclosure was, among other things – and, it could be argued, most importantly – the triumph of one way of valuing things over all others. The typical justifications for enclosure exclude all but economic considerations and disregard inconvenient but nevertheless critical human values of care, community, social cohesion, solidarity, and cooperation. The only kind of use that mattered was private economic use. We give lip service to other things but, at bottom, they matter less, and can be conveniently shelved in moments of crisis. Over time, ‘development’ became synonymous with ‘economic development’, ‘growth’ with ‘economic growth’. It was the beginning of unsustainable development and extractivism: powerful people and nation states treating nature as an inexhaustible stage for economic development and personal enrichment and working people as not much more than unthinking obstacles to progress or, at best, as units of production – good workers who know their place. These are the sort of people the UK’s new Prime Minister Liz Truss is on the side of: ‘people who work hard and do the right thing’ (a phrase that will be applauded by some and chill the bones of others, me included).

The enclosure of agricultural land paved the way for enclosures of other kinds and made them, for the first time, thinkable (if a man can own a field or a meadow, why not ‘mountains’ or the ‘deep ocean bed’, to quote Ewan McColl). Other things we once shared have been privatised and made available to be bought and sold in the marketplace. The subsequent privatization and commodification of energy, water, health, schools, transport, mail delivery, the oceans and the atmosphere, even the human genome, all owe something to the ideology of enclosure. It was something of a breakthrough, in that respect. The result is everywhere around us: an England in which all but eight per cent of land is off limits to the public  and half the country is owned by one per cent of its population, where water companies make billions of pounds of profit while overseeing the mass pollution of rivers, lakes and coastal waters and the loss of billions of litres of clean water every day through leakage, and where tax cuts for high earners are prioritized even as ordinary people face a spiralling cost-of-living crisis far more severe than any in living memory. Even viewed through a purely economic lens, enclosure has been a failure. It has not ended poverty or solved inequality. It has not made energy cheaper, water cleaner or public transport more efficient. It has not improved education. It has not made people happier. And it has put the future of the planet itself in jeopardy. It’s been nothing short of a disaster.

A sort of enclosure of the mind has been required to make this wider process of dispossession possible, even, for some, painless. The ideology of enclosure, economic extractivism and private property rights has colonized our minds and imaginations to such an extent that other sorts of value have become almost impossible to utter. For policymakers, non-economic considerations are now not much more than an afterthought, to be mentioned apologetically or with a measure of embarrassment. What once would have seemed extreme or dehumanising is now simply normal. We no longer have to be coerced or threatened with imprisonment or torture or death to go along with the enclosure and privatisation of things we used to own together. We have come to accept that the value of almost everything can be expressed in terms of its contribution to economic growth and profitability. We are persuaded that the market is the best way of ordering and organising society, and that those who understand the market best are also best equipped to run everything else. Think of all the clever investment bankers called upon by government to head commissions of inquiry on subjects of which they have no specialised knowledge. Look at the number of Tory Cabinet members with a background in finance, or links to the oil industry or to private health. Making money is the new master science of which all others are mere derivatives.

It didn’t even make that much of a difference when a deregulated and recklessly acquisitive financial sector crashed the global economy. The public sector bailed out the banks. We took our medicine. We didn’t flinch. We accepted austerity. We have to live within our means, after all, right? Some even blamed the crisis on excessive public spending. Meanwhile, those responsible got richer and richer, while wages stagnated, and local democracy was hollowed out. Unsurprisingly, things got worse. Working families found themselves unable to put food on the table. Food banks sprang up in every part of the country as working people turned to charity for essential goods. People died waiting hours for ambulances. The NHS started to fall apart. Maybe immigrants were to blame? We voted in more amoral hucksters. What was the alternative? The politics of envy? Tax and spend? Jeremy Corbyn? Remember the winter of discontent? Crisis followed crisis. And when energy prices rocketed and it became clear that people only just getting by would no longer get by and in many cases would die trying, a clever solution was found: bail out the energy billionaires at huge long-term cost to the taxpayer. Oh, and let’s throw in a tax break for the water companies polluting Britain’s beaches with raw sewage. And no need to worry about where the money is coming from to pay for it – it’s not as if we’re using it to build a school or a library or anything daft like that! We continue to lurch from crisis to crisis, unable to think of anything better. The abject failure of the world’s industrialised countries to act to mitigate the climate emergency demonstrates that we remain in the grip of a belief system that prizes the good of a few over the good of all, and a political system bent to the will of the powerful.

In education, the evidence of ideological capture is impossible to ignore. Market mechanisms have been introduced across state education, promising choice for parents and students (who, of course, never asked for it), while encouraging competition among schools, universities, and colleges. In adult education, where I have spent much of my working life, there has been a notable shift in policy thinking away from the wider benefits of learning – learning for pleasure, personal enrichment, critical thinking, democratic citizenship, and so on – to learning for work and a job. The broader, life-wide conception of adult education promised by Labour when it came to power in 1997 gradually gave way to a much narrower focus on skills considered economically useful. Labour’s 2003 skills strategy White Paper, 21st Century Skills: Realising our potential, set out the government’s intention to pursue equality and fairness through economic modernization, with far less emphasis on the importance of widening participation in pursuit of a fair and equal society. Adult education’s role was to ensure that ‘employers have the right skills to support the success of their businesses and organizations, and individuals have the skills they need to be both employable and personally fulfilled’. Further ‘skills strategies’ followed, putting employers’ needs at the centre in the design and delivery of further education and training and requiring colleges to focus more sharply on employability and the supply of economically valuable skills. Government investment now emphasised making the UK a ‘world leader in skills’ by focusing on qualifications that had ‘real returns’ in the labour market. While previous governments had recognised the intrinsic value of adult education (it is no exaggeration to say that the UK’s adult education infrastructure was, not so long ago, hugely admired and imitated across the world) it was now discarded ‘in favour of a much more instrumental view of “skills” as an asset to be traded’.

These priorities, shared by all subsequent UK governments, had a serious and substantial impact on education provision that was not vocational or adjudged (often spuriously) to be economically productive. Between 2004-05 and 2006-07 alone more than 1.4 million adults were lost to publicly funded provision. Deep entrenchment in public spending after the financial crash resulted in a 38 per cent cut in spending on adult education and apprenticeships over the 10 years after the Tories came to power in 2010. The  Learning and Work Institute estimated that there had been a loss of 3.8 million adult learners over the period. In higher education, the tripling of tuition fees resulted in the number of part-time students falling by 56 per cent between 2010 and 2016 (the highest fall was among mature students aged over 35). Meanwhile, much of the infrastructure that supported adult education in the UK – the university extra-mural departments, the public libraries, the adult and community learning providers and community centres – closed because of austerity cuts. Courses in the arts and humanities were cut across the board, as the curriculum, in all but the hallowed halls of elite universities – those finishing schools for the great and the good – narrowed to a meagre diet of basic skills and work-related training. The critical role of adult education in fostering democracy and civic values, critical thinking and social cohesion was all but forgotten in the dash to equip us with ‘world-class skills’. Whereas Raymond Williams defined the primary task of the adult educator as ‘to critique the prevailing common sense’, they were now, in one way or another, charged with preparing adults for work. Philosophy, history, art, literature, languages, poetry, and music are increasingly the preserve of the privileged. For the rest of us, it is a grim diet of workplace preparation, training and retraining. It has become increasingly difficult to articulate why this is so wrong. Surviving in this environment means adopting the language of league tables, grades, markets, testing and competition. We have forgotten how to speak our mother tongue: the humanistic language of public value, social and civic purpose, and democracy.

The UK was not alone in this, of course (though successive governments have taken to the task of dismantling social purpose education with particular vigour and enthusiasm). Across the world the economic dimension of education has predominated over other dimensions, with prevailing discourses ‘embedded in the logic of the knowledge economy, driven by concern for human capital formation as dictated by the changing demands of the labour market’ and tending to ‘neglect the needs and interests of local communities’. The discourse of lifelong learning shifted away from education for active citizenship, for personal development or social justice, to serve not the interests of learners or their communities, but the interests of the market. You have only to look back 50 years to see how radical a change this has been. Consider, for example, the Russell Report of 1973 which called for ‘a great development of non-technical studies … vital to provide the fullest opportunities for personal development and for the realisation of a true conception of citizenship’; or UNESCO’s 1972 Faure report that argued that ‘lifelong education’ should focus on the formation of the ‘complete man’ [sic], an individual capable of acting as an ‘agent of development and change, promoter of democracy, citizen of the world and author of his own fulfilment’, and stressed its importance in promoting political consciousness and understanding of the mechanics of power, and contributing to the replacement of ‘a mechanical, administrative type of authority by a lively, democratic process of decision-making’. Going back further, the 1919 report of the British Ministry of Reconstruction’s Adult Education Committee called adult education ‘a permanent national necessity, an inseparable aspect of citizenship’ that should be ‘both universal and lifelong’. Such sentiments were unable to resist the march of economic rationalism, as neo-liberalism sought to conclusively reshape not only education but the ways in which we talk and think about it. In the same way, it eroded not only democracy, but democratic values, so that when the institutions of democracy came under attack – as they have, at home and abroad, over the past decade – we lacked the words to effectively repel it. We were suddenly voiceless, stripped of the necessary moral vocabulary. We could remember our story, but when it came to saying why it mattered, we were dumb. We could not say what we needed to say.

The struggle against enclosure is, in this sense, a struggle of memory against forgetting. A liveable future depends on us being prepared to look backwards while thinking forwards, to recognise the wrongs of the past and right them. Just because one way of organising society predominates doesn’t mean that others are not possible or that there are no alternatives available. But resisting the brute force of capitalist accumulation in education and other parts of our lives means changing the way we think and the language in which we express our thoughts. We have to widen the discourse to include ideas of solidarity, participation, democratic citizenship and social inclusion. This, in turn, demands that we subvert educational norms, and start to use education not as a way of reproducing the values of neoliberalism but as a means of overturning them. There has been some positive movement in this direction. There is more openness in the public discourse to the wider value of lifelong learning, as well as to ideas of democracy, social justice, and the commons, than there has been for some time. The United Nations’ Secretary General’s report, Our Common Agenda, for example, calls on the world to ‘re-embrace global solidarity and find new ways to work together for the common good’, including by forging a new ‘social contract anchored in human rights’ between governments and people and within society. This social contract, the report argues, should include the protection of the ‘global commons’ and ‘formal recognition of a universal entitlement to lifelong learning and reskilling, translated into practice through legislation, policy and effective lifelong learning systems.’ The final report of UNESCO’s Futures of Education initiative, Reimagining our futures together: A new social contract for education, takes some of these ideas further. It demands ‘a new social contract for education to repair injustices while transforming the future’. Such a contract, it argues, must be ‘grounded in human rights and based on principles of non-discrimination, social justice, respect for life, human dignity, and cultural diversity. It must encompass an ethic of care, reciprocity, and solidarity. It must strengthen education as a public endeavour and a common good.’

The UNESCO report recognises the need to ‘think differently about learning and the relationships between students, teachers, knowledge and the world’, to ‘reimagine pedagogical approaches’ around ‘the principles of cooperation, collaboration, and solidarity’ and to foster participation in a ‘knowledge commons’ that learners further co-create. It deploys a moral vocabulary that explicitly values solidarity, cooperation, equity and inclusion, community, co-creation and the common good. This marks an important shift in emphasis. But, of course, it is not enough, as the report acknowledges: it is only an invitation to a ‘global conversation’. Many questions are left unanswered, not least how education’s potential contribution to social transformation can be realised in a context deeply inimical to it, where it is opposed by the most powerful and entrenched interests in society. The report talks, in hopeful terms, about reversing the emphasis on values of ‘individual success, national competition and economic development to the detriment of solidarity, understanding our interdependencies, and caring for each other and the planet’, but it stops short, quite deliberately, of describing how we turn this promise into action in a world shaped not by the pursuit of the common good but by private interests. As with enclosure, there is an opposing set of values, a different ideology, driven by the logic of the market, which is cloaked with what we might call economic necessitism – the presentation of political choices as economic necessities (and thus not choices at all). Recovering some sense of the commons and the language of public endeavour, community and social justice means acknowledging and confronting these values and the powerful private interests that perpetuate them. They won’t go away by themselves.

Part of this realism involves recognition of the failure of government to protect the commons and the close alignment of government with the private interests. This is emphatically true in the UK, where, under the Conservatives, there is a revolving door between the cabinet and the finance and fossil fuel industries, but it is also true, to one degree or another, in other countries in the Global North. Over a decade working in adult education advocacy in the UK, I saw minister after minister espouse their warm appreciation of lifelong learning, while overseeing its ruthless dismantling. As I have written in a previous post, it is no longer possible to take political undertakings at face value: politicians routinely speak for undisclosed interests and lobby aggressively behind the scenes for them. In such an environment it is simply not responsible for the advocates of adult education to work with government in delivering policy in a wider political context which is making the realisation of education’s potential for transformation more difficult. Reasserting the link between education and social change will not be achieved through political influence and advocacy. Like many people, I feel utterly disillusioned with conventional politics. It is not much more than a pantomime, poorly performed, by actors with contempt for their audience. I now believe that education can be most effective in reconstructing and enlarging the space between nation state and the private economic interests they support, by working with social movements and activities of one kind or another to reassert and recreate the commons. It is in this space that a future society based on sustainability and social justice can best be imagined and put into practice. We need to create a new commons of the imagination through which we can begin to transform the world around us.

It is clear that education’s transformative role can only be realised as part of a wider effort to challenge the powerful orthodoxies that sustain our failing and dysfunctional world. But it is just as obvious that radical change will not be achieved without education and that we should not wait for the world to change to embrace better and different. Adult education has an especially important role to play in opening up more places and spaces of transformation, where we can begin to resist the enclosure and commodification of everything and find different, more sustainable ways of being together, with each other and with the world, and of differently valuing things essential to our welfare and wellbeing. In navigating the converging storms of the climate emergency, the forced displacement of millions of people, demographic change, technological transformation and chronic inequality, we need adult education that prioritises critical thinking and empowerment, promotes active citizenship and community involvement, supports the co-creation of knowledge, and foster links with social movements and forms of activism. It is not enough to teach people about democracy and democratic methods; all forms of education should be an essentially democratic practice. We should try to embody, in all our work, the sort of wider change we want to see in society. Like the activists leading the right to roam movement in the UK, we need to trespass onto other forms of knowledge and understanding.  We should ignore the keep out signs, the high fences, the hedgerows, and the barbed wire. Teachers shouldn’t accept the curriculum handed to them. They should be prepared to cross boundaries with their students, looking elsewhere and everywhere in their attempts at co-creation. We cannot reconstitute the commons without tearing down the walls of enclosure.

In our search for a new vocabulary of value we need to look back to the worlds that existed (and exist) before capitalism, to understand that there are different ways of organising society and to explore Indigenous knowledge and systems of belief. While capitalism has enclosed almost everything on earth, we need not accept this as the end of our story (though if we cannot change, it surely will be). We can imagine the world differently, we can value different things, we can choose our future. We have to. After all, money, markets, finance, economics, profit and growth have no use or meaning outside a functioning eco-system. This imaginative effort is not trivial. It is essential. We have to find a way forward that does not repeat the errors of the past, that does not continue to tear at the social fabric and trash the natural world, but that is somehow a part of our shared history and experience. We can be different, in spite of everything. There will never be a better moment. There will never be another chance. Many of us have a feeling that we should do more. I do myself. Even experienced activists struggle with living out beliefs in a consistent way, in every part of their lives, all the time. But we shouldn’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. The trick is to contribute, with whatever we have to give, wherever we can, whether in the classroom, in the workplace or on the streets. As Leon Rosselson memorably asked, ‘Capitalism is in crisis, my dear, but where are the barricades?’

A country in search of a future

Hustings have been taking place around the country. The two candidates for political leadership of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland have taken part in head-to-head debates on national television. Both have set out new policy agendas departing significantly from their party’s previous manifesto, lurching to the right on issues such as tax, public spending and education. Yet there is no general election. The new Prime Minister – successor to the current incumbent, a disgraced, farcical and now largely absent figure who appears (holidays permitting) to be undertaking a sort of bucket-list tour of his duties while the country he is supposed to lead lurches from crisis to crisis – will be selected by 180,000 or so Conservative Party members, people likely to be middle-aged or older (most are over 60), relatively wealthy and located in affluent constituencies in southern England. They are also more likely to be male, less likely to be graduates and more likely to be from higher socio-economic groups than their counterparts in the Labour, Liberal Democrat and Scottish nationalist parties. Such are the people who, in a manner only marginally more democratic that that used by the Chinese Community Party to select its new leaders, will decide which wealthy, acquisitive, Oxbridge-educated Tory next gets a go at running the United Kingdom.

It is not possible to say with accuracy what Conservative Party members think and believe. However, it is clear from the dizzying escalation of populist far-right policy proposals from the two candidates how they and their advisers view them: They believe (and there is a measure of contempt in this belief, I suspect) them to be in favour of redistributing income from the poorest to the wealthiest parts of the country and penalizing the poor, particularly those who fail to turn up to their GP appointments. They dislike political correctness  and ‘woke’ culture and consider the benefits of a liberal education to be the preserve of the rich. They believe (against all evidence to the contrary) that grammar schools are the key to social mobility, want less spent on public services and believe in tax cuts in preference to ‘hand outs’. They are not especially keen on human rights or public protest, are not overly troubled by climate change and remain enthusiasts of Brexit. Above all, perhaps, they believe the nation’s salvation to lie in the past – whether by restoring Thatcherism (the socio-economic death cult that captured the party in the 1980s and has kept a firm grip on its supporters’ thinking ever since, such that no party leadership candidate, even now, dares to disavow it), reviving grammar schools or returning the country to levels of income inequality not seen since the early 1900s.

This is a caricature, of course, but it is evidently one in which Tory parliamentarians believe and to which they consistently appeal, and I suspect it is not so very far from the mark. After all, party members represent the base which the parliamentary party has sought to appease in its drift to the right and its embrace of policies on issues such as migration and civil rights that can fairly be described as extremist and authoritarian. Simon Kuper in the Financial Times neatly summed up what the Conservative Party has become in the course of this journey into the darkness: an ‘old people’s party’ that doesn’t care about the future; one prepared to ignore ‘the dearth of new homes, record low birth-rates, the threat to funding for British university research through the EU’s Horizon scheme, reduced opportunities for Britons to work or study abroad, not to mention climate change’, that ‘takes the geriatric side in culture wars, keeps house prices rising, and redistributes not to the poor but to pensioners’ and that ‘imports a non-voting workforce while encouraging geriatric grumbles about immigration’. It is a party that sides ‘with wealth – held chiefly by the elderly – against incomes’.

It is unsurprising, therefore, that the party’s supporters continue to invoke the memory of Margaret Thatcher. Her ‘right to buy’ policy (a right, like many espoused by the party, available only to those who can afford it) of selling off social housing at discounted rates and her belief in a ‘property-owning democracy’ created a new social sub-class of well-off homeowners who saw their houses principally as investments, while simultaneously denying the less well-off access to decent, affordable housing, thus enabling the rapid escalation of property prices and rental rates. Protecting this new wealth, acquired at little cost and with little effort on the part of those who benefited (though at enormous cost to many of those who didn’t), has become the business of a party that cares little for the troubles of the young or for the ongoing housing crisis it created. For subsequent generations the boom in property ownership has contributed to mass indebtedness and precarity, making work for millions of people (the young, especially) not much more than a form of indentured servitude linked to debt repayment.

The revival of Thatcher’s flagship right-to-buy policy continues to be a popular fallback for Conservative leaders, particularly when new ideas are in short supply (as, to be frank, they generally are). The policy is, however, indicative of more than just a party out of ideas. It demonstrates a willful disregard for the well-understood negative consequences of right to buy, as well as indifference to the needs of those languishing in grubby, insecure private accommodation whose lives could be transformed by the ready availability of decent social housing. Like the Johnson government’s proposal to reintroduce imperial measurements and the frequent harking back to the supposed golden age of grammar schools, it is a backward-looking, populist policy calculated to appeal to a certain constituency. It is hard to gauge how serious ministers are when they make such proposals (it could just be the latest front in the government’s tedious attempt to foster ‘culture wars’). But the attempt to glamorise the past says a great deal about both the leaders and the followers of modern Conservatism: they are a party of the past for a country that would prefer no to think about the future. Imperial weights and measures may be a part of our history and language, and perhaps even our identity (as the government’s consultation suggests), but they have not been taught in schools for generations and should certainly not be part of our future. This misty-eyed nostalgia for a fondly imagined golden age in which everything was as it should be, and everyone knew his or her place, is far from harmless. It is steeped in a distrust of foreigners and a fear of change and difference. And while it may be understandable that, in a time of unpredictable change and unprecedented, existential challenge, leaders strive to hold on to what we (or they and their friends) have, it should be just as clear that in such moments – in this moment – we need change and difference. More of the same will only edge us closer to the precipice.

Yet this appears to be all that is on offer. Even the Labour Party – increasingly an opposition in name only – refuses to offer anything new or better, preferring to shackle itself to the sinking ship of British Conservatism rather that engage with the real challenges we face and devise a vision of a different, fairer and more sustainable future people can actually get behind (or at least consider). In such an environment, the candidates for the leadership of the Conservative Party can make proclamation after proclamation in their search for the all-important Golf Club bar vote, cheerfully recanting them the next day if they don’t fly right. Rishi Sunak’s proposal to phase out university degrees that do not improve students’ ‘earning potential’ is a typical foray into the clubhouse lounge, a flip, kneejerk attempt to appeal to those who think arts degrees are rubbish (‘not worth the paper they are written on’) and academic teaching is a hotbed of steaming woke (bloody Marxists!). Sunak is on comfortable, familiar ground. The press has been banging on about ‘Mickey Mouse’ degrees for years. His target, of course, is not Oxford or Cambridge. The privileged, privately educated sons and daughters of the wealthy can continue to study what they like at the elite finishing school of their choice. His target is the newer universities, the red-brick unis and the former polys, the places people like us send our kids. No history or philosophy for them. No liberal arts. You can forget all that. That’s not for you. You need to get ready for work! Be productive! Be deserving! Like Thatcher’s right to buy policy, it’s a divisive ‘fuck you’ to some dressed up as freedom for all.

The irony of all of this, of course, is that we need more access to arts and humanities not less. In a moment of acute challenge, we need people who can think differently and see the bigger picture. We need people who can think critically, who are tolerant and civically minded, who are compassionate and thoughtful. Rather than closing humanities courses and discouraging working-class students from taking an interest in the arts, we should be looking to ensure that arts and the humanities are an ongoing, integral part of everyone’s education, and that the discovery of a vocation does not mean the end of a person’s wider education. We are all human – none more than anyone else – and we all deserve the chance to explore, to be curious and creative, to be what we bloody well want to be! Education should be about opening doors, not closing them, now more than ever, when we must learn to be and do different. The Conservative Party leadership campaign has underlined how shoddily we are led. We need political leadership that builds a bridge to the future, not leadership that holds on to the past and refuses to do better. We must break free of all the old traps. That is what leading for the future would look like. Instead, for now, we have leaders and followers desperate to hold on to the past, even after it has gone. For those left behind by the Tories’ dreams of a suburban paradise of shining cars and lush green lawns (there are no hosepipe bans in paradise), there is the generational accumulation of misery where work, debt and death are the only certainties – and hope, the elusive, joyful, fluttering thing with feathers, has long since been silenced, shot dead and stuffed. We should not wait for change to come. We should not ask politely, caps twisted in our sooty fingers. Freedom, after all, is never given. It has to be taken.

Against work

‘Why should I let the toad work squat on my life?’ wonders Philip Larkin in his half-funny, half-wise meditation on work. Why, he asks, should he give up six days of his week to work, when the meagre rewards are so out of proportion with what he must sacrifice to gain them? His answer, it seems, is that there is something sufficiently toad-like in his own character to oblige him to muddle along in his job. Escaping the toad work in pursuit of money, fame or ‘the girl’ is a romantic enough idea, but, in the end, it is not for him.

Larkin’s poem sticks in the head. Who among those of us obliged to work for a living hasn’t wondered this? Who hasn’t woken up, still processing the drudgery and waste of the previous working day, only to be sucked reluctantly into another? Who hasn’t sat at their desk, writing a report no-one will read or preparing for a meeting no-one will remember, and wondered whether their time might be employed more constructively? But I sense that for Larkin it was more of an academic question than it is for working people now (and, of course, the relatively privileged Larkin had more options available to him than working people did then or do now). As he says, it would seem easy enough to fend off the toad, more pest than predator, with a pitchfork (he suggests), should he choose to. It is more his inertia, his fear of the unknown, that keeps him from ditching work for something better.

Since Larkin’s time, work has come to occupy an increasingly large and inescapable place in our lives, despite the emergence of technologies that could be used to make all of our lives easier and more commodious. Work asks more of us than before, in many cases for fewer rewards. I know this varies from place to place, but in the UK working hours have increased (British workers work longer hours than most other countries in Europe) while wages have stagnated and insecure contracts (including zero-hours contracts) have become common. Many families in poverty have one or two parents working, sometimes doing multiple poor-quality jobs, for low pay and with little job security. Work, once considered the guarantor of a decent life, now purchases only the most tenuous of grips on the good life. According to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, 56 per cent of people living in poverty in the UK in 2018 were in a household where at least one person had a job, compared with 39 per cent 20 years ago. The twin manacles of debt and precarity keep the show on the road: however bad things get there is always something worse. The costs of not being ‘in work’ can be life-alteringly high and are often immediate, given the hand-to-mouth financial existence most of us now face.

Work is also much more invasive now, thanks to technology and particularly smart phones, a technology that promises connection but delivers isolation. They have, among other things, made the barrier between home and work more permeable – we are available all the time, we never switch off fully. Work is only a push notification away. It is everywhere, yet it never seems to end, expanding, seemingly endlessly, to fill whatever space we make available for it. COVID-19 and the lockdowns have exacerbated these trends for many people. Work is in your living room, your bedroom, your kitchen, thanks to Zoom, Teams and other technologies; something to be managed alongside homeschooling and other home responsibilities that usually occupy a different sphere of life. A survey commissioned by the Royal Society for Public Health in the UK found that 56 per cent of lockdown home-workers found it harder to switch off from work, while 67 per cent felt less connected to colleagues, 46 per cent took less exercise, 39 per cent had developed musculoskeletal problems and 37 per cent suffered disturbed sleep. The shift to homeworking, while giving some workers a chance of improved work-life balance, has also resulted in an increase in work stress and feelings of isolation which are already taking a toll on people’s mental health, especially, I suspect, among women, who still do most of the unpaid work at home and take on most of the caring responsibilities.

Furthermore, as anthropologist David Graeber argued in his polemical book Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, much of the work we do while we are ‘at work’ is ‘meaningless’, ‘pointless’ or ‘useless’ work of dubious value and, often, obscure purpose. A survey commissioned to test the book’s thesis found that 37 per cent of the British workers who responded believed their job did not ‘make a meaningful contribution to the world’ (50 per cent of people felt their job did and 13 per cent were uncertain). A survey of Dutch workers, also reported by Graeber, found that 40 per cent felt their job ‘had no good reason to exist’. While the definitional blurriness of the questions limits what we can read into such surveys, it is, nonetheless, a depressing sentiment, given the vast amount of time we spend at work and the role it plays in our sense of self-identity. It is also one to which many people will relate. Even people who see value in parts of their work frequently complain that they have too little time to focus on those aspects of their work that are valuable, usually the primary function of the role. The rest of their time is filled with wasteful meetings, reading and responding to emails, compliance with reporting and monitoring requirements, ticking quality kitemark boxes, and other administrative tasks, not to mention the now obligatory updating of our social media profiles and the innumerable other compulsive distractions and micro-stimuli thrown up by AI. The problem, as Graeber frames it, is that we value the job rather than the work, that is to say the fact of being in work, rather than the outcomes or point of the work. ‘More jobs’ is an end in itself, pursued by all political parties, irrespective of the nature or conditions of the work. And even though there is evidence that a shorter working week would make people more productive and happier, no mainstream party is seriously pushing for this.

I hope it is clear that I have no issue with work in and of itself. Work can be hugely fulfilling, especially when it is work you love or you feel matters. It can give you a sense of purpose and community, as well as a structure to life many people find useful. What I take issue with is the disproportionately large place work, in its institutionalized forms, now occupies in our lives and its tendency to exclude other things that matter and to override questions of value that we need to be asking; now more than ever. We work too much and, in most cases, for too little. But it is not only that. Precarity, personal indebtedness, housing costs, low wages, the high cost of living and the direct and indirect costs of a decent education for our kids mean that those of us not fortunate enough to be born into wealth, privilege and property face an almost impossible task in shrugging off the yoke and getting off the treadmill that is our inheritance. This not only breeds hopelessness and degradation but occupies our time and minds in such a way that it is almost impossible to think our way to anything better. We are agitated, humiliated and anxious, dismayed yet also curiously calm and almost disinterested because we believe nothing can change. What people who have never been without money find difficult to understand is how utterly absorbing, how emptying it can be to have very little, how the thought of it and what it means fills the room and every space in your life, including your thoughts, a constant, niggling, spiteful voice that is never done with you. There is little room for anything else.

Education is a case in point, and a highly instructive one because it demonstrates how radically things have changed in past decades. In a relatively short time, work has become the be all and end all of education policy, to the almost complete exclusion of education for non-economistic purposes. It is important to remind ourselves that this was not always so. The 1973 Russell Report on adult education in the UK, for example, noted that ‘The value of adult education is not solely to be measured by direct increases in earning power or productive capacity or by any other materialistic yardstick, but by the quality of life it inspires in the individual and generates for the community at large’. A ‘great development of non-technical studies’, it argued, was ‘vital to provide the fullest opportunities for personal development and for the realization of a true conception of citizenship’. As recently as 1997, Helena Kennedy, in her introduction to Learning Works, a report on improving participation in further education, observed:

Education must be at the heart of any inspired project for regeneration in Britain. It should be a springboard for the revitalisation that our communities so urgently need. However, in all the political debates, it is the economic rationale for increasing participation in education which has been paramount. Prosperity depends upon there being a vibrant economy, but an economy which regards its own success as the highest good is a dangerous one. Justice and equity must also have their claim upon the arguments for educational growth. In a social landscape where there is a growing gulf between those who have and those who have not, the importance of social cohesion cannot be ignored.

Since Learning Works was published, the language in which we talk about education has changed dramatically. It is difficult to imagine any government paper now offering an alternative to the ‘economic rationale’ for investing in education. The atmosphere has changed. It is almost as though the part of our vocabulary that deals with value that isn’t private or economic has been excised from the language. We find it hard even to articulate its absence, other than by talking in instrumental terms that contribute to the further othering of these different kinds of value. The most recent UK Government white paper on further education was called Skills for jobs: Lifelong learning for opportunity and growth, a title that summed up neatly both the current UK Government’s lack of ambition – its aim is not even skills for work, or a life of work, but skills for jobs merely – and its narrow, utilitarian view of lifelong learning, opportunity and growth. Where is learning for active citizenship or sustainable development, for health and wellbeing, for critical thinking or community cohesion?  Where is education that fosters a love and understanding of art or culture? Where is learning that builds resilience, creativity or the capacity to learn throughout life? We ask in vain.

The change is not only in the language we use, of course, important though this is. It is reflected in the reduction in opportunities for adults to learn for purposes other than basic skills acquisition or employment. In the UK, we have seen a steady decline in adult learner numbers since Labour decided to treat work as a proxy for all kinds of social inclusion from 2003 on, and a very substantial narrowing in the types of opportunity available to adults to learn, culminating in the slash-and-burn vandalism of successive Conservative-led governments after 2010. The austerian politics of the past 10 years or so have given Conservatives the opportunity to complete the demolition of the infrastructure of adult learning begun under Labour, forcing learning for purposes other than work further to the margins and practically eliminating it from further education colleges and higher education continuing education (the ‘extra-mural’ tradition). Adult education beyond skills for work has not quite gone, but it is embattled and precarious, and survives in spite of government policy rather than because of it.

Although no other sector has suffered cuts on the scale of adult education, the trend that has driven these cuts is reflected elsewhere, with comparable consequences. In both (state) schools and (non-elite) higher education, curricula have narrowed, with careers predominant and arts and the humanities increasingly disfavoured. In England, for example, curriculum breadth has been reduced as a result of funding pressure and real-terms cuts to state school funding, with pupils losing out on subjects such as languages, computing, design and technology, and music. ‘Catching up’ after lockdown, according to the education secretary, is likely to involve a further narrowing of the curriculum to focus on English and maths, with other subjects dropped or offered in reduced form. Meanwhile, in higher education, universities, particularly the non-elite, less selective institutions, have stripped back their offers in the humanities. History programmes have been particularly under pressure of late, with both Aston University and South Bank University peremptorily axing apparently successful history programmes, as the government pushes for a greater focus on ‘high-value’ technical and vocational courses. The dizzying price tag now attached to higher education courses has deepened the impression that education is a private transaction with primarily private benefits. And the need for (mostly) working-class students to find work to fund their studies, in addition to loans, has radically changed the university experience, robbing less well-off students of the space to think and explore, free from the pressures of work and time. The main and most important single product of the non-elite English higher education system is indebtedness.

As working-class adult education for civic, social and personal-development purposes has retreated, vocational higher education has been on the march, spurred on by New Labour’s incoherent 50 per cent HE participation target. This target has been reached but the achievement, such as it is, masks real and persistent inequalities. While full-time higher education is being accessed by more young people than ever before, the loss of part-time students over the past decade – there was a 61 per cent fall between 2010 and 2018 – means that the student body is, in fact, less diverse than it was before, with fewer opportunities for poor and working-class young people and adults. For those working-class, first-generation students who do make it to university, the experience is likely to be very different to that of their better-off, more privileged peers. Working-class young people are more likely to apply to and attend a non-elite university with a more vocational offer, and to combine work with study. A broad, liberal education is increasingly the preserve of the wealthy and privileged, who also enjoy the further benefits of freedom from work during their studies and emerging from university without debt. English higher education increasingly operates two tiers, one dominated by the privately educated whose time is their own to dispose of and who can choose to study what they like, and the other largely dominated by students from state schools, already well used to being told what they can learn, who have to combine work and study and face a limited choice with a strong emphasis on the vocational. Education for the children of the wealthy – training for everyone else.

Rather than giving students an experience of intellectual and personal freedom, higher education as most UK students experience it offers them a taste of what life will be like after they leave university, heavily in debt and managing work and other responsibilities, continuously conscious of time pressure and their obligations to others, overworked and under-supported, with a clear line of sight to the burdens and dissatisfactions of their working futures. Education, which should give us the means to break our chains or at least to reflect on how to do so, instead ends up further stupefying us, closing down options it should keep open, and filling our cognitive spaces with anxiety and agitation that stop us thinking about anything else (and also keep us firmly in line). It’s not that vocational education isn’t valuable. It certainly is. It’s just that it isn’t everything, and the purpose of education is not merely to prepare us for a job, or even for work, it is to prepare us to be good citizens, friends, lovers, parents, neighbours and carers, among other things. It is not that we have forgotten about these things, so much as we have lost our ability to talk about them as though they matter (even though we know they do). We are workers first, people second. And in the condition of permanent anxiety and distractedness in which very many of us live our lives, it is not surprising that we have difficulty thinking of how things might be better, even doubting whether it is possible that they ever can be.

Somehow, we have come to think of this very abnormal and unhealthy situation as normal, and even natural. People scoff at the idea of reducing people’s working hours with no loss of pay, despite evidence that it would improve productivity and reduce our carbon footprint, as well as improving people’s health  and wellbeing and strengthening their bonds with their families and communities. We have stopped believing that the future can be any different from the present. But, of course, planetary survival demands exactly this – that we imagine what seems unimaginable. It is a huge challenge and education is pivotal to it. We need an education that gives us grounds for hope rather than convincing reasons for despair, to paraphrase Raymond Williams. We need the space first to imagine change, and then to live it. But achieving this means doing, and thinking about, education differently. It means admitting that we are some distance down the wrong path and learning, with appropriate humility, from other knowledges, especially indigenous knowledges. Changing our relationship with the natural world means, among other things, changing our relationship with work. Work is making many of us unwell, reproducing patterns of inequality and driving the climate crisis. While it should be a vehicle through which people can achieve their potential, in very many cases it is directly preventing this. It is absorbing our attention to a degree that excludes other possibilities, even the possibility of change. Challenging must start with education and with the acknowledgement that while work matters, it is not the only thing that matters, nor even, as I wrote in my last post, the thing that matters most. If we are to dream again, and dream better, we need education to hold open the door to a different future, not close it.

Not levelling up: Britain’s failure to be progressive

This month, the UK’s Social Mobility Commission published the latest in a series of reports highlighting Britain’s failure to reduce inequality or advance social mobility. It found that 600,000 more children are now living in relative poverty than in 2012 and projected that this would increase further due to benefit changes and coronavirus. In schools, less than a quarter of disadvantaged students get a good pass in English and maths, the commission’s report noted, compared with around 50 per cent of all other pupils, while half of all adults from the poorest backgrounds receive no training at all after leaving school. It also reported that life expectancy is falling for women in the most deprived areas, with health inequalities linked to socio-economic background further exposed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Not only have successive governments failed to make progress in these areas, things have been getting worse, and, unless we do something radically different in our politics, they will get worse still, with those at the bottom paying the highest price. This is a frightening prospect – just over a year ago, the UN’s special rapporteur on poverty, Philip Alston, found the government to be in breach of its human rights obligations concerning poverty, predicting that 40 per cent of British children would be in poverty by 2021.

It has become a tradition for incoming Tory Prime Ministers to affect a passionate interest in these issues. After earnestly praising her predecessor’s record on social justice (Cameron, the architect of austerity, recast as a champion of the disadvantaged!), Theresa May used her first speech as Prime Minister to promise to prioritise ‘not the mighty nor the wealthy nor the privileged’ but working-class people who are ‘just managing’ but want to ‘get on in life’, correcting in the process the ‘burning injustices’ of educational disadvantage, economic exclusion and systemic racism. Similarly, current PM Boris Johnson undertook to ‘change the country for the better’ by delivering Brexit [sic], renewing ‘the ties that bind us together’ as a nation and ‘closing the opportunity gap’ by ‘levelling up’ in education, wages, housing and so on. It remains to be seen whether ‘levelling up’ will be more than the latest in the long line of glib, vacuous slogans (‘Take back control’, ‘Get Brexit done’, etc., etc.) on which Johnson has based his political career. Past experience (not to mention Johnson’s well-documented disdain for working people) encourages us to doubt it.

Such statements can (perhaps rather generously) be read as a serious attempt to reinvigorate working-class Toryism (the respectable face of the brand), with its traditional emphasis on hard work, self-reliance and a strong sense of national identity. But it also represents a party political power grab, exploiting the confused and febrile nature of our current political climate, and the Labour party’s failure to take seriously or attempt to understand the concerns of many traditional voters, to convince those who have fared worst under the Tories that in fact the party is on their side. Of course, if such rhetoric were to become a reality it would come as a surprise to the people who fund the Conservative Party, drawn, as they are, from among the ‘mighty’, ‘wealthy’ and ‘privileged’ (we should probably add ‘Russian’ to this list), but, of course, it is not aimed at them and they know better than to take it literally. While the message may sound progressive, the intention is not. Closing the education gap has tended to mean more selection and increased scrutiny (of state schools) and more centralised policy tinkering, while promises to reinvigorate neglected regions often generate grand announcements which deliver little and commitments to devolve power which come heavily qualified and are often little more than national-level blame shifting (austerity has resulted, among other things, in the hollowing out and enfeeblement of local government) or a means of sticking it to the ‘metropolitan elite’.

The failure of government to deliver on these promises is not the story of well-intentioned political will encountering intractable forces it cannot shift, despite the best efforts of our leaders. It is the well-understood, and entirely predictable, outcome of Conservative thinking and the institutions and interests the party represents and protects. Chief among these is the remarkable domination of elite professions and positions of influence, not to mention elite universities, by the 7 per cent of the British population who attend private schools. This isn’t evidence of the genetic superiority of ‘ancient families’, as some of those within and close to the current government appear, genuinely, to believe, but rather the result of social engineering intended to ensure that privilege is passed on from generation to generation. These institutions, which continue to receive public subsidy despite actively working against the life chances of the vast majority of people who live in the UK, perpetuate historic disadvantage and reinforce the social snobbery and segregation that squeeze opportunity for all but the best-off and make British society so miserably class-bound, so grubbily deferential and disunited.

One of the things that most struck me when I moved to Germany three years ago was the social mix of pupils and their parents in the German grundschule (primary school) my son attended. There is no social segregation because privilege has not been institutionalised within the system. Private schools play a marginal role in the German education system, and there is an expectation that the state will provide an excellent standard of education for every child and in every school. Things were quite different at my son’s old primary school, in a relatively prosperous suburb of Liverpool. Not only was there social segregation by property – the better-off neighbourhoods also had the best schools and there was competition among parents to buy into those areas so as to access those schools (and avoid the bad ones) – but almost all the parents at our school were from non-professional, mostly blue-collar backgrounds. Professional people sent their kids to one or other of the numerous private, fee-paying schools in the area, and there was wide appreciation of the fact that these establishments were much better resourced and much better at educating and represented the best way of giving your children a leg-up in life. If you could afford it, in other words, this is what you did. It is astonishing how normal this chronic systemic unfairness is in British life. It is hardly challenged.

While schools in the state sector in England are subject to rigorous, high-stakes inspection and near continual central political reform, usually aimed at increasing selection and providing greater ‘choice’ for parents (though I am yet to meet a parent for whom this is a priority), private schools are free to game the system in favour of their students. For example, Sevenoaks school, which charges more than £38,000 a year for boarding pupils, has a policy of exaggerating exam grade predictions for its lowest-performing students ‘to facilitate application to a more selective university’. While it is rare for a private school to put this policy in writing, as Sevenoaks did, it is, I suspect, a strategy that is widely, though perhaps less formally, deployed. Private school pupils also gain advantage from the support of well-educated parents who understand how the system works and how to game it. Unsurprisingly, once they are at university, students from state schools outperform privately education students admitted with the same A-level grades. Kids from wealthier backgrounds also benefit from the support of private tutors and the confidence that comes from attending an elite institution. With the odds so firmly stacked against kids from poor and working-class backgrounds, it is little wonder social mobility has stalled and, indeed, gone backwards, and that so many communities feel – and indeed are – ‘left behind’. Despite these very real and obvious inequities, and the anti-democratic networks of nepotism and low-level corruption they foster, the impact of private schools is not even up for meaningful policy discussion in the UK, I guess unsurprisingly given the hold their alumni they have on politics and media in the country.

Educational disadvantage for less-privileged students is further compounded in post-compulsory education. While private school pupils swell the ranks of elite universities to a disproportionate degree, state school pupils are more likely to apply to less prestigious institutions, where their degrees are likely to have a stronger vocational dimension. Further education too has seen a steady narrowing of its curriculum to focus on workplace and employability skills, while taking a huge funding hit since 2010. Adult education, the route through which working people can gain a second chance and access higher learning, has also faced devastating cuts since 2010. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies, funding for adult education in FE in England was cut by 45 per cent between 2009/10 and 2017/18. At the same time, local authority adult education provision, which targets in particular the most disadvantaged and hardest-to-reach adults, has also faced swingeing cuts. The Local Government Association (LGA) estimates that the government would need at least to double the adult education budget (from £1.5 billion to £3 billion) to reverse the overall 3.8 million drop in learner numbers since 2010. The number of adults in higher education in England has also been in freefall under the Conservatives. The total number of mature undergraduate entrants fell from more than 400,000 in 2010/11 to fewer than 240,000 in 2017/18 – a drop of 40 per cent. Part-time student numbers have collapsed too, with the Higher Education Policy Institute (HEPI) reporting a 61 per cent drop since 2010, most of these being mature students aged 21 or above. HEPI estimates that the loss in part-time numbers equates to 17 per cent fewer students from disadvantaged backgrounds accessing higher education in England.

Government plans to invest in school rebuilding and FE estate upgrades in England are welcome, of course, as is the relative funding stability of the past few years, but they come nowhere near repairing the damage done or the disadvantage deepened by cuts to schools and colleges since 2010. Still less do they address the systemic causes of disadvantage. The dismantling of adult education, besides being an appalling act of cultural vandalism, matters also because it closes off the main channel through which adults have traditionally been able to improve their lives and engage more fully in civic and social life. For adults who are not wealthy, the educational story of the past decade has been of one door shutting after another and a continual stifling of opportunity. Wherever you learn, whether at school in college, at university or in the community, there has been a steady narrowing of curricula choice and variety, with the arts and humanities under repeated attack and provision increasingly focused on work and employability and producing young people who are ‘job ready’ (as opposed to life or even work ready). It is clear from the direction of policy that while working people can expect an education that will prepare them for a job and, if they are very lucky, a life of work, the kind of liberal education that prepares people to live a full life illuminated by an appreciation of culture, political and civic engagement, and the capacity to think and argue critically and communicate ideas effectively, is to be more or less the exclusive preserve of the better-off and privileged.

I feel that we give our leaders too much credit by taking their commitments at face value. The COVID-19 crisis has shone a light on the appalling unfairness of some little-challenged aspects of national life, including the vast privileges bestowed by a private education and the dreadful poverty of opportunity they impose on the rest of us. It is right, of course, to applaud any intervention which will benefit learners and help make the country more equal, but too often in applauding the good intentions of policy we forget to hold government to account for the regressive thinking and systemic disadvantage that holds people and communities back and excludes them from opportunity. We can go back to the way things were, of course, and many would welcome it. But we have, in the midst of the current crisis, an opportunity to do things differently, to consider whether we want a system that self-consciously perpetuates social injustice and inequality, or think instead about abolishing private school education and rebalancing education spending more fairly, to the benefit both of disadvantaged children and young people, and adults, whose opportunities to access learning have been the most badly affected by the austerity politics of the past decade. Everyone deserves a decent education. We are not economic units; we are people with rich capabilities and capacities that should not be casually squandered. If we want a society that is both fair and prosperous, in which everyone is able to foster and exploit their talents to the full, we will dismantle the machinery of privilege and reassert the values of equity and equality of opportunity in and across our education system.

Education in an age of anxiety

We live in worrying times, don’t we? We test our children remorselessly and from an inappropriately early age because we are worried their performance is falling behind international standards. We send them to school earlier and press them harder than do most comparable countries; we also invest significantly less than most of them, citing our worries about money and the escalating debt. We continually reform our national skills strategy because we worry our skills system is less than ‘world class’ and our economy is becoming uncompetitive, putting huge pressure on further education to adapt and deliver on reduced budgets and under constant threat of a clobbering from our oppressive accountability system. And young people accept the reality of huge post-graduation debts because they fear the even greater costs of failing and slipping down the ladder. Wealthy parents spend a fortune gaming the system because they too are beset by the fear of downward social mobility – a grave risk indeed in our appallingly unequal society.

For very many of us, anxiety is the governing principle of our lives. Young people are wracked with anxiety about how they will ever be in a position to buy a house while those who do own their own homes are often weighed down by huge debts, unable to save or to think about retirement and forced, in many cases, to take on multiple jobs just to stay afloat. In some ways, I think Theresa May, in the brief honeymoon period of her dismal premiership, was right to highlight the plight of those ‘just struggling’ to get by. There are very many people out there who are stretching themselves to breaking point to do no more than simply exist. Where Mrs May was wrong, of course, was in thinking that she and her party were the solution to the problem rather than one of its foremost drivers.

It was, after all, her predecessor in power (another child of privilege so unacquainted with failure he couldn’t imagine it happening to him) who so successfully closed down debate about how much we should spend on public services by promoting the idea that overspending on things like health and education caused the financial crisis (and that another was looming – you know, like Greece – should we even think about spending as much on our children’s education as the Germans or the French spend on theirs). And it is her party that has ratcheted up the testing regime in schools, introduced more selection into schools (bad news and another cause of anxiety unless you can afford to rig the system and of course it is a system designed to be rigged), and made education dizzyingly expensive in a way that we are encouraged to think is financially necessary but which, in fact, is out of kilter with the cost of education in all comparable countries.

And somehow, in the midst all of this, we have voted repeatedly to be governed by those with least comprehension of the day-to-day toll of our anxiety-laden lives; a party of privilege and inherited wealth many senior members of which actively despise those at the bottom of the pile and have never experienced the worry of not knowing where the next meal is coming from or how they will afford a new pair of shoes or school uniform for their kids. Theirs is a different world of trust funds, debt-free liberal education, expensive internships, closed networks, risk-free investment and endless opportunities.

Doubtless they believe these opportunities should be available for them and their children – who wouldn’t – but it is equally clear that they do not want them to be available to us or our children. This is clearer nowhere else than in education. Building on the work of the last Labour government, which introduced and increased tuition fees, narrowed the further education curriculum and limited funding for part-time higher education, the governments of Cameron and May have overseen an enhanced vocationalism in FE and skills, cultivated a greater focus on selection (‘choice’) while reducing the overall budget for state-maintained schools, and created a hugely expensive two-tier system of higher education with elite universities, which offer a traditional liberal arts curriculum, dominated by young people who attended expensive private schools, while the rest, driven in part by anxiety about the career risks of non-vocational study, largely go to less prestigious institutions which offer more practical courses related to a job or vocation.

At the same time as countries such as China and Singapore began investing heavily in lifelong learning, recognizing the critical importance of skills renewal among the adult population and the need for education to prepare people not just for a job but for a life, the UK government, set on reducing the size of the state by any means and at any cost, took a wrecking ball to its own once enviably advanced lifelong learning system. The number of part-time students in higher education has fallen for seven consecutive years; last year alone by eight per cent – an overall decline of 61 per cent since 2010, when the coalition government introduced its funding reforms. The vast majority of part-time students, of course, are mature, adults who are already in the workforce who are combining higher study with a job, a family and other financial commitments.

Unsurprisingly, in this era of escalating anxiety, it is those with the most commitments, financial and otherwise, who have found themselves most excluded by the fees hike and the introduction of loans (this seems to have come as a surprise to the architects of the scheme though it was highlighted as a likely consequence, by NIACE and others, as early as 2010). As most part-time mature students tend also to come from less well-off, non-traditional backgrounds, this decline has also had a – largely unreported – impact on the social mix of our universities and on efforts to widen participation. As Claire Callender writes, the fall ‘has been greatest among older students, those wanting to do “bite size” courses, and those with low-level entry qualifications – all typically “widening participation” candidates.’

This shocking decline has caused barely a wrinkle in the brows of successive universities ministers. The present one, Jo Johnson (another politician who has had to claw his way to the top) has done little to suggest he considers the collapse of part-time higher education to be anything more than a minor inconvenience; regrettable, for sure, but a price worth paying to maintain the integrity of our costly and evidently failing higher education funding system. The line seems to be to stress the system’s relative success in increasing the numbers of young people from less-advantaged backgrounds (though the ‘top’ universities remain stubbornly resistant to change, continuing to act as finishing schools for the children of the very wealthy). Of course, this would look like less like success if part-time students were included in the same calculation – and it starts to look like serious failure if we also consider the institutions to which ‘widening participation’ candidates tend to gravitate.

The picture is no rosier in further education, where the government has savagely reduced the adult education budget to the point where usually conservative commentators were warning of its complete disappearance by 2020. Since then the government has attempted to restore some stability to the budget, but the cuts have been eye-watering, limiting the breadth and quantity of opportunity for older learners. In 2016-16 alone 24 per cent of the budget was cut, on top of year-on-year cuts amounting to 35 per cent of the total adult skills budget between 2009 and 2015. The range of provision on offer has narrowed too, reflecting largely discredited government choices about the skills that are economically useful, but also, I suspect, the tendency of people, driven by anxiety, to opt for courses they think will have a direct economic pay-off. Of course, this approach neglected – and continues to neglect – the importance of a range of other crucial skills, which are important in the workplace and in life more generally, such as resilience, creativity, problem-solving and, perhaps most importantly of all, a love of learning. As this year’s OECD Skills Outlook report suggested, the neglect of such skills makes little economic sense and is almost certainly harmful to productivity, where the UK traditionally performs extremely poorly.

Of course, the anxiety which drives people away from education and into compromised choices which do little justice to their real talents and aspirations, is part of a wider anxiety, fed by cuts to public services, rising household debt, growing inequality, pay restraint, insecure work and rising costs of living. For too long, the question of how much we should spend and on what has been off the agenda, as though we were too impoverished a nation to make serious choices about the kind of society we want to belong to. This year’s general election appears to have opened debate a little wider, though it takes place in the face of bitter resistance from the mainstream media and those who control it (who, by and large, whatever their populist pretentions, are rather happy with a status quo that privileges them and stifles the vast majority). My hope is that we can have a serious national conversation about tax and public spending in spite of this.

An Oxfam inequality index ranked the UK 109^th in the world for the proportion of its budget it spends on education – behind the likes of Kazakhstan and Cambodia (no disrespect intended to those nations but the UK is evidently a significantly wealthier country with very well-established education institutions and a well-documented need to increase both its productivity and the basic skills of its population). Oxfam’s report also noted that tuition fees in the UK are the highest in the industrialised world, with the burden of student debt disproportionally borne by poorer students. It noted too that UK corporation tax has been cut further and faster than in most other rich countries, ranking the UK’s tax system 96^th in terms of commitment to reduce inequality.

The government has approached Brexit without a plan – even for the Brexit negotiations themselves. Sabre-rattling and political posturing are, it turns out, no preparation for lengthy, complex and highly detailed negotiations across a huge array of topics. Little wonder EU counterparts are privately talking with thinly veiled contempt about David Davis and his team. But the government has let us down in a more profound way. It has purposefully stifled debate about the sort of society we can be, while effecting to have no choice about deliberate and ideologically driven decisions about funding which have had a calamitous impact on people’s lives. In doing so, it has denied hope of change or a better life to many thousands of people.

Adult education must rediscover its radical roots

Adult education has changed dramatically over the two decades I have worked in it. Increased levels of policy attention, beginning with the wonderfully optimistic note struck by Helena Kennedy’s 1997 Learning Works report and David Blunkett’s 1998 green paper, The Learning Age, and for a short while attended also by increased funding and some bright ideas for implementation, have not led us to the promised land of wider participation and political acknowledgement of the wider purposes of education. Instead, like the train Woody Allen finds himself on at the start of Stardust Memories, they have brought us to a vast scrap yard of thwarted and abandoned ambitions in which only courses offering basic or vocational skills, mostly to younger adults, remain pristine, carefully maintained by a succession of journeyman ministers indifferent to the wider value of education. If things continue as they are – and there is no reason to suppose they will not, given the feebleness of the opposition – we will soon reach the point where the aspirations of ‘lifelong learning’ live on only in the dismal and increasingly empty rhetoric of politicians.

The current situation is, of course, in large part the result of cuts in funding, which began under Labour, and have been remorselessly deepened by the current Conservative government and its Conservative-led predecessor. The sharks of austerity have cut back on great swathes of provision, savaged the public library service, hollowed out local democracy, and attacked vital public institutions, such as the BBC, making short-term savings but creating an impoverished legacy for succeeding generations. In further education, where the majority of adults in education learn, the adult skills budget was reduced by 35 per cent between 2009 and 2015. In 2015-16 alone, the government slashed an unprecedented 24 per cent from the budget. As a result of these cuts, there are more than one million fewer adults learning in further education than there were in 2010, with the Association of Colleges estimating that 190,000 adult learning places would disappear in 2015-16 alone. The characteristically measured AoC was moved to predict that, on the current course, adult further education would be a thing of the past by 2020. What a terrible legacy for a government which believes improving UK productivity to be the challenge of our time!

While the sector has been granted some respite from the grind of year-on-year funding cuts, the post-16 area review process is likely to result in still less choice for adult learners and, for providers, a considerable distraction from what should be their core business: teaching and learning. It remains to be seen what impact the devolution of the adult skills budget (along with the absorption of the previously ring-fenced community learning budget) will have, but, with local resources tight, there is clearly a danger that learners whose employability needs cannot be addressed straightforwardly through a narrow focus on training for employment will again lose out, as might providers in the third sector, whose role is less well understood and who are largely absent from the area review process. Skills devolution represents a huge challenge to voluntary sector providers, who play a crucial role in getting adults who lack the confidence or motivation to engage with formal learning to re-engage through less formal routes, but whose voice tends to be drowned out by the bigger players.

In higher education, the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) this month reported that the number of part-time students, the vast majority of whom are adults combining work and study, has fallen by 60 per cent over the past decade. This represents a dreadful act of vandalism about which even the specialist education press has been remarkably quiet. The overall number of mature students in HE has also fallen substantially, by 50 per cent over the same period, according to the report, with universities struggling to tackle the collapse in mature and part-time student numbers. And while progress has been made in attracting students from less advantaged backgrounds, the report found that universities in the elite Russell Group were failing to make adequate progress on access and progression. At the universities with the highest entrance requirements, said OFFA director Les Ebdon, ‘the participation gap between the most and least advantaged remains large and wholly unacceptable’.

The growing lack of diversity, in terms of student age and background, as well as mode of study, in elite institutions is a major concern, at least for those who cling to the old-fashioned belief that higher education should promote social mobility and challenge disadvantage rather than preserve patterns of privilege. We won’t achieve this with a one-size-fits-all system. Ensuring a more diverse, flexible and widely accessible sector is critical to efforts to widen participation. More than a third of the students entering HE last year who count towards widening participation targets were mature students. As Professor Ebdon noted in his report, ‘In order to strengthen the economy and ensure HE truly is open to everyone with the talent to benefit, urgent action must be taken to reverse the long-term decline in part-time and mature students.’ Thus far, we have seen little.

The growing prominence of adult education in policy debate over the past two decades is perhaps unsurprising, given its potential role – and proven benefits – in promoting economic productivity and reducing unemployment, improving health and wellbeing, and fostering social cohesion and active citizenship. Yet the curiosity of politicians has not resulted in increased investment, a more coherent approach to the education of adults or a more stable sector with a clearer sense of its wider role. Just the opposite, in fact, seems to be the case. I fear that in its willingness to adapt, to support and implement government plans and take them at face value, and to talk the language of ministers (albeit, often, through gritted teeth), the sector may, inadvertently, have contributed to its own decline.

As budgets have shrunk, so too has the focus of education policy, to the point where only provision related to employment skills and economic improvement is seen to matter and the education of older adults, in the past the driver of progressive reform across the system, has been neglected in favour of those at or near the start of their career journey. The focus of the sector has, in some ways understandably, followed the funding, resulting in the further marginalization of the wider benefits of learning in public discourse. While the case for genuinely lifelong and lifewide learning continues to be made in some quarters, the calls often seem a little hollow, an afterthought thrown out to placate supporters rather than to influence ministers. This is perhaps because, in the current climate, such calls are unlikely to get much of a hearing and no-one, in a competitive market for contracts, wants to be on the wrong side of the argument when policy is made. For the first time in my two decades working in the sector, adult education lacks a clear, distinct and dedicated voice in its corner.

It seems to me that adult education now has two choices. It can shuffle off quietly into history, acknowledging that its time has passed, or it can look back to its own history as a social movement to rediscover a sense of purpose and redefine a role for itself. I hope it chooses the latter route. If it is to survive in any meaningful form as a movement, adult education must reinvent itself as something more than a vehicle by which adults can become more employable or move on at work. Important though these things are, they are not everything. Increasing equality of opportunity, promoting active, critical citizenship, making people happier, healthier and more fulfilled, making society more socially just, cohesive and democratic; all these things matter too. Adult education should be about the development of the full range of capabilities necessary for human beings both to flourish in modern society and to help shape it. There are still many excellent examples of this sort of practice, in the WEA, the third sector, local authorities, unions and employers, though all face challenges. There remains huge potential across the sector that should be better utilized and better invested in. It should be part of a coherent system of post-16 education, working collaboratively with the rest of the sector rather than scrambling about, competing with potential partners for a diminishing pot of cash. But I don’t think that will happen if we continue to adapt our language and thinking to the latest political wheeze.

Instead, we should be thinking about how we can rebuild adult education as a social movement aimed at giving people and communities the most radical thing any teacher can give their student: the ability to think for themselves, to be critical and to play a full part in society, as a citizen, a parent, a partner, a member of a community, and not just as an employee. Adult education can either continue to dwindle as part of a system in which it has, at best, a restricted place, or it can play a part in creating something better, that can truly address the needs of the present and future. Adult education needs its own distinct, uncompromising mission, grounded in its social purpose, community education roots. It must continue to be about working with those who are most disadvantaged and disenfranchised, not just to give them a leg up into the labour market but, in Freire’s words, to help them ‘deal critically and creatively with reality’ and to ‘participate in the transformation of their world’. Changing calcified patterns of privilege and opportunities skewed in favour of the youngest and richest in society demands nothing less. There are major challenges ahead and adult education will have a huge role to play, if we are to address them adequately. When that truth is, finally, widely acknowledged, we will owe a huge debt of gratitude to those who have kept the flame of this work alive, in spite of it all.

Who will stand up for adult education?

The Skills Funding Agency announced this week that public funding is to be withdrawn from a further 1,600 adult qualifications for which, they say, there is little or no demand. Two thirds of publicly funded qualifications (6,900 in total) have been removed from government funding since 2013. Skills minister Nick Boles welcomed the move, saying the qualifications were ‘cluttering up the system’.

On the face of it, this looks like a smart move. Employers want a qualifications system that is streamlined and easy to comprehend. And students want to know that the qualifications they are seeking are worthwhile and, if the purpose of study is vocational (and the expectation is that it will be), valued by employers. But even if we accept that qualifications that support progression to and in employment are what we should be focusing on, it’s not clear that student take-up is, in itself, a reliable indicator of what is valuable or worth funding – or, indeed, of what local businesses need if they are to prosper.

In fact, the qualifications from which funding is to be withdrawn include a larger number in sectors important to the economy, such as engineering, manufacturing, ICT, and building and construction, and where there are growing skills shortages, particularly in higher-level technical jobs. Nor is it particularly useful to directly equate student take-up with student demand or interest. Prohibitive fees and an unwillingness to take on large amounts of debt are other factors which should be part of a much more nuanced, intelligently thought-out approach to streamlining qualifications.

Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, the ongoing cull of qualifications is indicative of a really remarkable narrowing of the educational offer to adults – one which began in earnest under the previous government as it became increasingly fixated on a funding model based on boosting employability and vocational skills. It’s not that employment and vocational training aren’t important – obviously they are – it’s just that they aren’t everything. Among the qualifications considered of no or low value will be many that adults have found hugely valuable, in giving them a foothold in learning again, building their confidence, broadening their horizons or simply offering them a second chance. Education isn’t only about getting people into work or on at work. It’s also about confidence and aspiration, family and community, citizenship and social cohesion. It makes people better citizens, better parents. It can make them more flexible, more resilient, more rounded and civilised, helping them become better people as well as better employees. The wider public value of adult education is far too infrequently asserted.

As Helena Kennedy wrote in her 1997 policy paper Learning Works, while ‘prosperity depends upon there being a vibrant economy … an economy which regards its own success as the highest good is a dangerous one’. There are other claims upon public support for education, Kennedy went on, namely justice and equity. Ignoring those claims is likely to be disastrous for us as a society, as a democracy and, ultimately, as an economy. This seems to me common sense. Yet parts of Kennedy’s paper – those in which she asserts the wider value of adult and further education – now read like something from another era. Part of the problem with adopting the circumscribed language and outlook of funders and policy makers is that it becomes more and more difficult to assert the value of those things that lie outside it. The less we talk about them the less relevant they seem until those things become almost unsayable (at least without inviting ridicule or marginalizing oneself – either as too wishy-washy or too radical). You either talk within the circumscribed limits or you talk to yourself. And the harder it becomes to talk about what we value, the harder it is to defend it against cuts. Increasingly, I find myself asking, who will stand up for adult education?

Under the coalition, we have seen the realm of publicly funded adult education continue to shrink. Indeed, the pace has quickened under the all-consuming (and all-justifying) blanket of austerity politics. UCAS’s latest figures on full-time applications to higher education show that while applications from younger students continue to hold up, applications from those over the age of 25 continues to decline – this on top of an 18 per cent decline between 2010 and 2013. And while applications from young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are up, people from advantaged backgrounds are still more than twice as likely to apply to university as their less-advantaged counterparts – even more so in the case of the most selective universities.

The numbers are even worse for part-time students, the vast majority of whom are older students (with a large proportion from disadvantaged backgrounds). Over the past four years, part-time student numbers in the UK have fallen by more than a third – with the figure even higher for part-time students aged above 25. In England, according to HEFCE, part-time undergraduate student numbers fell by 46 per cent between 2010–11 and 2013–14. The reasons for the decline are complex, but include Labour’s introduction of the ELQ rule – which denied funding to students studying at a level lower or equivalent to a level at which they were already qualified – the increase in part-time fees and the introduction of loans for part-timers (unsurprisingly adults with a range of other financial commitments have not been keen to take them up and incur more debt in their 30s, 40s or 50s), and a growing reluctance among employers to support employees to study part-time alongside their work. Despite protestations to the contrary, it is increasingly obvious that the government considers the damage caused to part-time HE a price worth paying (as long as applications from younger students holds up).

Adult education in FE is also under huge pressure. The government’s February 2014 skills funding statement included a 19 per cent cut to the adult skills budget by 2015–16, meaning an overall fall in adult skills funding from £2.8 million in 2010–2011 to £2 billion in 2015–16. Unsurprisingly, the cuts have resulted in an 11 per cent overall drop in adult participation in state funded learning between 2012–13 and 2013–14, with the numbers even worse for older adults –27 per cent fewer adults aged 25 and over in Level 3 provision and 34.2 per cent fewer in Level 4. At the same time, the Department for Education has reduced spending on 16 to 18 year olds from £7.7 billion in 2009–10 to £7 billion in 2013–14, with a swingeing 17.5 per cent cut to the funding rate for 18 years olds from last September, placing still more pressure on college principals. And while funding for 16–18 year olds is expected to be stable in 2015, further substantial cuts are expected in adult skills.

All of this has coincided with a substantial reduction in the public library service, making it even more difficult for adults to learn in their own time, on their own terms. Some 324 libraries have closed, with many more under threat, as a result of a 40 per cent cut in local government funding since 2010.

Even on the government’s own narrow terms this is self-defeating. In an ageing society in which social mobility has stalled – seemingly irreversibly – and compulsory education is so unhelpful to so many (the educational achievement gap between rich and poor at GCSE is widening), we simply cannot afford to put adults off returning to education. We cannot afford to be a society in which second chances are out of reach to so many people. It’s bad enough that our education system seems designed to write people off at as early a stage as possible, and to qualify the success of almost all but a small, mostly already privileged, minority. But to close down so much opportunity later in life makes no sense, not if we are serious about moving towards becoming a high-skill, high-productivity economy. If the system we have cannot offer good, affordable and varied opportunities for people to learn as adults, wherever they live and whatever their social background, then the system simply isn’t working.

Helena Kennedy wrote that education ‘has always been a source of social vitality and the more people we can include in the community of learning, the greater the benefits to us all’. It ‘strengthens the ties which bind people, takes the fear out of difference and encourages tolerance. It helps people to see what makes the world tick and the ways in which they, individually and together, can make a difference. It is the likeliest means of creating a modern, well-skilled workforce, reducing levels of crime, and creating participating citizens’. Wonderful words – as true now as they were in 1997. We haven’t changed and the social and economic needs Kennedy talks about are, if anything, more acute. Education has to offer more than a rounded liberal education for the few and patchy vocational training for the rest – or at least those that can afford it. As Kennedy argued, we can no longer afford to weight education spending on the already privileged in the expectation that this will produce ‘an excellence which permeates the system’. The trickle-down theory of economics doesn’t work – nor does the trickle-down theory of education. Apart from anything else, it is incredibly damaging to social cohesion or any sense that we are ‘in this together’. I’m sure nobody working at the Treasury would think mere training good enough for their children. Well, it isn’t good enough for other people’s children either.

1963 and all that: What Robbins thought about mature students

When Lionel Robbins published the report of his committee on higher education in the United Kingdom in October 1963, higher education in the UK was an elite system, run by and for a small proportion (less than five per cent, predominantly male) of the population, many of whom were fiercely resistant to the thought that expansion might be either feasible or desirable, for reasons which appear now to amount to little more than a combination of class spite, snobbery and chauvinism.

While that was already beginning to change, thanks to a range of social and economic pressures that were slowly teasing open the doors of the academy (there were 31 universities at time of publication, including seven which had been founded within the previous five years), the Robbins report provided a compelling rationale for the rapid expansion of the system, arguing that higher education courses ‘should be available to all who are qualified by ability and attainment to pursue them and who wish to do so’ (the ‘Robbins principle’). Its main recommendations, including the proposal that ‘colleges of advanced technology’ be awarded university status, were accepted by the Conservative government of the day within 24 hours of publication and the further expansion of the university system began almost immediately.

As Lord Moser, one of the few surviving members of Lord Robbins’ team, recalls, the report ‘changed the whole tone of public discussion on higher education’. Critically, it demolished the contention that there was a strictly limited ‘pool of ability’ at the level of higher study, arguing instead that there was a large pool of untapped talent which the country could not afford to ignore. Robbins recognised that this was an economic issue, of course, but his view of the purposes and potential benefits of higher education was much broader than that. He set out four objectives for a ‘properly balanced system’: ‘instruction in skills’; the promotion of ‘the general powers of the mind’ so as to produce ‘not mere specialists but rather cultivated men and women’; to maintain research in balance with teaching so that teaching is not separate from ‘the search for truth’; and to transmit ‘a common culture and common standards of citizenship’. The return on education, he argued, was ‘not something that can be estimated completely in terms of the return to individuals and of differential earnings’. Higher education was an important public good which should be supported largely through the public purse.

Robbins also recognised the importance of ‘second chance’ education and saw that the prevailing model of full-time residential education would not suit everyone. He urged that greater provision be made for mature students, recommending the ‘rapid development’ of courses for adults, and encouraging universities to admit ‘non-standard’ students. Higher education, the report said, ‘is not a once-for-all process. As the pace of discovery quickens it will become increasingly important for practitioners in many fields to take courses at intervals to bring them up to date … there are far too few students taking refresher courses and courses of further training’. It was particularly important, it continued, that such courses were made available for women returning to work after raising children and that these women were financially supported in their studies. He appreciated that full-time study would not necessarily be the right mode for delivery for this group.

The report also gave recognition to the important role of liberal adult education in giving students without advanced qualifications an opportunity to engage in higher study. It called for the further development of full-time courses for adults in residential colleges, such as Coleg Harlech and Ruskin College, and recommended that ‘consideration should be given to assisting them in the immediate future by capital grants and also by enabling suitable entrants to obtain adequate financial support for their studies’. Highlighting the activities of extra-mural departments, the Workers’ Educational Association and local authorities in providing adult education, the report noted that demand existed ‘on a large scale’ and that there was ‘clearly much scope for further development, in conjunction with the television services, for example, and other new media of communication. We hope that the universities and their partners will cooperate in this task. If this country is to maintain its proud record [in contributing to ‘the general education of the community’], further support for this kind of study will be needed in the future’.

Robbins didn’t see mature study merely as a nice-to-have but, rather, as an essential part of a university system within which everyone with the ability to study has the opportunity to do so. It is also clear that Robbins is not arguing for new types of institution to cater for these ‘non-standard’ students. The needs of the future, the report says, ‘should be met by developing present types of institution’ in such a way that ‘irrational distinctions’ and ‘rigid barriers between institutions’ are not perpetuated. While ‘it is inevitable that some institutions will be more eminent than others’, it says, ‘[t]here should be no freezing of institutions into established hierarchies; on the contrary there should be recognition and encouragement of excellence wherever it exists and wherever it appears’. Robbins’ vision allows for difference in function, where difference rests on ‘excellence in the discharge of functions’, but not for rigid differences in status. Equally, he did not look to different kinds of institution to cater for different kinds of student but, rather, expected that, as the system expanded, mature and other ‘non-standard’ students would become part of the institutional life of every university.

So, what has been the long-term impact of the Robbins report on widening participation, particularly for mature students? The Robbins principle that higher education should be available to all who are qualified and wish to study has underpinned developments in widening participation and lifelong learning, including the expansion of higher education opportunities to students who do not fit the traditional profile of 18 or 19 year old school leavers. There has been a huge expansion in total student numbers. There are now around 2.5 million students in the UK compared to a quarter of a million when Robbins published his report. By 2009 mature students (those aged 21 or over) represented almost a third of the first-year undergraduate population. At the same time there was a comparable growth in the numbers of part-time students, the vast majority of whom are classed as mature. Robbins was a catalyst for much of this change.

Yet, in some respects, I suspect the nature of the change would have disappointed Robbins and his committee. Although most institutions now welcome mature and part-time students it is clear that they are more welcome in some than in others. Much of the growth in numbers has been thanks to ‘new’ universities, including the former polytechnics whose foundation, in the mid-sixties, introduced into the system the sort of binary division Robbins argued against. The division survived the merging of polytechnics into the university sector in 1992 (we now have ‘pre-’ and ‘post-92’ institutions). Although these institutions have done much of the heavy lifting in terms of widening participation and opening up opportunities, for mature and part-time students in particular, there remains, in the eyes of the media, at least, and perhaps the public too, an impression that these institutions offer second-class higher education. At the same time, the innovation shown in these institutions has obscured the fact that many ‘elite’ institutions have remained stubbornly resistant to change, with a corresponding failure to widen participation to the extent of newer institutions, in which mature students (and other under-represented groups) have remained concentrated. For many of these older institutions more has not necessarily meant different, and they remain more or less rooted in the notion of universities as residential finishing schools for already privileged youngsters.

After 50 years, Robbins’ vision remains compelling. Universities minister David Willetts has made much of the continuity between the Robbins report and his own government’s vision for higher education. Certainly, the loans system devised and introduced by the coalition makes serious efforts to ensure that higher education remains accessible to all who have the talent, irrespective of ability to pay, despite the huge escalation in fees. The extension of loans to part-time students for the first time would also have pleased Robbins, particularly given his concern about women’s access to higher education. However, while there is some continuity, there are also large differences, which are more fundamental. Critically, Robbins thought very differently about the purposes and benefits of higher education. The coalition view of the benefits of university has narrowed beyond recognition to a truly grim utilitarian calculation based on individual earnings. Robbins, on the other hand, takes a much broader view, acknowledging the role of universities in creating rounded, cultivated individuals capable of promoting ‘common standards of citizenship’.

Mr Willetts notes that the Robbins committee considered the introduction of loans and that, in later life, Robbins came to regret the decision not to do so. This suggests common ground but, again, the differences are profound, and instructive. While the committee considered loans it also raised concerns that fear of debt would be a significant disincentive to students from non-traditional groups. And while Robbins may have come to think differently about loans in some respects, it is clear that he was never entertaining the possibility of loans to cover the full cost of a degree. This is because Robbins explicitly rejects the idea that the benefits of education ‘can be estimated completely in terms of the return to individuals and of differential earnings’. The wider benefits to society are of much greater importance; a recognition that underpins Robbins’ notion of higher education as an important public good, deserving of public support. He saw that the whole of society benefits from an educated citizenry capable not only of contributing to the economy but of playing a full part in civic life. It was likely that the ‘social advantages’ of investing in education greatly out-weighed the commercial ones, he argued.

A difference in approach is reflected also in the dramatic decline in part-time and mature student numbers – something which would have greatly dismayed Robbins who was acutely aware of the importance of this sort of provision both to the economy and to efforts to widen participation (particularly to women seeking to return to education after having children). Full-time mature student applications have fallen by more than 18,000 (a 14 per cent decline) since the trebling of tuition fees and the introduction of the new loans system. At the same time, part-time student numbers have collapsed, by 40 per cent, according to HEFCE figures. These shocking numbers would, I think, have appalled Robbins, but they may not have surprised him. In the section of his report on adult education, he highlights the need for ‘adequate financial support’ for mature students. Later, in considering the possible impact of a system of loans, he recognises that fear of debt can produce ‘undesirable disincentive effects’. He also observes that any drop in recruitment to higher education by those with the talent for it (but not the resources to fund it) is not only a private loss to the individual but a ‘social loss’.

It is clear, though we seem curiously reluctant to say so, that higher fees are having a significant negative impact on the recruitment of mature students, particularly those who would prefer to study part-time. There is a strong case, I think, bearing in mind the important public and economic good part-time study represents, for government to provide some sort of subsidy to enable institutions to lower costs for part-time courses, which are typically more expensive and time-consuming to run. Getting rid of the ‘ELQ rule’, which denies access to loans to students studying for a second degree (and played a big part in decimating university lifelong learning under the last government), would also be a positive move, opening up more opportunities to the kinds of adult student Robbins was particularly concerned about and lending meaningful support to his conviction that education is not a ‘once-for-all process’. Despite government efforts to ameliorate some of these problems (such as the very welcome partial relaxation of the ELQ rule), the continuing decline in mature and part-time student numbers is extremely bad news for social mobility and there remains a serious risk that the loans system will ultimately result in a two-tier system, with less-advantaged ‘non-standard’ students obliged to opt for the low-cost, ‘second-class’ model, while the elite institutions remain the preserve of the already privileged. This, I imagine, would be just about the last thing Robbins would have wanted.

A critical moment for part-time and mature higher education

Few will be surprised at the continuing decline in part-time higher education, highlighted in The power of part-time, the Universities UK review of part-time and mature higher education, which was commissioned by the government in response to falling student numbers and was published this week.

The report had been eagerly anticipated by those in the sector who appreciate the value of part-time higher study – and many have embraced its fairly broad statement of the critical importance of part-time. Its publication is undoubtedly an important moment in the campaign to revive the fortunes of part-time and higher education. But if is not followed by concerted, long-term action, underscored by the commitment of institutions and government, there is a danger that it will change little.

This is one of the problems with what is, in many ways, an excellent and valuable report – and one of the reasons it has disappointed some. Its recommendations are long on commitment but are rather short on specific policy interventions. Many, while agreeing that government, institutions and funding councils should ‘consider the needs of part-time and mature student as an intrinsic part of their thinking, not as an add-on’, will feel that the time for such injunctions has passed and that action is what is now needed. Others will be disappointed that the review did not feel able to make a bolder statement on the equivalent or lower-level (ELQ) rule, which denies funding to students looking to take a second degree and which has played a significant part in the late devastation of university continuing education. More, I fear, is needed if we are to galvanise the sort of immediate action we will need if part-time and mature learning is to have a future.

It is difficult to overstate the urgency of the situation. The review reports that the numbers of students recruited to undergraduate part-time courses in England fell by 40 per cent between 2010-11 and 2012-13 – equivalent to 105,000 fewer students – a dramatic drop which follows a decade of steady decline in part-time student numbers. The vast majority of part-time students are mature, most of them combining work with study and taking vocational courses. Full-time mature student numbers have also declined sharply since the increase in tuition fees in 2010. At a time when the need for a flexible, resilient workforce, capable of re-skilling throughout their adult lives, has never been clearer, this is depressing news indeed.

The report identifies a number of potential causes for the decline, including the current economic climate, pressures on employer support for further study, the changing pathways into higher education and shifts in demographics, and the effects of the 2012–13 changes to the funding system in England and associated increase in fees – a ‘perfect storm’ of factors, the report says. It also points out that information on courses and finances can be patchy and that employers and potential students are often not fully aware of the value of part-time higher study.

In response, the review recommends that part-time and mature higher education should form an intrinsic part of the plans of higher education providers, government and funding councils and calls for an ‘urgent push at all levels to help potential students and employers to understand the value of part-time higher education’. It also recommends that universities ‘take bold steps’ to meet the needs of potential part-time students and to improve the part-time experience, and calls for a boost to employer-focused part-time higher education.

This is all laudable stuff, and well worth saying. But the report stops short of saying what the government and institutions need to do to make this happen. This is a missed opportunity, I think, particularly in an area in which there is a lack of clarity about where responsibility lies. The government is looking to institutions to set out their stall more clearly in attracting part-time and mature students, while institutions would like the government to do more to incentivise and support them to engage with part-time and adult students. Despite government rhetoric about a diverse system characterised by a variety of modes of learning and types of learners, most institutions see little reason to change their focus on full-time residential degrees for school leavers. In a sense this is understandable: part-time students are harder to recruit and support, and more likely to drop out. To make a difference here will require a thoughtful, holistic approach taking in issues such as cost (both to students and institutions) and affordability, course design, credit transfer, employer engagement and attitudes to debt. And all of this must be supported and nourished by a genuine vision for a true learning society, which offers accessible, affordable opportunities for adults to learn at every stage of their lives.

I think it is important to note also that the decline in part-time and mature higher education is not only extremely bad news for the economy and for prospects of growth and the development of a knowledge economy worthy of the name, but also for democracy, social mobility, culture and active citizenship. The focus of provision should not just be on employment and economic benefit but should reflect the wider motives, interests and ambitions of adults (while giving them affordable opportunities to pursue them). The UUK report, while recognising the wider benefits to society, overwhelmingly (and, perhaps, understandably) focuses on the contribution of part-time higher education to economic growth. This is important, of course, but if we are serious about the role of universities in creating an engaged, knowledgeable and aspirational citizenry we need to ensure these are not the only kinds of opportunity available. Self-realisation should not be the sole preserve of the already privileged. The revival of university lifelong learning should be at the heart of an enhanced community engagement mission for institutions.

Reading the report sent me back to Jonathan Rose’s landmark study, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, and his account of the motivations for study of continuing education students in the 1930s. A survey of WEA/Ruskin College students found them concerned both with the ‘fullest expression of the faculties of the individual’ and with ensuring ‘the maximum co-operation of the individual towards the happiness of the group of which he is a part’. One student described the object of study as:

First, to equip the student with adequate knowledge in order that he or she may make a more adequate and effective response to his or her social obligations. Secondly, to enable one to appreciate and cultivate a desire for the best in art, literature, music, etc., to more readily understand the significance of science and generally to raise the level of intelligence in order that the student may enjoy a fuller and more harmonious existence, freer from the trammels of prejudice, superstition and dogmatism.

Engaging potential part-time students needs to be about more than information and guidance, important though those things are. It needs to recognise the diverse motives and ambitions of adults, as well as taking seriously the issue of cost and the clear negative impact of the new loans system on this group of learners. The removal of the ELQ rule would be a constructive start.

As I said at the outset, the UUK report represents an important moment in the campaign for part-time higher education. It should help give this critical issue the attention it deserves. But it remains to be seen whether it will mark a sea change in attitude and approach or become yet another landmark on the long road of decline. My fear is that we are still some way from genuinely integrating part-time and mature higher education into the mission of institutions, and that the kind of commitment needed to make up the ground already lost will be very difficult to secure.

Spaces to think, question and create – we need them more than ever

We are witnessing an assault on the humanities, nationally and globally, to the extent that many academics now feel it necessary to ‘defend’ the humanities – something that would have astonished any previous generation of scholars – and to warn of a growing crisis which could threaten their very existence.

In Australia it seems likely that A$100 million funding for the humanities and the social sciences will be ‘reprioritised’ to where it is ‘really needed’, principally in medical research. The language of the debate there may be tonally different, but it plainly echoes the UK government’s emphasis on science and research and in particular on so-called STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and mathematics), and its treatment of other disciplines as nice-to-have but not essential.

In the UK we have seen the beginnings of a debate about the value of the humanities, but it is, in the main, a depressingly narrow debate, focused on their contribution to employability and the economy. The culture secretary, Maria Miller, has argued – ‘claimed’ might be a better word as (as is so often the case with the austerity rhetoric of the coalition) there is no real argument, only an unsupported assertion of necessity – that ‘in an age of austerity, when times are tough and money is tight, our focus must be on culture’s economic impact.’

Of course, it is much easier to defend investment in medical research, for example, than it is to defend investment in the humanities. The benefits of medical research are clear, measurable and comparatively well-understood. The case for the humanities is more difficult to set out, particularly against the backdrop of a policy and media environment which is stubbornly resistant to abstract or difficult thought or to any opinion which overtly challenges conventional thinking. No doubt the decision of the UK government to withdraw the university teaching grant for the humanities was made, in part, because it was a cut that would be hard to argue against, given the way debate is constrained.

We need to remind ourselves that not everything that is valuable is valuable in terms that can be expressed on an abacus. Much of what is most valuable in our lives is valuable for reasons which are not particularly easy to understand, that involve reflection, thoughtful articulation and learning. But that is no reason to dismiss or overlook them.

It is not only economic considerations that guide our choices, even in times when money is tight. In fact, when times are tough it becomes even more important to look beyond the economic concerns which regulate much of our everyday behavior, to reach towards some vision of how things might be different and better. A broad, general education and an understanding of the humanities and social sciences become all the more important.

I was in Edinburgh recently to meet a group of adult education students and activists interested in broadening and deepening the debate about Scottish independence in the run-up to next year’s referendum. The debate, as reflected in the mainstream media and the rhetoric of the two campaigns, was characterised as dull, sterile and negative, with the focus on the economy and projections, often negative, about what economic life in Scotland will be like in five or 10 years time.

No-one, of course, would deny that these things are important. But, beyond the mainstream, the debate is much wider, as was reflected in the discussion the students had. This touched on questions of value and social justice, history and literature, politics and political education, but was, above all, about culture and identity. As one student, Andrew Morrison put it, ‘Economics is important, but the issue is identity’. It is questions of culture and identity that are truly enlivening the debate, and which, I suspect, will be foremost in people’s minds when they walk into the polling places.

I was reminded of this conversation when I read James Kelman’s short column on Descartes in Saturday’s Guardian. Painting with a broad brush, Kelman traced ‘almost every literary tradition’ back to Descartes’ profound philosophical scepticism and, in particular, his emphasis on ‘the primacy of the individual perception’: ‘A sceptical voice, the child questioning the adult, the artist challenging convention, the individual challenging authority; casting doubt on infallibility and the imposition of authoritarian control.’

Five centuries later, philosophical scepticism and our insistence on the primacy of individual experience remain strongly linked with our reasons for valuing the humanities. Crucially, the humanities teach us to think – for ourselves – in creative and critical ways, to argue and to respect the arguments of others, and, most of all, to question. It also helps us to develop new visions of what the future might be, to challenge conventions and to think about how things might be different.

These are critical resources, particularly in times when the outlook is bleak and people are unsure of how to move forward or to change things they see as plainly wrong. While no-one (again) would question the huge value of medical research, we, as a society, also need to be able to reflect on the legitimate limits and use of medical research, to consider the conventions and how we might change or improve them, to maximise the benefits for humanity, with in a set of agreed boundaries. The humanities help us to do this.

As Richard Taylor argued recently, we need a broad, cultural education, and not just for children and young people. Adult education for active and informed citizenship is an absolute condition of democracy. Adult education is closely linked to the democratic process. It gives people a safe, neutral space in which to gather and discuss issues of concern, to think critically about the world as received through the news media and to engage in an imaginative and open conversation about how things might be. Given the pressing challenges we face as a society – from wealth inequality to climate change to the democratic deficit – this is more necessary than ever. It is much more than a nice-to-have. We need more spaces to think and more awkward customers. Adult education produces both.

Of course, education itself is not exempt from this kind of critical questioning. The cuts to higher education funding have resulted in heightened questioning of the value of higher education, what it is for and what its wider civic and community obligations are – and I think this is welcome. For too long, parts of the academy have been far too remote from communities, from ordinary people – and have been far too happy to remain so. This has begun to change. There is no room for complacency. Academics in the humanities and social sciences must do more to demonstrate the wider value of their work – not through soundbites and with abacuses, but by slow and careful engagement with people and communities. You can’t really be told about the value of the humanities. You have to experience it.