The crisis in climate leadership and how we can learn our way out

In 2015, the global community – Britain included – signed up to the United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, an ambitious set of 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and 140-plus targets, on critical development areas ranging from climate change and poverty reduction to health and education and lifelong learning, which countries committed to achieving by 2030.

As we pass the midpoint on the road to 2030, it is clear that progress on most fronts is woefully insufficient. The UN’s preliminary assessment found that only 12 per cent of the goals and targets were on track, with close to half ‘moderately or severely off track’ and 20 per cent either regressing or showing no progress at all. On current trends, the UN estimates, 575 million people (almost 7 per cent of the world’s population) will still be living in extreme poverty in 2030, while 670 million people will still be facing hunger in 2030, some 8 per cent of the world’s population, the same as in 2015. Worst of all, action to address the climate crisis remains wholly inadequate, with the 1.5 °C target ‘at risk’ and the world ‘on the brink of a climate catastrophe’.

There is little chance now that global warming will be kept to 1.5 °C and I suspect most leaders in the wealthy West privately accept this and are, in different ways, planning for it. The opportunity to keep to the target has likely been squandered, and the worst predictions of climate scientists are beginning to play out in real time before our eyes. Parts of the world are already well on the way to becoming uninhabitable for humans. Amid the warmest month on record in July, the UN Secretary General warned that ‘The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived’. It is here and it is going to get worse. Countries’ current commitments to cut greenhouse gas emissions put the world on course for at least 2.5 °C of warming by the end of the century, a level consistent with catastrophic climate breakdown, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Every bit of fossil fuel burned contributes to global heating and exacerbates these risks.

Yet, as the world heats and 50 °C temperatures become the devastating norm in many places, the fossil fuel industry is increasing oil and gas production and making record profits in the process, aided and abetted by politicians, many of whom are on its payroll. In fact, rather than upping their game at this crucial moment and shutting down oil and gas production, leaders are loosening their commitments, often in the name of ‘energy security’, and reconciling themselves to failure. Some, such as Lord Frost, are even waking up to the benefits of global warming (a new and really remarkably stupid form of climate denial). The UK, which once positioned itself as a leader in tackling climate change, now leads the world only in the audacity and insincerity of its rhetoric. While the government’s decision to grant more than 100 of new oil and gas extraction licences in the North Sea has been condemned by environmental groups as sending a ‘wrecking ball’ through its green pledges, it continues, straight-faced, to describe itself as a ‘world leader on net zero’.

The truth, though, is that rather than listen to environmental groups and climate scientists (including its own), the UK government has little interest in honouring its climate commitments, only in appearing to do so. While it ‘maxes out’ Britain’s North Sea oil and gas reserves, it is confident that it can manage the public’s perceptions, as it has quite successfully over a decade or so of austerity politics and economic stagnation. And if that fails, it is in the process of introducing new laws to curb dissent and criminalise protestors who disrupt ‘everyday life’. Whether they believe it or not, politicians still talk as though an accommodation can be found between extractivist economics and environmental protection. Continued fossil fuel extraction will bring more jobs and boost energy security, they say. It will even reduce our reliance on oil and gas in the longer term. The Prime Minister meanwhile eschews sustainable forms of transport in favour of private jets and helicopters, justifying this as the most efficient use of his time. Such supposed trade-offs are, of course, false and unjustifiable. Every private jet journey contributes to making the planet uninhabitable. Every oil and gas licence issued brings us closer to environmental collapse. To talk as though such risks could be counter-balanced by increased efficiency or greater economic or environmental security is, to be frank, risible, as is Mr Sunak’s Orwellian claim that increasing oil and gas production is ‘entirely consistent’ with net zero goals.

None of this though should surprise us, demoralizing though it is. Generations of politicians have been ideologically captured or else co-opted by the fossil fuel industry. Britain’s ruling Conservative Party, for example, received £3.5 million from individuals and entities linked to climate denial, fossil fuels and high-pollution industries in 2022 (a lot of money in Britain’s eminently biddable and reassuringly affordable political landscape). Many senior politicians have stakes in oil and gas companies or accept donations or gifts from them. And these are just the interests that are publicly declared. They tell the story of a party that is simply too close and too dependent on an industry to effectively regulate it, still less to close it down or even limit its production. Instead, Britain now finds itself a leader in the group of countries prepared to increase fossil fuel production, ‘truly dangerous radicals’ pursuing ‘moral and economic madness’, as the UN Secretary General put it (a group that also includes the United States).

We are facing a crisis in climate leadership, globally and in the UK, which is symptomatic of a more general failure of political leadership over the past few decades, itself emblematic of a wider crisis in democracy. Politicians in Western democracies now operate in a kind of post-truth environment in which slogans have supplanted argument and rhetoric outflanks reality. Pledges – on climate or anything else – matter only in the moment they are made. They are a cheap way of generating some positive news. Achieving them matters rather less.  It is a problem to be dealt with through the careful management of public expectations. And for a government that convinced a large proportion of the British electorate that the global financial crisis was caused by reckless domestic spending and that austerity was a necessity rather than a political choice, no lie can really be considered too big.

Politics – real politics, that is, in which real decisions about things that really matter are made – has to a large extent become about personal enrichment and private collusion. The access given to Big Oil and to oligarchs of various stamps, including the media barons to whom senior UK politicians of all stamps bend the knee, gives them a direct say over policy, while public debate, such as it is, takes place largely within parameters already set behind closed doors. Policy debate has become mean and small, with politicians stoking culture wars and fabricating outrage, particularly through policies on asylum and immigration, which they know will divide people and frequently have no greater purpose. There is no serious attempt to resolve the underlying issues or to make people’s lives better. We are all now used to the dissembling of politicians. Johnson and Trump were the apogee of this, openly lying to the public while selling this, quite effectively, to their supporters as a facet of their charismatic leadership. Meanwhile, a demoralized, under-informed electorate veers between infantile sentimentality about the past and a fear of otherness, both enthusiastically nourished by their leaders, though neither does us any good.

I think the implications of all of this for education and learning are quite profound and pose an important moral choice for educators and advocates. Can we carry on with business as usual when business, to put it mildly, is anything but usual? Is it the job of education lobby groups to contract to support government policy and make it work? Should education aim narrowly to supply the economy with the skills it needs and be blind to the industrial uses to which these skills will be put? When I worked for the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE), the institute aimed to act as a ‘critical friend’ to government, supporting policy it felt was progressive and looking to improve policy that was not. There was a presumption in this that there was broad alignment between the values of the organization and the ministers and civil servants it worked with, as well as a joint understanding of the challenges faced and the areas of policy intervention to be prioritized. I no longer think this presumption holds. Some would say it never did (while NIACE’s achievements are now widely recognised and the institute fondly remembered, its decision to work more closely with government met with bitter resistance from many of its supporters). It is no longer clear quite what the government means to do, what its true priorities are and why it does what it does. Its commitments cannot be ascertained simply by listening to what they say they will do. In such circumstances, it becomes important to take a critical approach to engagement with ministers, and to reflect thoughtfully on the dangers of co-option and what this might mean more broadly, across different areas of public policy. There is a responsibility for all involved in public advocacy to think between and beyond their silos, and to not talk only to their members and stakeholders. We cannot afford to be in it only for the money.

Of course, it is important that education, and adult education, in particular, provides people with the skills required for the much-vaunted ‘green transition’. There is a clear role for lifelong learning in the retraining and reskilling of adults to work in new and changed industries, should this become a reality (though training alone won’t deliver this). But the crisis in leadership and democracy described above suggests another, still more important role for adult education, one that points to a reassertion of is past values and objectives. The ‘deep, rapid, and sustained reductions in greenhouse gas emissions’ demanded by the IPCC won’t be delivered by politics as it is currently construed. It requires mass public engagement, cooperation with environmental groups and a redirection of political will, driven by an informed, committed and politically savvy population. Lifelong learning has a critical role to play not only in generating informed, critical public support for climate action but also in encouraging political action and fostering shared agency for change.

One of the interesting, more positive outcomes of the COVID-19 crisis was people’s willingness to act with agency and joint purpose in responding to the pandemic, demonstrating the moral clarity, solidarity and willingness to make sacrifices Britain’s  political leadership so plainly lacked – Dame Ruth Silver coined the term ‘leaderhood’ to describe it and we write about it here (behind a paywall but please get in touch with me directly if you would like to read it). Leaderhood, as we frame it, can characterize leadership but goes beyond it: ‘Where leadership concerns an occupation or activity—managing a school or college, for example—leaderhood is more a state of being, recognizable not only in formal leadership situations but in every part of life, emerging not from policy and regulation but from a sense of fellowship and an awareness of our responsibilities to others and our community. These qualities are at the heart of good leadership—are, indeed, indispensable to it—but can be exercised anywhere, by anyone’. We see this as an antidote to the sort of closed, introverted, conservative leadership that is focused on retaining what we have rather than building for the future. Leaderhood, by contrast, is ‘about how we position ourselves and our sector in relation both to our values and to the wider context’. It is leading that ‘transcends institutional settings and exists powerfully at the interface of different contexts … that builds bridges to the future and embodies an ethic of care and public service, rather than holding on to the past and refusing to do better or different’.

It is this sort of shared agency that education is in a unique position to promote. The early twentieth-century adult education movement saw its purpose in broadly these terms. It recognised its social purpose in giving working people the means to be active citizens and thus change the world, ‘without a revolution’ as historian John Harrison put it. Adult education can give people hope that another world is possible, and it can give them the means to be the change they want to see in society, a platform for joint action and activism. Lifelong learning should be the enemy of quietism and the friend of creativity, courage and critical thinking. It should grow people’s collective agency and empower them to become active citizens who believe the world can be different and that they can contribute to that transformation. To transform society and our relationship with the planet we must transform education too, recognizing both its limitations and its largely dormant potential. Of course, education concerns skills and employability. We need skilled people in key roles at every level of society, and that is important. But by focusing only on skills and training, we are starving democracy of the oxygen of active citizenship, dissent and critical thinking it needs to survive and thrive, as well as stifling human development in its fuller sense.

The planet is crying out for a different kind of leadership. But it will not come from politicians. Change of this sort can only come from the ground up, and it will not happen without dissent, disruption and civil disobedience. As educators and advocates we can make a difference, strengthening the links between education and social movements, promoting critical thinking, and fostering shared agency among learners and joint propose with others in their communities. Only through the distribution of leadership can we begin to make collective sense of the world and start to change it. We need to think of leadership as an ensemble undertaking in which everyone can play a part. As I write elsewhere, the austerity fundamentalists have persuaded people that while another world may very well be possible, it is simply not affordable. But the situation is really the reverse. Unless we transform our world, our relationships with each other and with nature, in a truly profound way, against the entrenched interests of many powerful and wealthy people, we will remain on the road to climate catastrophe. This, it seems to me, is unarguable. More of the same means more extreme heat, more depleted oceans, more uninhabitable zones, more death and morbidity. It is in all our interests to change course. This should form part of a new common sense about climate change and planetary sustainability. We are in an emergency after all, even if, for the most part, everything feels the same. The real ‘climate radicals’ are the politicians who are ditching their commitments and stepping up oil and gas production in full knowledge of the terrible consequences their actions will have.

Reclaiming our common purpose: 100 years of adult education

Yesterday was the centenary of the organisation known, variously, as the British Institute of Adult Education (BIAE), the National Institute of Adult Education (NIAE), the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE) and, in its present incarnation, the Learning and Work Institute.

Although it appears to have passed largely unremarked (I confess, it would have escaped me had it not been for a tweet from Sir Alan Tuckett), it is an anniversary to celebrate: the organisation made a substantial, civilizing contribution not only to the British adult education movement of the twentieth century but also to British society more widely, including through the numerous organisations to which it gave birth. But it will also, for very many veterans of the movement, be a moment to pause and reflect on what we have lost, the distance we have travelled from our founding mission and where we are now going. I want to explore this a little but I will begin by considering the origins of the institute, its founding goals and some of its most important achievements, evidence of its often profound social and cultural impact.

The inaugural meeting of the British Institute of Adult Education took place on 28 May 1921, at the University of London Club in Gower Street, two years after the publication of the hugely influential 1919 report on adult education. Its primary aim, according to its first President, former Secretary of State for War Lord Haldane (who, with Albert Mansbridge, founder of the Workers’ Educational Association, was instrumental in creating it), was to be ‘a centre for common thought by persons of varied experience in the adult education movement’. It aimed to be a representative body and a ‘thinking department’, focused not on teaching but on discussion and advocacy, holding public meetings and exerting pressure on parliament. Initially, it did not have its own premises but met in hired rooms.  Its address for correspondence – 28 St Anne’s Gate, London – was Lord Haldane’s private address.

Most of the institute’s early members were university teachers and administrators and its initial focus, unsurprisingly, was on university adult education, with forays into women’s education, adult education in rural communities and broadcasting. The institute was quick to see the potential educational power and reach of broadcasting, and made this the topic of one of its first inquiries, in 1923, organising a conference on the use of broadcasting for educational purposes. Subsequent inquiries focused on everything from the relation of library services for adult education to the educational uses of the gramophone. In 1924, it published a report entitled The Guild House that proposed that every town and cluster of villages should have a centre for adult education. The following year, it began publishing its own journal, the half-yearly Journal of Adult Education, which became the quarterly Adult Education in 1934 and the monthly Adults Learning in 1989. It started an adult education library and commenced publication of a Handbook and Directory of Adult Education, edited by Basil Yeaxlee, one of the forerunners of the concept of ‘lifelong education’.

The institute began to move away (though never entirely) from its early focus on university extension classes and to take an interest in what it termed ‘various auxiliary services,’ meaning the wide array of voluntary agencies, many with primary purposes outside adult education, involved in creating less formal and more accessible opportunities for adults to learn. Its activities included: collaboration with the BBC on developing an educational use for the wireless; setting up a Commission on Educational and Cultural Films; assisting loan exhibitions of pictures in small towns and villages; an inquiry into public reading habits; and, in 1933, setting up a National Advisory Committee to develop educational work for the unemployed.  By the mid-1930s, the institute saw its wok as ‘analogous to a research laboratory’, conducting experiments, preparing blueprints, defending adult education and devising strategies to take it into new territories.

Some of these interventions led to the creation of new bodies. The Commission on Educational and Cultural Films, set up in 1929 to explore the use of films in education and the possible establishment of a ‘permanent central agency’ to develop the public appreciation of film, led to the creation of the British Film Institute. In 1935, under the direction of its Secretary, the brilliant social entrepreneur W.E. Williams, the institute set up a scheme called Art for the People, which aimed to provide ordinary people with the opportunity to see great works of art. Many private collectors loaned paintings to the institute for the purpose. This work led to the creation of the Council for Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), which, throughout the Second World War, provided high-quality musical, theatre and opera performances, as well as exhibitions, helping resist what Kenneth Clark, one of the founders of CEMA, termed a ‘cultural black-out’. It provided artists with employment and emphasised local participation and the contribution of amateur groups. In 1946, CEMA, which has been chaired by John Maynard Keynes since 1941, became the Arts Council of Great Britain, with a charter committing it to securing greater knowledge, understanding and practice of the arts, and too increasing the accessibility of the arts to the general public. Williams became its first secretary-general.

During the war, Williams was instrumental in setting up and running the Army Bureau of Current Affairs on behalf of the War Office, overcoming official resistance in doing so. He felt strongly that serving men and women had a right not only to basic information about the war, but also to the opportunity to partake in the discussions that would shape the country that emerged from the conflict. The bureau organised weekly current affairs talk-and-discussion sessions for service men and women, based on a series of 16-page pamphlets, published fortnightly and dedicated to an issue ‘of topical and universal importance’, from post-war reconstruction to the abolition of war (!). The sessions have been credited with engendering greater political awareness and contributing to the election of a Labour government in 1945 (some sources estimate as many as 80 per cent of soldiers voted labour), though, in practice, official vetting meant the pamphlets on which the talks were based usually avoided controversial topics.

In 1949, the BIAE, which was struggling financially, merged with the National Foundation for Adult Education – a forum set up to promote understanding and co-operation between the various bodies involved in the provision of adult education – to form the National Institute of Adult Education (NIAE), under the leadership of Secretary Edward Hutchinson and Deputy Secretary Brian Groombridge. The new institute welcomed both corporate as well as individual members, including local education authorities, Workers’ Educational Associations, libraries, the BBC, the Townswomen’s Guilds and Women’s Institutes. Hutchinson enhanced the institute’s reputation as the national focus for adult education, thought and practice, while ensuring its financial stability. He also made the institute more internationally focused. In addition to Adult Education, the institute published an annual yearbook and numerous monographs, which helped promote understanding of adult education, both nationally and internationally. The Russell Committee of 1973 described the institute as ‘a major non-governmental force in the development of the adult education service’ and recommended the enhancement of its role. Its recommendation that the institute conduct regular surveys of adult students and teachers, led to the institute’s regular surveys of adult participation in learning. Another of the committee’s recommendations – to ‘establish a Developmental Council for Adult Education’ – led to the creation of the Advisory Council for Adult and Continuing Education (ACACE), under the chairmanship of Richard Hoggart. Co-located within the institute, ACACE produced 36 reports between 1976 and 1983, on topics such as educational guidance, basic education and education for black communities.

In 1983, the NIAE changed its name to the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE), a decision at least in part motivated by changing preconditions for departmental investment. As the 1980s progressed, NIACE began to contribute more confidently to discourses about the relationship between general education and vocational training and between economic prosperity and social inclusion. ACACE was succeeded, in 1984, by two new units: the Unit for the Development of Adult Continuing Education (UDACE), which focused on collecting information on effective and innovative practice, making recommendations to government on improving adult learning, and developing research to the benefit of adult learning; and REPLAN, which aimed to improve, increase and extend educational opportunities for unemployed and unwaged adults in England and Wales. There was a perceptible shift in policy interest towards skills for employment, and particularly basic skills, which was becoming an increasingly important part of the institute’s activities. In 1975-76, the institute was funded to establish an Adult Literacy Research Agency (ALRA), to support and promote an expansion in adult literacy teaching. It funded special development projects, published resource material and developed staff training. The grant was extended for two further years and, in 1978, ALRA was succeeded by the Adult Literacy Unit. The unit remained a part of NIACE but stayed in London when the institute moved to new premises in Leicester. The unit became independent of NIACE in 1989, changing its name to the Basic Skills Agency in 1995. With the policy scenes in England and Wales diverging, NIACE Cymru was established in 1985 to advise the Welsh Office, the Welsh Joint Education Committee and Welsh adult education providers. It became NIACE Dysgu Cymru in 2000.

In 1988, Alan Tuckett succeeded Arthur Stock as Director of NIACE. While positioning NIACE as a neutral, non-sectional advocate for adult learners within government, he also strengthened the institute’s campaigning profile, launching the monthly Adults Learning as a successor to the quarterly Adult Education in 1989, and, in 1992, organising the first UK Adult Learners’ Week, a festival of learning to celebrate the achievements of learners and encourage others to try learning for themselves, since emulated in countries around the world. The celebrations coincided with the publication of NIACE’s annual survey of adult participation in learning – to this day a critical advocacy tool for the institute. Stephen McNair noted later that: ‘Adult Learners’ Week gave NIACE direct access to, and credibility with, ministers and the wider policymaking community, which proved invaluable as government’s interest in adult learning grew throughout the 1990s’. NIACE’s growing influence on mainstream policy was evident in its response to the 1991 white paper, Education and Training for the 21^st Century, which threatened the withdrawal of public funding from non-vocational adult education. NIACE argued vigorously against the proposal, explaining that it would almost certainly prove fatal to all sorts of socially valuable adult education provision. Working with a coalition of partners including local authorities and the National Federation of Women’s Institutes – described by an education minister at the time as ‘the forces of darkness’ – the institute helped force the government into a climbdown, recognising that non-vocational adult learning mattered and retaining the statutory duty on local authorities to ensure its ‘adequate’ provision (though the vagueness of this requirement would prove problematic).

NIACE’s move into the mainstream did not sit well with all of its partners. As Roger Fieldhouse noted, the 1990s saw a serious erosion of adult education’s ‘fundamental commitment to serving a collectivist social purpose – to make the world a better place’, presenting the institute with a ‘vast new challenge’ to ‘introduce its social values into the mainstream’. During this period, NIACE published a number of influential studies that sought to explore the factors preventing adults from participating and succeeding in learning, including Veronica McGivney’s influential Education’s for Other People: Access to education for non-participating adults (1990). NIACE also contributed to a number of important reviews, notably John Tomlinson’s review of further education opportunities for students with learning difficulties and/or disabilities, and Helena Kennedy’s inquiry into adult participation in further education. Both exerted significant early influence on the 1997-2010 Labour government, largely through its National Advisory Group for Continuing Education, chaired by Principal of Northern College Bob Fryer, with Alan Tuckett as vice-chair. The group’s final report called for ‘a new learning culture, a culture of lifelong learning for all’, and helped shape Labour’s 1998 green paper, The Learning Age: A renaissance for a new Britain. The green paper promised to put learning at the heart of the government’s ambition, calling for the creation of a learning society, built on ‘a renewed commitment to self-improvement and on a recognition of the enormous contribution learning makes to our society.’

The Learning Age proved the high-water mark both of Labour’s ambition for adult education and of NIACE’s direct influence over policy. While NIACE, now recognised as part of the mainstream of public policymaking in lifelong learning and charged with delivering parts of the government’s the new agenda, continued to grow, both in size and influence, its ‘critical friendship’ with government become increasingly strained as Labour, form 2003 on, moved away from the expansive vision of the green paper towards a narrower, more utilitarian vision of adult education, stressing skills for employment to the exclusion, in the end, of almost everything else. Not everyone was comfortable with the institute’s new role. As Leisha Fullick argued, ‘[T]he relationship with the government and the growth in contracting gave rise to concern that the organisation’s role as an independent advocate was being undermined’. NIACE agreed a memorandum of understanding with the government which recognised the institute’s right to campaign and comment on government policy, irrespective of any existing funding relationship, and continued to publish work critical of policy (including Fullick’s Adult learners in a brave new world [2004]), but this did not satisfy everyone.

Within the institute, the relationship with government was the topic of thoughtful, ongoing debate. As I have written elsewhere, Director Alan Tuckett and his policy advisor Alastair Thomson saw that NIACE had an unprecedented opportunity to sit at the big table with policymakers, and to shape, and even to write, government policy. They felt that, on the whole, it was better to be able ‘to make good policies better and mitigate the impact of bad ones, than to be shouting perpetually from the sidelines, with clean hands but no influence’. The calculation was that the institute’s ‘commitment to adults and their learning, and the independence this gave it’ would keep the organisation ‘from becoming just another contracting “think tank” working at the behest of ministers and civil servants often with quite divergent agendas.’ I wrote about this here. Once consequence of this approach was that much of NIACE’s advocacy work was conducted behind closed doors, sotto voce, with noisier partners often taking credit for changes in policy that owed more to NIACE’s quietly critical approach. I suspect that one of the reasons this approach worked, and NIACE did better than most publicly funded organisations in resisting the distorting effects of government support, was that Tuckett and Thomson remained ever-mindful both of the dangers inherent in the approach and of the need to preserve an independent, strongly critical voice, however softly spoken.

Nevertheless, as Labour’s increasing focus on the achievement of equality and fairness through economic modernisation narrowed opportunity for adults dramatically – more than 1.4 million adult learners were lost between 2004-05 and 2006-07 – this tightrope became more and more difficult to walk. Taking the view that a ‘new settlement’ for adult education was required, NIACE launched, in quick succession, a ‘Big Conversation’ about adult learning and an independent Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning, chaired by Sir David Watson. The latter’s main report, Learning through Life, published in September 2009, called for a rebalancing of expenditure on learning towards adults, to reflect demographic and labour-market changes. The report was used extensively by NIACE in its advocacy in the run-up to the 2010 general election but, despite its relatively modest costs, it remains to this day a missed opportunity to recalibrate learning to meet the challenges of the twenty-first century. The election of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat government was attended by yet more warm words about adult education, quickly followed by swingeing cuts and the hollowing out of provision, as successive governments moved further and further away from a wider view of the purposes and benefits of adult education. NIACE was itself, by this time, in deep financial trouble. The ongoing withdrawal of government funding on which NIACE had become dependent resulted in a succession of restructures and the loss of large areas of work and the staff who worked on them.

In 2014, NIACE, now led by David Hughes, began a process of strategic cooperation that led to its merger, in 2016, with the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion to form a new organisation, the Learning and Work Institute. The change in name marked a more substantial change of focus, strengthening the institute’s work on young people, employment and skills, but also making its traditional focus on the promotion of adult education for a variety of social purposes more marginal to its aims and purposes. This should in no way be taken as a criticism of the current stewards of the institute’s work. These changes were difficult to avoid, perhaps irresistible, given the funding environment and the urgent need to secure financial satiability for the institute and its staff. But it was inevitable that the merging of these two agendas would mean a diminished voice for adult education, and for the pluralistic and inclusive vision of adult education long-defended by the institute, in all its previous incarnations, and so it has turned out. The world is a better place for the Learning and Work Institute, and its contribution remains significant. It is an important voice on adult education, but it is no longer the loudest or the most urgent. With adult education facing wave after wave of cuts over the past decade, the loss of a dedicated organisation committed to promoting adult education and the interests of adult learners to the exclusion of all other interests has hit hard, though other interventions, such as the Centenary Commission on Adult Education, have tried, with some success, to fill the gap and offer the intellectual and campaigning leadership the field needs.

So, for me, 100 years of the institute, in all of its guises, is a critical moment that we should recall and celebrate. But it is also a reminder of what has been lost along the way, and an indicator of how policy ambition in education has narrowed and coalesced around an incredibly meagre, economistic vision of the purposes and benefits of education. Where is the vision for a better world that drove the institute’s work for most of the twentieth century? What has happened to the notion that education is about human and not merely economic flourishing?  Why do we find such concerns hard to articulate or somehow uncompelling? The challenge now is, as Roger Fieldhouse observed so nicely in the nineties, to find ways to bring these social, pluralistic, human values into the mainstream of policy, where they absolutely belong. In some ways this seems more difficult than ever. Changing education and reclaiming adult education’s traditional purpose means challenging systems of power and ways of thinking about and doing education that are pervasive. Yet the pandemic crisis gives us permission, and the opportunity, to see and think further, to make good, once again, our common purpose.

I see some hope in the idea of ‘learning to become’, articulated by the UNESCO Futures of Education as an additional pillar to Delors’ famous four – to know, to live together, to do, and to be (or perhaps as a better way of framing each). We need to think of learning as essentially connected to something beyond the individual, something essentially to do with making change in the world, with collective action for the common good, construed as inclusive not only of all people but of the natural world to which they belong – a ‘less anthropocentric humanism’, as Maren Elfert described it in her contribution to a debate about the commission’s latest update this week. As Elfert also argued, this is not about breaking with tradition or rejecting the strand of humanism in thinking about education to which the institute has contributed – it is about reclaiming it from those who have co-opted and repurposed it for non-humanistic, instrumental ends, and realising its potential in reshaping education, including adult education and lifelong learning, in the service of the common good. This, perhaps, is the educational challenge of the next 100 years.

For the history of the institute I have drawn on a series of articles I wrote between January and April 2011 for NIACE’s now-defunct journal, Adults Learning, which I edited from 2002 to 2014. Other material is drawn from A History of Modern British Education, by Roger Fieldhouse and associates, NIACE, 1996.

Uncritical friends

When I began work for NIACE (the National Institute for Adult Continuing Education, since merged to become the Learning and Work Institute) in 2002, the institute had entered into close partnership with a Labour government that was, at least in its first few years in office, strongly committed to progressive reform and investment in the adult learning and further education. NIACE’s approach was not universally acclaimed. Many in the sector – or the ‘movement’, as we still thought of it then – opposed NIACE’s approach. Critics felt that there was a danger of NIACE becoming too close to government, that accepting significant amounts of government funding for project implementation would tie its hands when it came to resisting regressive or potentially harmful policy reform.

NIACE was well aware of these objections and took them seriously. However, the view of director Alan Tuckett and his policy consigliere Alastair Thomson was that it was better to be at the table with ministers and civil servants, able to make good policies better and mitigate the impact of bad ones, than to be shouting perpetually from the sidelines, with clean hands but no influence. I have written elsewhere that this calculation was, on balance, a sound one (even if it meant that NIACE could not take everyone in the field with them). NIACE was able to exercise a strong influence on policy (in some cases, effectively writing it), to keep adult education at the forefront of ministers’ minds, and to effect significant reversals in policy where the prospects of adult learning and adult learners were perceived to be in danger. Although I was sceptical about this approach at first, I came to admire it and to see the value in NIACE’s willingness to put outcomes for adult learners above recognition (and, for some, credibility) in the field. As I have observed before, much of NIACE’s best advocacy work ‘was conducted sotto voce, with the institute preferring to be privately effective rather than publicly lauded’ (perhaps, one day, Alan or Alastair will tell this story – it would make a fascinating book).

What made this approach work and kept NIACE, as it were, honest, was the institute’s willingness to bite that hand that fed it, to tell ministers when their policies were likely to prove harmful to adult learners and to campaign with partners against regressive policy, in the interests of learners. NIACE styled itself as a ‘critical friend’ of government. This did not mean that the institute was unable to offer meaningful criticism but, rather, that the criticism it gave was frequently delivered privately and always in a constructive way, as a means of improving learning outcomes. As the Labour government lost sight of the animating spirit of David Blunkett’s The Learning Age, with its invocations of enlightenment and its aspiration to create a ‘learning society’, and focused funding increasingly on basic skills and employability, NIACE became more publicly critical of the direction of policy (see Alan Tuckett’s TES columns from 2003 on) while nevertheless maintaining good relationships with key ministers and civil servants, which meant that the government was aware of what the institute was doing, even if they could not be expected to like it. This enabled the institute to reduce some of the negative impact of policy, but it was unable, in the end, to change its direction. As funding for other types of adult learning shrivelled up and learner numbers went into steep and, as yet, unarrested, decline, NIACE’s approach cannot be declared an unmitigated success, but it was, to my mind, the right way to go and remains a useful template for advocacy in education.

One of its successes was to transmit the institute’s vision for adult education and lifelong learning to the incoming secretary of state and minister for further education, Vince Cable and John Hayes, respectively, following the 2010 General Election and the advent of the Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government. NIACE had cultivated a strong relationship with John Hayes and his adviser Scott Kelly when they were in opposition and, indeed, Hayes’s first speech as minister was given at an Adult Learners’ Week policy event. Cable too was a long-standing friend of NIACE, with personal experience of the benefits of adult education. These relationships helped ensure that adults learners were protected from the worst possible effects of austerity-induced cuts (for example, the anticipated withdrawal of ‘safeguarded’ funding for adult and community learning) and that further education survived the threat of having all of its funding withdrawn (a proposal put to Cable by a department civil servant). Nevertheless, the broad drift of policy – driven by an ideologically motivated desire to shrink the public sector – was hugely damaging to adult education, as part-time and mature student numbers went into freefall and the crisis in adult participation in further education was deepened. For all the talk about the wider benefits of adult learning – in 2010, for example, new Prime Minister David Cameron told Adults Learning that ‘adult learning and the way it inspires people is crucially important’ – the view that adult education is about the development of workforce skills increased its hold on policy, and the enthusiasm of ministers frequently amounted to little more than hot air. As I recall Alan Tuckett’s successor at NIACE, David Hughes, remarking, adult education now enjoys warm rhetorical support from ministers and shadow ministers alike, but this is rarely translated into policy. Still less is it reflected in outcomes for learners.

Undoubtedly, organisations such as NIACE that choose to work closely with government in shaping policy, and that accept money for support in implementation, do so at some cost to their independence and credibility among supporters. Despite this, as NIACE also showed, it is possible to achieve meaningful positive outcomes and to be critical, both privately and publicly, in an effective and useful way. However, sharing the table with policy-makers assumes a climate in which values and objectives are also, to a large extent, shared and where commitments made can be taken at face value. What I suspect we have seen in recent years is, on the one hand, an increasing preparedness among those in power to say one thing in public but think another, entirely incompatible, thing in private, and, on the other, a growing unwillingness among organisations dependent on public funding to call out policies that fail to live up to the avowed values of politicians, or indeed their own values. The broad nature of the impact of austerity has meant that organisations with an unhealthy dependency on government support have not been able to diversify their funding base (a long-standing problem faced by NIACE, which was never, to my understanding, adequately resolved). At the same time, the quality of political debate has declined, with policy-makers eschewing evidence in favour of the opinions of experts with whom they agree. Such unequal relationships cannot reasonably be termed friendships, still less critical ones.

In the best of friendships, values are to the fore, as is mutual respect. Where values move too far apart or respect diminishes, relationships break down or become abusive and unequal. If we remain in these circumstances, we run the risk of aiding damaging behaviour, or of being complicit in it. This has increasingly become my concern about the relationship between the key advocacy groups in the adult and further education sector in the UK and the government. When we agree to work closely with the government in implementing reforms necessitated by austerity, are we abetting that policy? When we accept the latest prime ministerial promise concerning further education at face value and flag up our willingness to work with the government to make it a reality, are we really doing the best for the learners and providers we represent? Rather than celebrating the support of politicians, shouldn’t we be calling them out as hypocrites who attach too little value to keeping their promises? This has always been a difficult road to walk and some degree of compromise is certainly inevitable. And, of course, much of the good work these groups do is not visible. But I have to wonder if we now have the balance right or whether we need to take an altogether more sceptical approach to our work with government and use our influence not only to secure the survival of our bit of the sector but also to assert our values and widen the diversity and authenticity of voices at the policy table accordingly.

What made the NIACE model work was the fact that the institute had an unarguable bottom line – it was about defending the interests of adult learners of all kinds and across all sectors. It was not simply banging the drum for one bit of the sector or one group of providers. This is what made it such an important and irreplaceable part of the education policy community, and is the reason the Learning and Work Institute, for all its excellent work, cannot be said to occupy quite the same space or to fulfil quite the same purpose. I do not want to say that we have reached a point where the values and objectives of government are so removed from the progressive values of the further and adult education community that we can no longer sit around the table together. But the conversations we have there should reflect our understanding that we no longer operate in a particularly benign or progressive political environment. They should also acknowledge the fact that core values are not negotiable and come as a package – one cannot be sacrificed or silenced for another. There is also something dissatisfying about the prevailing one-dimensional, high-level model of policy influencing. We strengthen the branches but neglect the roots. I would like to see advocacy groups do more to strengthen their links with civil society and rediscover the social purpose ethos that has underpinned the adult education movement in the UK for well over a century. Time spent rediscovering our shared mission is never wasted because it reminds us that learners do not care about who is providing what – they want, and deserve, solutions that work for them, and that places on the sector an obligation to advocate holistic solutions that do not involve robbing Peter to pay Paul. We are the guardians of our mission and values. If we do not call out policies and practices that fail to live up to them, who will?

1919 and all that

This year we will mark the centenary of a milestone in the history of adult education in the UK and, indeed, internationally: the publication of the final report of the Adult Education Committee of the Ministry of Reconstruction, better known as the 1919 Report. The report represents a hugely important statement of the value of adult education and its role in creating and sustaining successful democratic societies, animated by shared civic, social and economic goals. It not only recognised the wide impact adult education can have on society, notably in responding to the massive social, economic and political challenges of the time, but also accorded government, national and local, a direct responsibility for ensuring its adequate supply. Adult education, it argued, is not a luxury – as governments subsequently have tended to see it – but is in fact indispensable to national recovery and to sustainable, effective democracy.

This farsighted and ambitious perspective emerged at a time when the country was in profound crisis and the need to learn from past mistakes was acute. Prime Minister Lloyd George’s government created the Ministry of Reconstruction in 1917, charging it with the task of overseeing the rebuilding of ‘national life on a better and more durable foundation’ once the Great War had ended. It set up numerous committees to consider different aspects of life in Britain, including labour relations, local government, housing and the role of women in society. One of these committees was on adult education. It included luminaries such as Albert Mansbridge, founder of the WEA, Basil Yeaxlee, who oversaw the YMCA’s programme of adult education during the war, and chair Arthur L. Smith, Master of Balliol College and another key figure of the British adult education movement. A young R.H. Tawney drafted much of the final report. The Committee’s remit was ‘to consider the provision for, and possibilities of, adult education (other than technical or vocational) in Great Britain’. However, in practice, it went somewhat beyond its terms of reference to consider all forms of adult education, including technical and vocational, on which it makes a number of recommendations.

The final report was presented to the Prime Minister in 1919. It emphasised the social purpose of adult education in supporting enlightened and responsible citizenship and in creating a ‘well ordered welfare state or Great Society’ organised around ‘the common good’. The main purpose of education, Arthur L. Smith noted in his covering letter to the Prime Minister, was ‘to fit a man [sic] for life’, including not only ‘personal, domestic and vocational duties’ but also ‘duties of citizenship’. The ‘goal of all education’ must therefore be citizenship, he wrote, ‘that is, the rights and duties of each individual as a member of the community; and the whole process must be the development of the individual in relation to the community’. He argued that the main political, social and economic challenges faced by the country could be tackled only with the help of a greatly expanded, publicly funded system of adult education. Not only did peace between nations rest on a ‘far more educated public’ but so too did the health of British democracy, harmonious industrial relations and the elimination of the social ‘cankers’ of drink and prostitution. The ‘necessary conclusion’, Smith wrote:

is that adult education must not be regarded as a luxury for a few exceptional persons here and there, nor as a thing which concerns only a short span of early manhood [sic], but that adult education is a permanent national necessity, an inseparable aspect of citizenship, and therefore should be both universal and lifelong … the opportunity for adult education should be spread uniformly and systematically over the whole community, as a primary obligation on that community in its own interest and as a chief part of its duty to its individual members, and that therefore every encouragement and assistance should be given to voluntary organisations, so that their work, now necessarily sporadic and disconnected, may be developed and find its proper place in the national education system.

The members of the committee had been greatly impressed with the progress made by the adult education movement in the nineteenth century and in the early part of the twentieth. The report surveyed these developments in detail – tracing the history of adult education in Britain from the early adult schools (probably the first recognisable and distinctively adult education provision in Britain) to the mechanics’ institutes, the cooperative movement, people’s colleges and university extension programmes – but placed particular stress on ‘the recent expansion of adult education … sprung spontaneously from the desire of working people for a more humane and civilized society’. This new approach, the report noted, was reflected in the support given by trade unions to Ruskin College and the foundation and expansion of the Workers’ Educational Association and other ‘collegiate institutions’ such as the Working Men’s College and Morley College in London, Swarthmore in Leeds, Fircroft residential college in Birmingham and Vaughan Memorial College in Leicester. The WEA, in particular, had ‘combined in one organisation a large number of working-class and educational bodies … to stimulate and give effective expression to the growing demand for higher education among adult men and women’.

This explosion of voluntary activity, combined with the improvement in adult teaching represented by the ‘tutorial classes’ offered by universities as part of extra-mural courses, often organized in conjunction with the WEA, had been the main inspirations for the expansion in non-vocational adult education, the report said. It put particular stress on two factors. First, it highlighted the work of voluntary bodies in demonstrating ‘the necessity for the recognition of the peculiar needs of adults and for methods of education and methods of organisation and administration appropriate to the satisfaction of these needs … Non-vocational studies have developed in recent years largely because attention has been concentrated upon the formulation of methods in harmony with adult needs’. Second, it emphasised the importance of the university tutorial class model, noting the ‘seriousness and continuity’ of the students’ commitment, their growing ability to understand and evaluate sources and direct their own learning, the high quality of their work and the tendency of the classes to challenge and overcome intolerance. ‘Dogmatism does not easily survive question, answer and argument continued at weekly intervals for several months, and students learn tolerance by being obliged to practise it,’ it said.

The report sought to build on this ‘remarkable renewal of interest in adult education’, particularly among working-class people, and the growing trend towards ‘extending and systematising’ provision. The advance of the adult education movement was, it noted, in part an ‘expression of the belief that a wider diffusion of knowledge will be a power working for the progress of society, and the ideal which it places before its students and members is less individual success of even personal culture then personal culture as a means to social improvement’. The ‘primary object’ of such education was ‘not merely to heighten the intellectual powers of individual students, but to lay the foundations of more intelligent citizenship and of a better social order’. Technical training, while ‘necessary and beneficial’, and an ‘integral part of our educational system’, was not to be thought of as ‘an alternative to non-vocational education’, thus conceived. ‘The latter is a universal need; but whether the former is necessary depends on the character of employment,’ the report argued.

The committee urged substantial development in adult education, supported by public funds. In particular, it called for an expanded role for universities in delivering adult education, especially through the establishment of extra-mural departments, more and better-paid staff, and an increased role for the WEA and other voluntary organisations. Universities, the report said, should not look only to schools for their supply of students but ‘to the world of men and women, who seek education not as a means to entering a profession, but as an aid to the development of personality and a condition of wise and public-spirited citizenship’. They should make ‘much larger financial provision’ for adult study with the support of ‘liberal assistance … from public authorities, both national and local’, and reframe their priorities to reflect the importance of adult education, including by establishing an extra-mural department for adult students in every university. The Committee viewed extra-mural departments as a crucial link between universities and the wider, non-academic world.

Local education authorities were encouraged to see non-vocational adult education as ‘an integral part of their activities’, including through organisational and financial support for university tutorial classes and the creation of ‘non-vocational institutes as evening centres for humane studies’. These centres would have a special focus on the education of young adults and operate in cooperation with voluntary agencies. Authorities were also recommended to form ‘Adult Education Joint Committees’ within their local area ‘to receive applications for the provision of adult classes’. Ultimately, though, the report argued, the volume of educational activity would be determined ‘not by the capacity of universities and education authorities to provide facilities, but by the ability of organising bodies to give shape and substance to the demand’. The agencies should be regarded as ‘an integral part of the fabric of national education, in order to give spontaneity and variety to the work and to keep organised educational facilities responsive to the ever-widening needs of the human mind and spirit’. Their work, therefore, should be ‘maintained and developed’, supported though not directed by the state (the report put great stress on ‘self-organisation’). The ‘large expansion of adult education’ would only be possible with a ‘considerable increase in financial contributions from the State’. This in turn would require a system of inspection to ensure the education was ‘serious and continuous and, because of its quality, worth supporting’.

The 1919 Report, like the 1942 Beveridge Report that founded the British welfare state from amid the ashes of the Second World War, represents an attempt to renew and repurpose society in the wake of the most appalling destruction and loss. Its particular importance lies, in the words of R.H. Tawney, in demonstrating that adult education was ‘an activity indispensable to the health of democratic societies’. The Committee saw in adult education an opportunity to foster the capacities and attributes necessary in creating a new, fairer, more democratic society (including, importantly, the knowledge and understanding required by women who, following the extension of the franchise, had new roles as citizens). It sought to capitalise on the desire it identified among working people ‘for adequate opportunities for self-expression and the cultivation of personal powers and interests’ and the deeply rooted links between adult education and ‘the social aspirations of the democratic movements of the country’. The report recognised that all men and women had the capacity to participate in a ‘humane’ liberal education and to contribute to the democratic life of the country. It also saw that different approaches to teaching and organisation were required for adults, emphasising both the realities of their lives and the breadth of their interests, along with their need for ‘the fullest self-determination’ in their learning. Its focus on the role of education in supporting participatory democracy drew on the intellectual origins of the movement and its insistence on the importance of ‘true education’ which ‘directly induces thought’ and promotes active citizenship and social understanding. This perspective shaped and influenced the practice of British adult educators for decades to come, informing their view of their work as invested with ‘social purpose’.

The report led, among other things, to the creation of an Adult Education Committee to advise the Board of Education on the development of adult education provision. The Committee argued for a stronger coordinating role for local authorities and sought to expand the range of ‘responsible bodies’ involved in adult learning, alongside universities and the WEA, through the 1924 Board of Education (Adult Education) Regulations. This was, in part, a recognition that the report’s limited focus and relative neglect of the vocational dimension of adult education (which makes it, in places, a slightly awkward, unsatisfactory read). The Committee was evidently not entirely comfortable working within the limitations of its mandate. While it appreciated that a more comprehensive approach was desirable and necessary, it is undeniable that the report perpetuated the damaging distinction between vocational training and academic study, and underscored the relatively low level of esteem accorded the former in comparison with the latter – an issue that continues to dog education policy in the UK a century later.

The British Institute of Adult Education was founded in 1921, in the wake of the report, as a ‘thinking department’ focused on research and advocacy on adult education (it became the National Institute for Adult Continuing Education in 1983; and is now the Learning and Work Institute). Its remit was in part to ‘revive interest’ in the report and its recommendations, which, it was felt, had not been sufficiently noticed by the public. However, while it put strong emphasis on the involvement of local authorities, it quickly moved away from its early focus on university extension classes to take an interest in what it termed ‘various auxiliary services’, meaning the wide array of voluntary agencies, usually with a primary purpose outside adult education, involved in creating less formal, but often more accessible, opportunities for adults to learn. Its activities included collaboration with the BBC on developing an educational use for the wireless, a commission on educational and cultural films, an inquiry into public reading habits and a national advisory committee, set up with the National Council of Social Service, to develop educational work for the unemployed.

Later, under the direction of Secretary W.E. Williams, the Institute initiated a number of cultural projects, which led to the creation of the British Film Institute and the Arts Council. During the Second World War, Williams oversaw the work of the Army Bureau of Current Affairs (ABCA), established in 1941 by the War Office to provide weekly current affairs talks and discussions, led by regimental officers and supported by the fortnightly publication of pamphlets on issues ‘of topical and universal importance’. Williams felt strongly that serving men and women should not only have access to basic information about the war, but also have the opportunity to take part in the discussions that would shape the country that emerged from the conflict. General Sir Ronald Adam, President of the British Institute of Adult Education from 1945 to 1949, told the Institute’s 1945 conference that the ABCA programme was ‘a great manifestation of democratic faith’.

While voluntary organisations kept the recommendations of the report alive, albeit according to their own changing understandings of the needs of adults, the response from successive governments was cool. As Harold Wiltshire notes in his introduction to the University of Nottingham’s 1980 reprint of the report, the years that followed its publication were marked by economic crises and cuts to education spending, which lasted from the early 1920s well into the 1930s (when local authorities were instructed to make all non-vocational adult education classes self-supporting). This helped ensure that the recommendations of the Committee were widely ignored. It was not until the 1944 Education Act that education authorities were given a responsibility to provide ‘adequate facilities’ for full-time and part-time further education ‘for persons over compulsory school age’ and ‘leisure-time occupation, in such organized cultural training and recreational activities as are suited to their requirements, for any persons over compulsory school age who are able and willing to profit by the facilities provided for that purpose’. As a result of the 1944 Act, the number of evening institutes offering courses for adults more than doubled between 1947 and 1950, from just over 5,000 to nearly 11,000, while the number of students increased from 825,000 to 1,250,000. The 1943 White Paper on Educational Reconstruction, which preceded the Act, described wartime developments in army education as a catalyst for adult education reform and stressed the need for training in democratic citizenship through adult education, effectively reviving the idea of education as a civic project.

As Wiltshire argues, the 1919 Report’s lasting influence resides less in its direct practical or political impact or application than in ‘its general and pervading influence’ in establishing adult education as a ‘distinctive domain of education’, elucidating its ethos and purposes, and highlighting its problems and possibilities. For that reason, it remains a critical text, a reference point for advocacy and a landmark statement of the value of adult education. Reading it today, however, reminds one of how our much our political aspirations and ambitions for education have shifted. As Alison Wolf wrote in 2002:

[We] have almost forgotten that education ever had any purpose other than to promote growth … To read government documents of even fifty year ago … gives one a shock. Of course, their authors recognized that education had relevance to people’s livelihoods and success, and to the nation’s prosperity. But their concern was as much, or more, with values, citizenship, the nature of a good society, the intrinsic benefits of learning.

This shift is reflected in the shocking decline in part-time and mature higher study, the closure of university adult education departments, the reduction in opportunities for adults to learn for reasons other than employment and employability, cuts to adult further education so deep they now threaten it with extinction and in the narrowing of the school curriculum. Outside education, local authority funding has been dramatically cut, on the altar of austerity, resulting, among other things, in the loss of many public libraries, highlighted in the 1919 Report as answering a vital need of adult students. When Philip Alston, the United Nation’s special rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights, visited the UK at the end of 2018, he noted that more than 500 children’s centres had closed between 2010 and 2018 and more than 340 libraries between 2010 and 2016, an act of social and cultural vandalism ‘of particular significance to those living in poverty who may need to access a computer or a safe community space’. There is nothing woolly about this idea. Anyone who has lived in or around poverty knows how potentially lifesaving and life-changing such spaces can be.

The infrastructure of adult education in the UK has been effectively and efficiently dismantled; all at a time when the challenges posed by changes in technology, climate, demography and politics would seem to demand much more adult education, not less. Where once the rest of the world looked to Britain for guidance and inspiration in adult education, it now regards us with ill-disguised concern and sadness. It would be charitable indeed to suggest that this destruction of this tradition and complete disregard for public value in education policy was the result of anything other than informed political choices. The centenary of the report provides a much-needed moment for introspection and reflection on what we think education is for and why we value it. It is an opportunity to put adult education, once again, in the spotlight, to recognize the importance of engaged, thoughtful and civically responsible citizenship, and to show how adult education can help us renew our democracy and become a kinder, smarter, more cohesive, open and prosperous society. Let’s raise our voices once again.

What’s in a name? Well, quite a bit really

NIACE, the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education, was founded in 1921 by Albert Mansbridge as the British Institute of Adult Education, ‘a centre for common thought’ about adult education, a representative body and a ‘thinking department’ focused on discussion and advocacy. One of a small number of iconic organisations within the adult education movement, the institute announced earlier this year that it was to merge with the Centre for Economic and Social Inclusion, an organisation that promotes social inclusion in the labour market and which shares some of NIACE’s core values. A couple of weeks ago, FE Week reported that the newly merged organisation would be called the Learning and Work Institute, subject to the agreement of NIACE’s annual general meeting, which convenes this week.

The proposed name change has understandably ruffled some feathers among NIACE members, and, while many will be supportive, recognising the economic rationale for the merger and the inevitable need to compromise and make accommodations in such a situation, others will see it as representing a decisive break from the institute’s founding purposes. For those in the latter camp, there are perhaps three main issues. First, the stress on ‘work’ will confirm for some what they see as the institute’s drift away from a wider vision of the values of education and its benefits. Second, the decision to drop the word ‘adult’ from the name is a fairly clear indicator of the organisation’s intent to focus more on the education and training of young people and less on adult education, described by Chief Executive David Hughes – perhaps all too accurately – as NIACE’s ‘historic work’. And, third, there is the omission of the word ‘education’ in favour of ‘learning’, another important change though one that reflects a longer-standing trend, towards what Ian Martin has described as the ‘de-politicisation’ of adult education.

NIACE has been through some tough financial times recently, resulting in a succession of bruising ‘restructures’ and the loss of some large areas of work, including its events and publishing activity and some of its research capacity. The main reason for this has been the ongoing reduction in government funding on which NIACE became reliant during the boom years under New Labour. NIACE has been subject to the same trends in funding that have seen university lifelong learning shrink, part-time student numbers collapse and adult further education approach extinction. At the same time, successive governments have moved further and further away from a wider view of the benefits of adult education – so glowingly described by David Blunkett in the early months of Tony Blair’s government and by David Cameron shortly before he was elected in 2010 – to a narrowly utilitarian perspective which sees the purpose of adult and further education as being to make adults more employable and businesses more economically prosperous. This has had an impact on NIACE, as it has on other organisations, though NIACE has done better than most in resisting the distorting effects public funding can have on the values of organisations in receipt of it.

When New Labour began investing more money in the sector and in adult education contract work, in particular, the institute had a choice. It could engage with the changing world of policy and help shape it, perhaps sacrificing some of its independence along the way. Or it could remain fully independent of government, keep its hands clean and remain firmly on the sidelines, unsullied by the new resources flooding into the sector. NIACE, rightly I think, opted to do the former, making a difference on a range of policy fronts though, at the same time, sacrificing credibility in some quarters. The approach worked for NIACE because, uniquely in a terrain beset with sectional interests, it stood up for adult learners rather than a group of providers. It became a close but ‘critical’ friend of government, willing and able to point out when a policy was doing harm rather than good, often behind closed doors but also publicly, when it thought it was necessary (some would argue, given the current state of the sector, it hasn’t thought it was necessary often enough). A lot of NIACE’s best advocacy work was conducted sotto voce, with the institute preferring to be privately effective rather than publicly lauded. The commitment to adults and their learning, and the independence this gave it, kept the organisation from becoming just another contracting ‘think tank’ working at the behest of ministers and civil servants often with quite divergent agendas.

This is a tightrope NIACE’s leaders have continued to walk, with increasing difficulty and awkwardness as funding has shrunk and survival become a more pressing concern. With large numbers of livelihoods at risk, the pull of financial security has become greater, making the balancing act more difficult still. The merger adds yet another pressure and, while it will give NIACE a stronger foothold in its work on young people, employment and skills, there is a clear danger that, at the same time, it will also push it further away from adult education and a wider vision of lifelong learning. Critics see that drift in mission reflected already in the change of name. They are right to say that the choice of name is about more than branding. It says something important about the organisation and what it is about. While learning and work does not imply learning for work, the dual focus is bound to bring the two sides of the new institute’s offer closer together, which is likely to mean a further squeeze on NIACE’s traditional focus on the wider value of learning and its promotion of a pluralistic and inclusive vision of lifelong education. Funding pressures will further exacerbate this.

As John Field has argued, the change represents the end of an era, a cause for concern in some respects but perhaps also unavoidable, given the context. NIACE has struggled for stability for a number of years only to find the same challenges resurfacing with renewed force. Clearly, all good organisations need stability, first and foremost. So too do their staff if they are to do the work required to take their organisations forward. It is to be hoped that the merger will provide all of that. And I have no doubt that the merged organisation will do good and valuable work that will help make a difference to the lives of many young people and adults. Certainly, there seems to be a genuine intention to retain a focus on lifelong learning and to keep alive a vision of education that is about more than training for employment. That is hugely important and welcome, and I hope it can be delivered. It is clearly preferable that NIACE and its values survive in some form, even if that form is, in some respects, a diminished one. However, irrespective of the outcome and the institute’s success or otherwise in retaining its core values, the merger means there will no longer be a dedicated organisation committed to promoting the interests of adult learners to the exclusion of other interests. That loss, inevitable or not, will be keenly felt.

A short fanfare for Adults Learning

I was saddened to hear that Adults Learning – a magazine I edited for 12 years, between 2002 and 2014, and the only UK periodical dedicated to adult education and learning in the round – is to close. Before it disappears into adult education history – unremarked alongside the loss of so much else that is valuable – I thought I would spend a little time remembering it and its place in what we still, in 2002, thought of fondly as ‘this great movement of ours’.

The British Institute of Adult Education (BIAE) was founded in 1921 as a branch of the World Association for Adult Education, an organisation set up by Albert Mansbridge, who also, of course, founded the Workers’ Educational Association (WEA). The institute’s aim, in the words of its first president, Lord Haldane, was to be ‘a centre for common thought by persons of varied experience in the adult education movement’, and both a representative body and a ‘thinking department’, focused not on teaching but on discussion and advocacy. Publication was seen an as important dimension of the work.

The institute became an autonomous organisation, independent of the World Association, in 1925. The following year it set up its own journal, the Journal of Adult Education, a twice yearly publication which became the quarterly Adult Education in 1934. The BIAE’s new Secretary William Emrys Williams (best known perhaps for his work as editor in chief at Penguin books, which included the launch of the Pelican imprint), who had edited the WEA’s The Highway since 1930 (and would continue, at times controversially, as editor until 1939), wanted to turn the institute into a more influential, dynamic voice in the debate about adult education, and to engage a wider audience in that debate.

When Williams assumed editorship of The Highway he told readers he intended to run the journal ‘in the interests of the adult education movement as a whole, and not just those of the Association’. His aim was to make the journal more democratic and participative, very much in the spirit of the WEA itself, which Williams described as ‘not just a federation of students, but a fellowship of all who believe in education and who wish to make it more and more accessible. It stands above all for the abolition of privilege and of competition in educational systems.’ He was true to his promise ‘to provoke opinion and to foster controversy’ in the pursuit of a better national education policy.

Williams’ leadership of the BIAE was energetic and creative, typified by a willingness to push back the boundaries of what was considered relevant to the movement. Up until 1934, the institute saw itself more as ‘a research laboratory’, setting up inquiries and producing a series of reports intended to support ‘the revision and development of educational policy’ (one of its reports, The Film in National Life [1932], resulted in the creation of the British Film Institute). Williams’ far-sighted innovations included the Art for the People programme, which gave working people around the country an opportunity to see important works of art (leading, eventually, to the creation of the Arts Council), and the Army Bureau of Current Affairs, which produced a series of topical short papers to stimulate discussion among troops during the Second World War. Somehow, Williams managed to sell the idea that the troops defending democracy should also be active participants in it.

Williams was very open to the possibilities of different, often new, forms of educational activity, and was concerned always to encourage ‘spectators’ to become participants – the most immediate requirement of adult education, as he saw it. Students’ voices mattered, he believed, and the need to create a better understanding between participants and providers became a theme of his early editorials in Adult Education. The publication became a vital forum for discussing the work of adult educators and adult education’s future as a movement. Williams’ first contribution to the journal – ‘The Institute: Terminus or Junction?’ – invited members to bring their understanding of ‘what is going on in adult education and what ought to be going on’ to discussions of the future of the institute. In another article – ‘The Storm Troops and the Militia’ – he launched a debate among adult educators on how best to reconcile the different needs of the ‘storm troops’ of the three-year tutorial classes with those of the ‘militia army’ of less able or less ambitious adult students. Williams saw the journal not just as a way of communicating institute business to members but as a forum for wider, democratic debate, going well beyond the day-to-day concerns of the institute and attempting to put the work of adult educators in a much broader context.

The British Institute of Adult Education merged with the National Foundation for Adult Education in 1949 to form the National Institute of Adult Education. The NIAE continued to publish Adult Education, under the shrewd leadership of Edward Hutchinson who, adapting to straitened circumstances, took to editing the journal himself (he was also finance officer, conference manager and research and development officer, among other things). Hutchinson grew the organisation into a prominent national source of information and thought about adult education, giving the journal a leading role in developing that thought and supporting others to contribute to it. The Highway had ceased publishing in 1959, leaving Adult Education as the only serious periodical publication in the field.

The journal continued to publish under Arthur Stock’s directorship, which, in 1983, saw the institute again change its name, this time to the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education (NIACE). Alan Tuckett, who took over the directorship of NIACE in 1988, was a social entrepreneur in the tradition of Williams (though, like Hutchinson, he also had a talent for encouraging others). He launched the monthly Adults Learning as a successor to the quarterly Adult Education in 1989, making what Judith Summers described as ‘a statement of intent to reach out actively to a widening constituency’. He also organised the first Adult Learners’ Week (in the teeth of a good deal of internal opposition), launching an idea now copied in countries around the world, developed NIACE’s campaigning and publications operations, and transformed NIACE’s research and policy-making capability, supported by outstanding staff such as Naomi Sargant and Alastair Thomson.

I joined NIACE as editor of Adults Learning in September 2002 having spent the previous few years teaching and researching. The panel that interviewed me included Jane Thompson, one of the best and most influential writers on adult education and a big supporter of the journal. I had worked in journalism in the past but not for the best part of a decade. I knew very little about publishing and had no experience whatsoever of magazine production. I came to it with the idea of creating something that was thoughtful and rigorous, yet accessible to the average reader, while making it look ‘as nice as we can afford to’ (to quote Williams’ reply to a critic of his editorship of The Highway). I also, like Williams, wanted to make it about ‘the interests of the adult education movement as a whole’ rather than the narrower concerns of NIACE (something, I should add, Alan Tuckett enthusiastically supported, recognising that an editorially independent journal was, in some respects, better for NIACE, as well as for the wider sector).

The people who agreed to write for me or be interviewed by me included not only some of the luminaries of the adult education world but also adult education teachers and students. All, almost without exception, were happy to contribute their work without a fee. I was lucky to be able to include the work of some outstanding writers, including regular columnists John Field and Tom Schuller, Alison Wolf, Ewart Keep, Mick Fletcher, Anna Coote, Ian Martin, Ann Walker, Mike Campbell, Mary Stuart, Stephen McNair, Frank Coffield, Jane Thompson, Ken Spours, Ann Hodgson, Lorna Unwin, Kathryn Ecclestone, Gert Biesta, Veronica McGivney, Jim Crowther, Mark Ravenhall, Alastair Thomson and, of course, Alan Tuckett. There are many more and I apologise to those I have omitted to mention. Keen to broaden the appeal of the journal and to highlight the wider relevance of adult education I also interviewed a number of people who, while outside the sector, had things to say which adult educators would find relevant, engaging or inspirational. These included Richard Hoggart, Tony Benn, Maggi Hambling, Esther Brunstein, David Puttnam and the incredible Margaret Aspinall of the Hillsborough Family Support Group (the interview that will stay with me the longest). One-off issues on special themes, such as poverty and low pay, were an attempt to do something similar. I also visited and reported on some remarkable projects, such as the North Edinburgh Social History Group, Tent City University, Lincoln’s Social Science Centre and Liverpool’s The Reader Organisation.

One small coup, in May 2010, was publishing one of the first interviews with new Prime Minister David Cameron (though it was actually written shortly before the election – we also persuaded Gordon Brown and Nick Clegg to answer the same questions). Mr Cameron’s warm words and passionately stated commitment to ‘adult learning and the way it inspires people’ are well worth revisiting in the light of the cuts which have since decimated the sector.

Funding cuts and the decline in policy interest in adult education which accompanied the growing obsession of ministers with skills and employability (narrowly conceived) made it difficult to maintain a journal that was about adult education as a whole, rather than, say, skills or training, or further education. Subscriber numbers fell and, without resources to market or source advertising, it was perhaps inevitable that the journal would close. Nevertheless, I think it did something very valuable in offering a very diverse and often disconnected readership a sense of being part of something bigger, whether that was understood to mean a movement or a sector. As John Field said to me once, it gave people a sense of the whole forest, not just the trees surrounding them. It was a place where it was all brought together: what adult education does, the difference it can make and why it matters, in all its different guises and settings. It helped people think and encouraged them to become participants in the leadership of thought in adult education. It also tried to keep alive the link with adult education’s historic roots. It is a real concern that there is now so little defence of adult education that is about anything other than skills for work. We need to do more to resist this and rediscover some of the values of our past, as well as finding find new ways to talk about them.

I fear there is no bringing back Adults Learning but I do believe there is a need for something that does what it used to, though perhaps in a new form. I’d love hear what people think about this and what their thoughts are as to what might replace Adults Learning, what the sector needs and what would be valuable as a way of developing thinking and advocacy within and about adult education. Please feel free to comment on this post. I’d love to hear what you think.

Some of the material for the article draws on Sander Meredeen’s excellent book, The Man Who Made Penguins: The Life of Sir William Emrys Williams (Darien Jones Publishing, 2007)

HE and social mobility: the problem of mature and part-time students

Alan Milburn’s justified criticism of the government’s decision to cut the Education Maintenance Allowance – a ‘very bad mistake’, he argues – may have grabbed the headlines, but there is much else that is good and useful in his thoughtful, intelligent report on the role of higher education in advancing social mobility.

Particularly welcome is the recognition that higher education is an important public and social good – as well as an economic one. As the NIACE-sponsored Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning noted, ‘universities contribute across the full range of desirable forms of capital – human, social, identity, creative and mental’. Higher education is as much about cultural enrichment as it is about skills. It is about helping people grow intellectually and achieve fulfilment as much as it is about equipping them for work. And while nobody would deny that it makes a critical contribution to the economic success of the country, to create a system that, in Lord Dearing’s words, can ‘inspire and enable’ individuals from every background to ‘develop their capabilities to the highest potential levels throughout life’, a wider vision is necessary, and Milburn’s acknowledgement of the diverse purposes of higher education is important.

Engaging adults in higher education, and opening up more opportunities for them to study part-time, in ways that fit around their work and family circumstances, is important in achieving both economic growth and greater social mobility. For that reason, it is good to see the consideration given to mature and part-time students in the report, and the concerns Milburn raises about the substantial fall in applications from mature students and the steep drop in part-time numbers expected in admissions for this year. He is also right to highlight the failure of the government to adequately communicate the new fees regime, particularly to part-timers and mature students, whom it appears to have deterred. As he notes:

While there has been considerable effort to target potential applicants from schools and colleges that go through the UCAS system, others, including mature students and part-time students, have been left out. Evidence from outreach teams suggests that part-time students are confused by, or simply unaware of, the loan support that is now available to them. Applications from this group have significantly dropped across the sector at universities which specialise in part-time students, and there is a risk that what should be a good news story regarding the extension of loans to part-time students will turn into a bad news story, as people are put off applying through a lack of effective information.

The report calls for the government to broaden its communications effort ‘to include applicants who are not coming straight from school’ and to develop ‘a new strategy for encouraging non-traditional students – especially mature and part-time students – into higher education’. It is to be hoped that ministers act on this suggestion and think seriously about how to improve their messaging to these groups.

Milburn argues, rightly in my view, that some of the government’s key policy interventions in higher education are likely to have unintended negative consequences for social mobility, in particular the so-called ‘core and margin’ mechanism, which allows ‘unconstrained recruitment of high achieving students (AAB+) and creates a ‘flexible margin’ of 20,000 places available to universities charging £7,500 or less in tuition fees. There is a danger that these reforms could further polarise the HE system, with elite institutions competing for high-achieving students and other, middle-ranking, institutions forced to cut costs (and, in some cases, inevitably, standards) in order to compete for the flexible margin of places. In particular, the unconstrained recruitment of AAB+ students will make it more difficult for mature students who have come to higher education by a non-traditional route to gain a place at highly selective institutions. Milburn says:

Such polarisation would be deeply damaging and could have undesirable consequences for social mobility if able candidates from lower socio-economic backgrounds felt constrained to choose lower-cost provision. Indeed, it could create a vicious cycle in which those universities which charge less will have less scope to invest in facilities and to enhance the student experience, with the result that they may find it increasingly difficult to attract high-achieving students or those from wealthier backgrounds, regardless of the quality of teaching on offer.

Milburn’s calls for the sector to make the use of contextual data ‘as universal as possible in admissions processes’, and to standardise it, are also welcome. Many universities already make use of contextual information, for example, family income and the type of school attended by applicants, in admissions, but it should be used more widely. It is of particular importance to ‘second chance’ adult students who are less likely to have conventional qualifications. I support Milburn’s rejection of the distinction between ‘equity and excellence’ and support his argument that ‘over-reliance on A-level results engineers a distorted intake to universities, and fails to meet the criteria of excellence’. There is evidence that students who attended state schools perform better in finals compared to privately-educated pupils with the same A-level scores. It is clear that, in many cases, university admissions systems do favour students from private schools.

There are many other positives in Milburn’s report. There are sensible proposals for shifting resources away from bursaries and fee waivers towards outreach and support for students while studying, and for more and better evidence as to what approaches to outreach work best. And it is good to see recognition in the report of the important role played by HE in further education colleges in enhancing the diversity of the higher education sector, and of the need to increase the proportion of apprentices entering higher education. Milburn’s calls for greater long-term investment in education, with more public and private investment in higher education, and for an expansion in student numbers to allow more part-timers and mature students into the system, also deserve support.

Milburn is also right to say that the abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance and its replacement with a new system of discretionary support (‘inadequate,’ Milburn says) was a serious mistake, though there are concerns, voiced by new universities group Million+, that making universities responsible for providing financial incentives for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds could create a ‘postcode lottery’ that might lead to the exclusion of many students. Universities will be reluctant to fill the funding gap left by the withdrawal of the EMA and more thought needs to be given as to how an adequate alternative to the scheme can be funded.

In some respects, Milburn’s proposals are too narrow. While he does well to highlight significant concerns about mature and part-time student applications, much of his report is overly focused on younger, full-time students, and there is not enough on how to encourage participation among adults who are not currently learning in institutional settings. Milburn’s proposals for incentivising young people to stay on and succeed at school will do nothing to help mature students and there is little here to address specific support and retention issues facing older and part-time students. More attention too might have been given to the role of families in supporting young people into higher education, and the critical part family learning can play in transforming attitudes and aspiration. There are dangers in the report too, not least that the collective use of ‘statistical targets’ could seriously limit institutions’ capacity to respond flexibly to local circumstance and their own distinct challenges on admissions.

Participation in higher education remains painfully unequal, with the most advantaged 20 per cent of young people seven times more likely to attend the most selective universities that the 40 per cent most disadvantaged. Milburn is right that universities, and in particular highly selective universities, need to do more to help raise aspiration and attainment and to identify excellence wherever it is to be found. He is also right to dismiss objections that the focus ought to be solely on schools and that a university place should be determined solely by attainment at A-level. Every university should seek to do more to widen participation and make access fairer, and the government should work to ensure a policy framework that makes this easier rather than harder. It is to be hoped that Alan Milburn’s report will reopen debate about the future and purpose of higher education and, critically, get us all thinking hard about what to do about the troubling decline in mature and part-time student admissions.