Presentation by Beth Walker NUS FE Vice President at UCU Adult Learning Vision Conference 30th April 2009

I am Beth Walker, Vice President FE at the National Union of Students.

I am really happy today to sit on this platform and give a students’ perspective on where we are with adult learning and more importantly, where we should be heading.

Many of you will know that NUS was a founding member of CALL and I am proud to relay that at our annual conference last month in  sunny Blackpool, students voted unanimously to make CALL the priority campaign for our FE zone for the coming new academic year.
I know when I launched the CALL campaign within NUS, student officers found it hard to comprehend the statistics that showed that a minimum of 1.4 million students had lost their courses. But that’s fair enough, I still struggle to get my head round it some days, but I found a way to put it in perspective. 1.4 million people is the population of Liverpool, Sheffield and Bristol combined, disappearing from education, in two years. 

The government has disputed that figure, saying that some of these courses are funded by fees from students and haven't disappeared altogether.   They seem to think this is acceptable, even preferable, for those with the money to pay to learn, but those who can't to miss out.

This from a government who last month said "we recognise the importance of learning for pleasure and the enormous contribution it makes to the well-being of individuals, neighbourhoods and wider society". Presumably they forgot to add “for those who can afford it”.  Its hard to see this as anything but hypocrisy.
 
But to be honest, I think this is representative of where we are with adult learning policy in this country.  The Government’s programme is a tangled mess of contradictory initiatives designed either for their headline grabbing potential or to placate the media-amplified voice of “business”. And now we have another contribution from Government: the informal adult learning white paper “The Learning Revolution”.

According to the white paper, we are in midst of an “internet facilitiated revolution” where the public is casting off the shackles of “formal education” in favour of self-organised study and googling stuff.  

But as UCU’s Vision for Adult Learning demonstrates, self and community organised learning isn’t new, it is a constant feature of British society since at least the 18th century. Education is an important path out of poverty and deprivation and when the state fails to provide it is natural that individuals, communities and organisations like trade unions step in to address the need. 

The efforts of these people is something to be celebrated, but it doesn’t excuse the state’s failure. 

Self-organised learning is an important part of the system, allowing flexible, accessible and low risk learning, but the point is that it is a starting point, not an end.  It cannot replace a trained and professional teacher, any more than a living room can replace a classroom.

To suggest otherwise is not abdicate responsibility but also to criminally undervalue the entire teaching profession as well as those who support it. 

This is why I, and NUS, welcome this new vision of adult learning from those who actually know something about learning, teachers.

It is also why NUS enthusiastically helped to co-create and endorse the sixth of CALL’s core principle for a “stable, motivated and rewarded workforce of professional practitioners”.

In last few months I have spoken to hundreds of students from colleges all over the UK and I firmly believe that the potential is there for us to take this vision forward and build an even stronger campaign around it.

Our members always say: they want good teachers, teachers who care about what they teach, teachers who know about what they teach and most of all, teachers that respect and are respected.  

Students may not always know what words like “casualisation”, “professionalisation” and “pedagogy” mean, but they know the results, they see it every day in every classroom. Well…given the mess in the last few weeks, If they are lucky enough to still be in a classroom of course.

I also think that we need to push hard to redress the balance between individual and employer need, especially in this time of recession.  

By the end of the year we will had three million people unemployed in this country.  It is difficult to see how an employer-centered funding system designed in a time of near full-employment can possibly meet their needs.  

Even for those in work, Train to Gain fails to address the fact that “business needs” are not always, if ever, the same as individual needs, least of all when a business is struggling to survive.

The future of adult education is very contested right now and with an election approaching we have a great opportunity to influence the agenda of all three major parties.  

CALL is an education campaign, but it is also a community campaign and a trade union campaign.  CALL is a national campaign but it is also a whole array of local campaign groups. Most importantly it a coalition of 200 organisations all primed and ready to make adult learning an issue at the next election.

This diversity and flexibility is its strength and as the vision evolves and sharpens I firmly believe we need to use CALL to push for that vision to become a reality.

I look forward to working with UCU and all the other 200 member organisations to make that happen.

Thank you