Workers Educational Association Peter Templeton

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Workers Educational AssociationPeter Templeton
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Something about the WEA

• Established in 1903
• Link between universities and broad labour
  movement
• Built on a relationship between students and
  tutors
• Allowed groups of students to decide what they
  wanted to learn
• Strong apparent agreement on curriculum

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Raymond Williams 1961

• creation of an educated and participating
  democracy
• voluntary, independent, serious work
• It stands for an educated democracy not for a
  newly mobile and more varied elite.

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Where the WEA is now

• 100,000 learners a year
• Half of all learners have not been in education
  recently
• 600 branches, nine regions and Scotland
• More professionalised management
• Strong student voice in governance
• Specialist Designated Institute
• High dependency on LSC contract

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How the WEA fared in the Learning Age

• Growth in volume of provision over late 1990s
  into new millennium
• Internal crisis of leadership and management
  2002-2004
• Supportive intervention from local LSC
• Restructuring and reorganising with new senior
  management
• Recovered position in quality and finances

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However

• Although confidence and reputation largely
  recovered still a voluntary organisation
  captured by the LSC
• Now advocating and campaigning for adult learning
  but how does the WEA fit into a Foster/FE White
  paper future?
• Volunteer and staff alienation/weariness from
  Government learning agenda

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The learner at the centre of the process?

• Learners or Students?
• Divide with Higher Education
• Relationship with tutor
• Commoditisation the learner as a unit of
  production
• The LSC at the centre of the process
• Or are they all now Skill-Seekers?

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Agenda for Change

• Welcome recognition of failure of first five
  years
• Clear efforts to reduce bureaucracy and simplify
  funding methodology
• Apparent efforts to reduce costs
• Will fake localism be overcome?
• Can a bureaucracy reduce bureaucracy?
• Is internal reform enough?

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The FE White Paper

• Foster did what the LSC didnt
• Clear role for FE colleges around employability
• Back to the future the technical colleges of
  the 60s and 70s
• The fee target is the stick
• PCDL (and adults) an afterthought?

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Will it work?

• Industrial and employment change knowledge,
  technology, globalisation
• Can Colleges return to a previous relationship
  with employers?
• 69 Skills Councils (22 Sector 47 learning
  skills)
• Brokers (possibly honest)

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Command led or demand led?

• Central planning
• Market driven
• Local choice
• National targets

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Faith in employers

• Employers are the key but will they engage?
• Are employers the driver of economic change and
  innovation?
• How does this relate to individual adults?
• Balance of responsibility
• Balance of funding contribution

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David Miliband

• If the 1980s and 1990s were about the economy
  and if the 2000s are about public services tuned
  around individual need, then the next agenda is
  about people having more control over their own
  lives.
• February 2006

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New localism

• New public services agenda
• Services orbit around people
• The hollowed out state
• Choice and voice
• Role for voluntary sector
• Aimed at local authorities and health trusts
  does it apply to the LSC? Does the FE White Paper
  align?

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Can the LSC deliver?

• Will Agenda for Change go far enough?
• Can it engage with individuals and localities?
• Will simplification arrive or arrive in time?
• Infatuation with IT and tracking
• What about adults?
• What about what cant be measured?

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An Opportunity?

• Principles of new localism appeal
• Potential for real engagement between providers,
  individuals, employers and communities
• A chance to reduce bureaucracy and put learning
  at the centre of things
• Right idea wrong delivery mechanisms?

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How will the WEA engage?

• Clearer and more assertive to LSC and DfES
• Engage with development of PCDL
• Communicate with our students and volunteers
• Try to avoid Voluntary Sector incorporation
• Build our local voice

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RH Tawney 1917

• The fundamental obstacle in the way of education
  in England is simple. It is that education is a
  spiritual activity much of which is not
  commercially profitable, and that the prevailing
  temper of Englishmen is to regard as most
  important that which is commercially profitable,
  and as of only inferior importance that which is
  not

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Four pillars of thought

• Fellowship and, in particular, the fellowship of
  learning.
• The significance of education generally, and
  adult education specifically, in the struggle to
  sustain democratic citizenship.
• The idea of liberal education expressed through
  the great art of teaching adults
• The link between adult education and the values
  of socialism