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Report on NIACE Conference ‘New Futures, New Funding’,
27 October 2005

Context

The conference was arranged to set out the implications for funding of adult learning from 2006 and beyond, in view of the funding changes outlined in the government’s recent document “Priorities for Success”. The conference sought to put the implications into context and explore the potential for retaining and improving a broad curriculum for adults against a backcloth of tightening resources and the drive to achieve high quality. The concern for colleges, particularly Adult and Community providers, is that government priorities for 14-19 year olds, skills improvement for employment and basic skills for adults will mean that funding will be taken away from leisure and recreational courses. Such courses will fall within the funding segment of Personal and Community Development, for which the LSC will expect a higher contribution from individuals and from employers, ie fees for such courses will increase. This raises concerns for the continued provision of language courses for adults as it is into this category that the majority of language courses fall. The issue is most acute for Local Authority Adult Education providers.

Main points from presentations:

Richard Boslin, General Secretary, Workers’ Educational Association (the largest voluntary sector provider of adult education)

• The adult learning sector is disparate with possibly too much choice (FE, Local authorities, voluntary sector etc). It is confusing.
• Funding methodology is built around 14-19 year olds with not enough flexibility for adults. Learning for leisure is disparaged.
• Is adult education becoming the preserve of millionaires and the poor and illiterate? There is a need to provide evidence of the impact of fee increase.
• We must take care not to confuse widening participation and increasing participation. Widening participation is the aim.
• There is much evidence of the wider benefits of adult education (see LSDA research), other than the gaining of qualifications and skills (eg increased confidence, better health, improved social interaction etc). The government needs to acknowledge these benefits.
• There is a need to value knowledge as well as skills.
• However, there is a distinction to be made between ‘serious’ adult education courses and leisure and recreational. It was suggested that yoga, as an example, was perhaps not as ‘serious’ a subject as a foreign language, and would not offer as many opportunities for continued personal development. This implied that a foreign language course may be worth funding more than a yoga course. (There was disagreement from the audience in relation to the comments re yoga, saying that yoga could be the first step for someone coming into learning, and it could lead them onto taking another course.)
• Ways forward: seek other sources of funding, eg from regeneration budgets and increased partnership working.

Martin Tolhurst, Principal and Chief Executive of Newham FE College

Reiterated many of the views of the first speaker, particularly in terms of adult learning being forced to take whatever funds are left over once other priorities have been met. He felt that there was the need for a coherent national strategy for lifelong learning and made some strong arguments to defend this view:

• 80% of FE learners are over 19, 50% of taught hours in FE are for adults, more than one third of adult learners are over 50, two thirds of new and replacement jobs will be filled by adults
• There should be an adult learning entitlement to Level 3, not simply Level 2. The speaker questioned why only 19-year olds should be entitled to a Level 3. This presupposed that everyone was able to work through school without a hitch and that no-one would ever need a second chance
• Current learning patterns and qualifications do not fit adult needs: learning opportunities needed to be more flexible, as did timelines for gaining qualifications (was in favour of unitisation and accumulative learning following the pattern of the Framework for Achievement). The current National Qualifications Framework was confusing, inflexible and wasteful. He reported that research had shown that over two thirds of adults had said that they would be more prepared to participate in learning if it could be done flexibly and with no time constraints.
• Often national goals are too prescriptive and need to be more flexible in order to meet the needs of the locality.
• Strong partnerships are needed locally.

Richard Hooper, County Manager, Adult and Continuing Education Services, Lancashire County Council

This speaker raised the question of whether skills and economic competitiveness were being given too high a priority by the government. He stressed the added benefits of learning for its own sake and argued that this type of learning offered as many benefits as learning for skills in terms of creating a civilised and economically stable society.

Phil Hope, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Skills

The Minister was keen to express the government’s continued support for adult learning and said that for 2006/2007 the safeguarded fund for personal development (primarily ‘leisure learning’) would be £210 million, comprising £153 million for Personal and Community Development learning (split £120m for Adult and Community Learning and £33 million for FE) and £57 million for family and neighbourhood learning. In addition, there would be £55 million for first steps courses which would fall within the mainstream FE budget and which local authorities could also access. For 2006/2007 this money would be divided up between local LSCs to equate closely with the amounts which had been allocated to personal development learning in recent previous years. Thereafter, the amount allocated to local LSCs would be calculated on specific criteria such as the size of the local population, the cost of running courses and the level of local disadvantage. The LSC would need to strengthen its local planning to decide on priorities for personal development in individual local areas. The priority would be to widen participation, not necessarily increase it, so that perhaps different learners than before were catered for. There should be a focus on deprived areas which may have missed out previously. LSCs would need to negotiate with providers via their 3-year plans and agree with them what they could offer and what they should be offering more of. The key would be stronger collaboration between providers in a local area so that adult learners would continue to have a wide range of opportunities, although not all opportunities would be offered by all providers. He agreed that the skills agenda of offering basic skills and level 2 opportunities to adults was the priority and that there was a tension between skills for work and lifelong learning. However, he stressed that both agendas needed to be funded and that providers would need to find other ways of doing it without relying exclusively on the LSC. He stated that the national fee assumption would rise to 50%, from an assumption of 32.5% in 2006/2007 and 37.5% from 2007/2008.

The Minister expressed his concern about the current situation regarding vocational qualifications. There are 5,700 vocational qualifications in the UK as compared to 630 in the Netherlands and the Netherlands considered that even this amount was too many. He expressed that neither employers nor individuals understood the qualifications and that the whole situation was too complicated. He felt that the development of the Framework for achievement was vital for adult education. He acknowledged there was a feeling that the emphasis on qualifications was swinging too far towards employers but felt that qualifications did benefit learners and was conducive to community cohesion in the same way that learning for personal development was.

Rob Wye, Director of Strategy and Communications, LSC National Office

The speaker stressed that although the LSC’s priority was 16 to 19-year olds, the LSC still aimed to support adults. He said that it was not solely about skills, economics and economic success but also about lifelong learning. In his view, skills learning and personal development learning both led to the same goal of economic improvement and social inclusion. There would be a safeguard for personal development learning. For adults, the priority was basic skills and achievement at level 2 but it must not be forgotten that personal and community development was still a priority. However, the LSC was looking for a higher contribution from individuals and from employers. This would mean increasing fees for those who could afford to pay. He said that the LSC would work with providers to raise the income they generated from private sources. There would be fewer short courses (below 6 hours) supported by the public purse but that ‘tasters’ could still be funded through the safeguard. He stressed that quality was a key issue and that providers had a responsibility to raise the quality of what they were offering. The LSC were not prepared to spend money on poor provision.

Rob Wye was asked by the audience how the LSC would support providers in explaining the funding changes to learners and in changing perceptions about how courses were funded. Providers felt that they were being blamed by learners about rises in funding who did not understand why it was happening.

Views from the audience and anecdotal evidence re languages

• It was questioned whether the economic situation in the UK was so uncompetitive globally that it really needed so much emphasis to be put on improving employability skills. Had the government got its priorities right?
• How were providers to persuade employers to pay more for training, as the funding changes demanded?
• The funding changes only reflected government priorities, not necessarily learner needs. Will learners buy what the government want them to buy?
• Two adult education providers had decided to put on more personal development courses provision in the most affluent areas of the borough (including languages), to target learners who would be more prepared to pay the higher costs of courses. They hoped to be able to use this money to subsidise courses in poorer parts of their localities. One of these reported that the local LSC was not interested in funding languages
• One adult education provider had cut all of their language courses and directed the students to the local FE college where they would be doing accredited courses. They had segmented their provision into 70% first steps courses and 30% personal development. All of the provision had been targeted at the poorer parts of the borough and they were confident of being able to fill the 70% of first steps courses
• One FE college felt that the demand for language courses would drop in 2006 and that they may cut some of their accredited courses
• The speaker who the audience seemed to appreciate the most was Martin Tolhurst from Newham FE college, because of his strong defence of adult learning and the need for a lifelong learning strategy

Conclusion

The changes to funding in FE and adult education will mean higher fees for Personal Development courses (‘leisure’ courses), the group which languages fall into. Providers will have to make decisions about which leisure courses to continue and which ones to cut. Anecdotally, providers at the conference reported planning a number of different strategies including putting on more personal development provision (including languages), in the most affluent areas of the borough to target learners who would be more prepared to pay the higher costs of courses. They hoped to be able to use this money to subsidise courses in poorer parts of their localities. Also of interest is that providers at the conference reported charging vastly different fees for current personal development courses (largely non-accredited), from being completely free to being full cost and any amount in between. The government expects the fee assumption to rise to 50% from 2008.

Language courses will have to be cut, unless the provider can convince the local LSC that languages are a priority in their local region. The advice for providers in relation to all Personal Development courses is that they should form close local partnerships in order to ensure that there are opportunities in as many subjects as possible. In relation to languages, this could mean that providers ‘share out’ languages or certain levels, rather than all offering the same provision. It also means that stronger partnerships will create more powerful voices for bidding for funding from other sources.