Image – from the old Cambridge College of Further Education, which merged with CCAT and then hived off to form what is now Cambridge Regional College.
One of my most persistent criticisms of successive governments has been over the very narrow criteria put in place for funding adult education services. Since Margaret Thatcher’s Government, the policy areas of skills training for work, and lifelong learning for leisure, have been merged. The result has been reduction of local councils’ roles to that of service commissioners for the first, and the demise of the second.
Previous blogposts have included:
- ‘A lifelong learning centre in every town’ – recommendation by the Commons Education Select Committee from December 2020
- An ideal adult education college – An example from Derby 1968
- Where is the holistic approach to adult education and lifelong learning that research recommends?
- Learning about local public services and how they function. And malfunction
- The Combined Authority’s limitations on further education and on lifelong learning provision in Cambridgeshire
- On the lack of democracy education
- The Bishopsgate Institute shows what a lifelong learning centre for Cambridge could be like
- ‘You can’t build the biggest employment site in Cambridge and not have a lifelong learning centre on it’
The forgotten contemporary history of further education and lifelong learning in Cambridge
The Cambridgeshire Collection has folders full of past prospectuses and syllabuses of courses and programmes that were offered in the mid-late 20th Century. I wrote about them in Lost Cambridge here having browsed through them. I am not going to pretend that the facilities were ideal. They were anything but.
More recent issues
The three big themes I’ve raised over the years are:
- Cambridge’s chronic skills shortage – and the inability/unwillingness of local firms to finance the courses and maintenance costs for adults willing to retrain to fill the vacancies – in particular in STEM technical-level roles
- The refusal/inability for the sector to provide for and fund new generations of democracy education – including but not limited to workshops and courses in the midst of a crisis of trust in politics and the threat of organised disinformation
- The inability of the sector, city, and wider region to provide for group learning for leisure in the arts, humanities, drama, music, and sport as a means of community building and tackling loneliness in society
These all fall into a broader theme of Cambridge becoming a lifelong learning city. If Cambridge can’t become a lifelong learning city, what hope is there for the rest of the country?
Provision of learning institutions – from 16-19 cold spots to the lack of a lifelong learning institution for adults
Dealing with the former has been a priority for the Mayor, but such is the grindingly slow pace due to all of the hoops and hurdles required to pass through/over, precious little has actually been achieved. This is because of the fragmented structure of local government and the retained control ministers still have, even though they may not be aware of it. Eg. the requirement for ministers to approve the new construction of new lifelong learning institutions.
Combined Authority’s Skills Committee prepares for a new era under the new government
You can read the committee papers here for their meeting on Monday 21st October 2024.
Scroll down to Item 11 – Adult Skills – Current and Future Commissioning with the officers’ recommendation being ‘to recommend that the Combined Authority Board agrees to the development of an Adult Skills Commissioning Strategy 2025 – 2028’.
The question then is what should be in that skills commissioning strategy. If you have any ideas, then ***please contact the Combined Authority directly*** or contact any of your local councillors and ask them to make representations on your behalf.
“What should be in an adult skills commissioning strategy?”
Good question.
“I know – that’s why I asked it”
The first thing is what are the strategy’s parameters compared with the wider field of lifelong learning, which isn’t jobs/vocational specific.
- Is the strategy only concerned with the skills shortages? [What part of the adult education policy remit will be specifically *outside of* the strategy?]
- Is the strategy only concerned with basic functional skills? (English language, maths, basic IT/computer skills)
- What percentage of the adult education budget will be allocated for the delivery of the strategy?
- What structures, systems, and processes will be put in place to lever in additional funding from the private sector in return for building and fitting out new training and learning facilities suitable for new learners
- What contributions are private sector firms prepared to make to fund people who want to retrain but cannot afford to, in order to meet their living costs? [Mindful we are talking about an already heavily indebted generation struggling in a city with high housing and rental costs].
- Is there likely to be anything in the strategy that will deal with the problems of loneliness in society, especially regarding the provision of group learning for leisure in arts, humanities, local history, music, drama, and sport?
Now…how to turn all of that into a single public question!
You can email in your own public questions to the Combined Authority via here, and if you cannot get to the meeting being held, you can have your question asked by an officer on your behalf.
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The Cambridge Town Owl 