The Impact of Policy on Learning and Inclusion in the New Learning and Skills Sector

[Updated 20/12/2006 and 11/4/2012 with working links to papers and diagrams.]

Frank Coffield caught my attention some years back when he was based at Newcastle University. In 2004 Frank and his team "did for" learning styles inventories with the two research reports they produced for the then Learning and Skills Development Agency, most of whose functions are now within LSN. Frank also wrote sceptically, but as a critical friend, about some of the incoming Labour Government's more aspirational policies on lifelong learning.

Coffield has recently moved to the Institute of Education where he, Ann Hodgson, Ken Spours, and Ian Findlay head the TLRP project after which this post is titled. On 5/12/2006 Coffield gave a public lecture "Running ever faster down the wrong road: an alternative future for Education and Skills" [360 kB PDF], which has some choice observations on the way in which the UK Learning and Skills Sector has been pushed about, albeit whilst getting a massive and welcome injection of additional funding. Here are two examples:

"Charting the impact of government policy on practice has not been, however, a simple matter of recording linear, evolutionary, coherent or cumulative progress. Rather, the processes of change have been complex, uneven, dynamic, ambiguous, hotly contested, and often contradictory. Policies have not only evolved or been radically altered, as Secretaries of State and senior civil servants have come and gone, but some polices were abandoned, while others were from the start internally inconsistent or flatly contradicted existing policies."

"In all the pelting torrent of official documents which have flooded the sector since 1997, there is, however, one significant silence: there is no discussion of, and not even a definition of, the central concept of learning, although the word 'learning' is pervasive in such texts and deliberately used in preference to the term 'education'. And yet the whole programme of reform is dependent on some unstated notion of what constitutes learning, and, especially, how we become better at learning. The implict model is a simple input-output one; and government concern to improve the quality of everyone's learning has not spilled over into an interest in learning itself. No learning society is likely ever to be created in the UK or anywhere else without an appropriate theory (or theories) of learning."

For me the best parts of the paper that went with the lecture are its diagrams [130 kB PDF]. These clearly identify the excessive number of levels (10) between learners and central Government (I wonder if there are that many in China?), and the extreme complexity of the policy and planning landscape, and the lack of democratic accountability. Learner-centred it certainly is not.

Comments

[Keith Duckitt]

1 I am not an educationalist, but I do have very strong views about the value of learning, even if I were hard put to define learning. A hard and fast definition of learning could be counter to my espoused value. My learning is very different to that of every other member of my current University evening class, as we all have different learning skills and learning goals, all of which are valid, even if they are not all as effective as others.
2 I was quite taken by the cartoon in the Times a day or so ago.
"Father (to a 10? year old confused boy):
Son, which new learning strategy did you adopt today?"
A plague on all our houses I suspect.
Happy New Learning Year (whatever that means!)

Keith D