Free ESOL classes – is voluntarism the answer to our ESOL crisis?

I picked up this card in a cafe while visiting my daughter in York. I looked them upon the York St John University website, where the classes are listed under the international students heading, along with courses on English for academic purposes. In addition, the classes are clearly aimed at local (non-student) people as well.

As the website says, ‘These classes are open to everyone (with the exception of beginners) over the age of 18’. They are taught by trainee teachers, and are free to participants; presumably the teachers are unpaid, but they gain experience and can use the classes to build their CV.

I don’t know who the participants are, but it looks to me as though the classes are open to to migrants, refugees and other potential local ESOL learners – presumably alongside some of the university’s overseas students. Is this a good idea?

It certainly helps fill a gap. According to the Labour Party’s spokesperson for skills, government funding for ESOL in England fell from £203 million in 2010 to £90 million in 2016. Of course I’d prefer to see the funding restored to its 2010 levels, and teaching undertaken by experienced professionals, but at the moment that seems a remote possibility, at least in the short to medium term term.

So while I am concerned that we seem to be reverting to voluntarism, I take my hat off to York St John. And in the longer term, we need to keep restating the case for publicly funded adult ESOL learning as a great way of achieving a cohesive society.

Celebrating work camps as national treasures – the case of the Civilian Conservation Corps

Some Australian friends recently sent me some photographs they’d taken while vacationing in the USA. Among other places they visited Colorado, sending me photos of Mesa Verde, where the the Ancestral Pueblo peoples built their cliff dwellings and farms; and the Red Rocks Amphitheatre, where you can watch the moon rising over Denver as you listen to your favourite performer.

Statue at Red Rocks

Information panel at Mesa Verde

What both sites have in common was that during the 1930s, they housed work camps for unemployed young men. The Civilian Conservation Corps was a product of Roosevelt’s New Deal; it opened in 1933, placing over a quarter of a million single men in 1,300 camps, employing them on public works that were chosen partly for their public value. In contrast to Britain, the programme became so popular that politicians lobbied to have the CCC open camps in their electoral districts. I’ve met elderly American socialists who will brook no contradiction with their view that the CCC was a force for good.

This enduring popularity might seem inexplicable, particularly as the camps were segregated, women were excluded, and the men wore uniforms and came under military control. But the USA had no welfare system, in contrast to the unemployment benefit available in Britain and elsewhere, and the CCC made it possible for the federal government to pay unemployed single men. It also benefited from its association with the wider New Deal programme.

And Roosevelt was not shy of mobilising public opinion. On the contrary, he was one of the first major democratic politicians to make use of new mass media (wireless in his case) to publicise his administration’s work, and the CCC was equally adept at promoting a positive image, helped by the nature of the work it undertook. While the British Government reached an agreement with the trade unions limiting the work to be done in its work camps, the CCC proudly presented itself as building the modern facilities needed for a nation of pioneers.

Hence my interest in Tony and Janet Brown’s photos. I find it fascinating to see how the memory of the CCC is kept alive and celebrated today, and while I love Rachel Whiteread’s Nissen Hut sculpture in North Yorkshire, it is understated and rather remote. If not exactly secret, most of the British work camps are largely forgotten, along with the unemployed young men who laid the basis for so many of our great forests.

Check out my book if you want to find out more about the British experience of labour camps..

 

 

Promoting civic engagement through learning accounts

I’ve been taking a keen interest in the French system of personal learning accounts. Like other similar systems elsewhere, it seems to me a model of how to incentivise learning – at least as an experience which could hold lessons for the rest of us. And it is also being used to promote active citizenship.

The labour law of 8 August 2016 introduced a new system for incentivising civic engagement, the compte d’engagement citoyen (CEC), which enables the recognition of specified types of civic activity throughout the life course, accompanied by support for relevant education, with the applicant accessing funding through their compte personnel de formation (CPF).

The CEC covers eight types of volunteering:

• National civic service (the alternative to military service, now suspended)
• Military reserve service
• Police reserve service
• Health reserve service
• Master apprentice service
• Service of at least 200 hours a year to a registered association
• Voluntary fire brigade service
• Service in the national or regional civic reserve

The first I heard of the CEC was when I read this summer that the French legislature had criticised delays in the IT system supporting it. The MPs also called on the government to remedy inequalities of access, sort out anomalies such as the exclusion of first aid training, and extend the education provision to retired people who volunteer.

The introduction of the CEC runs parallel to another new scheme for young people, of national universal service. Reflecting one of President Macron’s campaign pledges, the scheme is currently being piloted, and if all goes well it will require all French youth to complete a month of civic action followed up with a further period of systematic voluntary civil or military activity. I’ll post a more detailed description of this scheme soon.

So this is an interesting approach to promoting active citizenship through adult learning, and I look forward to seeing some serious analysis of its effects. At this stage the system seems to me to be admirable in principle, if rather bureaucratic to access and restrictive in scope, but that is an early perspective from an outsider.

Meanwhile, if you want to know more about the French approach to learning accounts, you can find my earlier posts on the CPF here:

• The launch of the new system: https://thelearningprofessor.wordpress.com/2015/01/26/personal-training-accounts-supporting-adult-skills-in-france/
• The move from a time-based account to cash support: https://thelearningprofessor.wordpress.com/2018/03/07/funding-adult-skills-in-france-here-comes-the-big-bang/
• A report on worker take-up of the CPF: https://thelearningprofessor.wordpress.com/2019/06/21/frances-personal-training-accounts-were-a-great-idea-what-is-going-wrong/