Adult education and municipal enterprise: Learning from the 80s

Reading Helen Jackson’s political memoir has been both a joy and an inspiration. It is essentially the story of her political life before becoming an MP, when she rose from activist to senior councillor at a time when local government was an exciting space for experiment and innovation as well as an important source of much-needed public services. Until, that is, the Thatcher government decided that local government needed its wings clipped.

Sheffield, where Helen taught, worked, and raised a family, stood at the centre of several significant developments. Before the mass unemployent of the early 1980s, the City Council was one of a number of radical local authorities that sought to protect and expand public services such as housing and education, and led a number of radical new policies such as South Yorkshire’s much-loved policy of freezing bus fares (I have happy memories of taking my daughter into town at the princely sum of 12p each way).

As unemployment hit hard at the region’s traditional (male) industries in the early 80s, the Council shifted to using its position as an employer and purchaser to promote local employment, promote equality of access to work, and to improve the quality of jobs on offer, while woeking in partnership with an initially reluctant business community to support enterprise and attract new jos. And it was striking how strong a role adult education played in this process.

Helen is well-placed to comment on these developments. As an increasingly vocal champion of women’s rights and advocate of racial justice, and as an influential elected office-holder responsible for the large direct works department, as well as being an educator herself, she is able to give an authoritative account of the part played by adult education in Sheffield’s municipal socialism.

Three of these initiatives are particularly worth mentioning. First is the opening of Northern College, the first residential adult college in the north of England, which stood out for its commitment to a broad conception of social justice which linked class, gender and ethnicity to its educational work, and continues to do important work with adults to this day. Keith Jackson, the College’s first deputy principal, was then Helen’s husband.

While the College partly emerged from the strong tradition of trade union education and industrial day release schemes in South Yorkshire, Helen also points to other important influences in the Workers’ Educational Association and some of the innovative community development work launched by the Home Office in 1969. She notes that the College was an early adopter of free childcare for students, initially funded by an outside grant and later absorbed into the ongoing budget.

Second, Helen describes the pioneering work of the women who challenged gender stereotyping in traditionally male manual crafts. It’s easy now to forget how innovative – and controversial – it was for women to train as garage mechanics or builders, and then work successfully in their new trades. Women from this group went on to train others through further education and through new training programmes for women, as well as helping influence the Council to adopt gender monitoring in its own employment practices.

The third pioneering initiative was the Take Ten scheme of paid educational leave for the Council’s manual workers. As the name implied, Council workers could take a day a week off to attend a tailored course for ten weeks; against expectations, some 270 attended in the first year alone, with priority going to the low-paid and those with no previous qualifications.

There were others. For example, the Council established a Community Work Apprenticeship Scheme, recruiting people from disadvantaged backgrounds to train as community workers rather than relying on the largely white middle class graduates who would otherwise have taken these roles. There’s also the informal learning that informed Helen’s gender politics, among other areas. But that’s probably enough to give a flavour of the book’s account of adult eduction’s contribution to municipal enterprise in the conditions of the 1980s.

It’s striking to work out how much of this thinking and experience was carried over into the early Blair years after 1997, when Helen became Parliamentary Private Secretary to the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland. Particularly while David Blunkett was Secretary of State for Education, the early Blair government supported and promoted lifelong learning as a vehicle for employability and social justice, in ways that have still to be systematically evaluated; but it is also striking that the Labour governments subsequently back-pedalled on much of this work.

What conclusions do I draw from this? First, the book provides a coherent account of adult learning’s role in promoting social change and civic engagement as well as economic regeneration. Second, it shows how local government can serve as a test-bed for broader strategies – something worth remembering given the devolution of adult education budgets to the English regions.

Third, and most important, it made me wonder why the 1997-99 innovations were so easily overturned. On Helen Jackson’s account, the Sheffield adult education measures were popular as well as effective, so that opposition was eventually overcome. But that wasn’t the experience at national level.

With the benefit of hindsight, I’m not convinced that after 1997 we – the adult learning community – did enough to generate enthusiasm and build support for the new policies. Consequently the Treasury found it easy to persuade later ministers that adult education was all cost and no benefit, and could cheerfully be dismissed as a luxury rather than a national necessity.

Protesting an honorary degree for Judith Butler

The poster for Butler’s lecture (copyright unifr.ch)

Judith Butler is a well-known American scholar and political activist. Her work on gender and sexuality is widely cited, and her book Gender Trouble was something of a best-seller. She has influenced scholars in a number of disciplines beyond feminist and queer theory and cultural studies, and is well known in educational studies. Her work on the gendered body has been taken as a sharp tool for understanding educational identities and purposes. Researchers in adult learning citing her work include Barbara Merrill, Valerie-Lee Chapman and André Grace.

Given Butler’s fame and standing, I was slightly surprised to discover that the Anglophone media had ignored the kerfuffle over her recent honorary doctorate. The University of Freiburg/Fribourg awarded Butler her degree on the recommendation of its philosophy department, and the Berkeley scholar duly collected her award. But she did so amidst a storm of fury from conservative Catholics, objecting to her views on family life and gender construction.

Butler’s formal lecture (on non-violence) was given with security guards at the doors, while some thirty Catholics audibly protested outside with hymns and candles. The university’s professor of dogmatic theology (let me know if you come up with a better translation of ‘Professor für dogmatische Theologie’) announced that he disapproved of the honorary degree and was boycotting the lecture.

This was relatively a small and generally polite protest. The lecture hall was full, and the only anger was apparently shown by latecomers who were refused entry. An alternative event, with mulled wine and bible readings, attracted a negligible audience. Meanwhile, the university’s rector received dozens of angry emails, and the local Bishop was urged to withhold his usual mass during the University’s ‘Dies academicus’.

Butler is, of course, no stranger to controversy. She has been particularly criticised for her views on Israel and once won fourth prize in a competition for bad writing. I haven’t heard of religious fundamentalists taking any particular exception to her previously, though I can see that her views on the social construction of gender might offend those who believe that the two genders were made by God. So I found it rather odd that the national broadcaster quoted Barbara Hallensleben, professor of theology at Freiburg/Fribourg, as saying that Butler’s view of gender was consistent with creationism.

Given that the controversy passed off safely, I would imagine that Butler rather relished the whole experience. It’s only slightly surprising that it wasn’t picked up by at least some specialist journalists in the Anglophone media; I only came across the episode because I was working in Hamburg and saw it reported very briefly in the press. Academic fame can impress insiders like me, for better or for worse, but out there it remains a very small niche.

Can women be trusted to govern higher education?

A battle is under way over who is to control Scotland’s universities. The Scottish Government is legislating on the future shape of the post-16 education system. The legislation is wide-ranging, but includes proposals for greater political involvement in the appointment of university governing bodies.  Mike Russell, for the government, is very keen on this idea; the universities are lobbying ferociously against it.

Enter the National Union of Students, who yesterday released a statement condemning the gender imbalance of existing university governing bodies. Based on 2011/12 figures, the NUS claimed that just 25% of board members are women. These figures were duly reported in the Herald on the day that Mike Russell was called to give evidence to the Scottish Parliament’s education committee, where he said agreed that the figures justified the powers that he has proposed for himself, and even floated the idea of a new amendment allowing him to intervene in order to secure a gender balance.

The first thing I want to say is that the NUS has every right to present these figures, however inconvenient they may be for the universities. University governing bodies are often seen as ceremonial bodies with little real power, but this is only partly right. Governing bodies (usually known as the ‘court’) are increasingly flexing their muscles over their formal role, which is to approve and review the institution’s strategic goals and direction; they can be key allies for particular groups of senior staff; and above all they appoint the principal and can hold him or her to account.

And it is the chairs of university courts who have been meeting Mike Russell, and reportedly annoying him not only by opposing his new Bill, but by the way in which they do it. If the governing bodies do matter, then so does their membership. I checked the NUS data, using more up-to-date membership lists where possible, excluding small specialist colleges, and disregarding university principals (most of whom are male, but that is another issue) who are present ex officio.

Women account for 28% of current members of university governing bodies (usually known as ‘the court’). Men are a majority of all university governing bodies, ranging from 55% at Dundee to an overwhelming 85% at University of the Highlands and Islands. All university governing bodies are chaired by men.  And this is in a system where the majority of students and of staff are female.

It isn’t difficult to see how this situation has come about. University courts are very different bodies, depending on the history of the institution, but all share some common features. They all include a group who are co-opted by existing governors; though some universities advertise such posts, more usually this is a closed process. I found that 74% of those listed in this category were men.

Co-opted representatives usually come from the world of business and public life. Most of the former group are men; one university has a number of co-opted male governors from the dominant (private) industry, and a smaller group of female co-optees who come mostly from quangos and the service sector.

The Herald quoted Alastair Sim of Universities Scotland as claiming that ‘many universities have an equal gender balance amongst their co-opted members’. On my figures, this is so in only one university – Strathclyde – out of fifteen. I have invited him to clarify or correct his claim. No university court has a majority of female co-optees.

Then there are those who sit on court by virtue of some office they hold. These include the main student association officers. They often include representatives of local councils, and in the ancient universities they include Kirk ministers, student-elected rectors, and a few other remainders from past times. The universities have no control over these groups, but they are relatively small in number.

And there are staff representatives: 60% of the governors elected by a predominantly female staff electorate are men. When I was a deputy principal, I well remember discussions in which the principal and chair of court (both then female) lamented the difficulty of getting women academics onto court. Was this because they were unwilling to stand for election (we thought so) – and if so, why?

It should go without saying that the current situation is unacceptable. I can understand some of the problems. Women are a minority in public life. Mike Russell knows this, not least from his experience in the Scottish Government: the First Minister is male, as are five out of seven Cabinet Secretaries and eight out of thirteen Ministers. Wherever we look in public life, we see stark and alarming examples of inequality.

But I expect better of university courts. They could have overcome this and other challenges if they had chosen to do so – and they did not. And if inequality is wrong in principle, it may also turn out to have been remarkably stupid. MSPs have already called governors ‘an old boys’ club’. This is a whiskery old cliché, of course, but the label is likely to stick. It won’t help the sector feel good about itself, and it damages our reputation in the wider world. And it has handed over a weapon to a Minister who has often been described as a ruthless centraliser.

Andrew Denholm’s article in today’s Herald is at: http://www.heraldscotland.com/news/education/minister-may-intervene-on-university-inequality.20356477