Ambitious Policies and Learners’ Voices

The Scottish Government today launched Adult Learning in Scotland: Statement of Ambition. This is one of a number of broad vision statements covering different areas of Scottish education, and its broad purpose is to guide policy development over the next five years. What should we make of it?

My initial reaction, as well as my more considered response, is that this is a very welcome statement indeed. The statement acknowledges the central role of adult learning in helping people change and develop – as individuals, as family members, as workers, and as part of the wider community. It sets out broad principles – namely, that larning should be lifelong, life-wide and learner-centred. And it calls for a broad range of provision, with learners involved in planning, developing and evaluating that provision.

Much of this may well remind you of the optimistic policy debate over lifelong learning of the mid-1990s. Key texts such as Learning: the treasure within from UNESCO and England’s The Learning Age expressed similar hopes and values in very similar language. The first main ambition listed in the Scottish statement – for Scotland to be ‘recognised globally as the most creative and engaged learning community’ – could have appeared in any of a score of policy papers from different countries. So could several of the other proposals, such as high quality training for professionals, giod quality advice and guidance, or the recognition of informal learning.

But there are also new and distinctive features in the Scottish statement. The most significant of these is the role envisaged for learners in driving the system forward. The Scottish Government set out to engage with learners in producing the statement, and it contains broad proposals for empowering learners not only in their own learning but in developing policy.

And this is also a key feature in the strategy for taking the ambitions forward. The first step listed in the statement is the creation of a cross-sectoral task group to develop a strategic implementation plan; the second is to ‘ensure learners are involved in the process’.

There are some obvious challenges in taking this forward. What about people who are, or see themselves as, non-learners – who think the system is ‘not for me’? What about working learners, with limited time to spare on meetings that may or may not meet their needs? Will the loudest voices be those of the most articulate and confident – and indeed the best educated and most affluent? And will some people simply become semi-pro learners, constantly speaking for other learners long after moving on from the experiences that brought them into learning?

I’m sure there are plenty of other practical questions like this, but the principle is a good one. Of course professional adult educators will also have relevant knowledge and experience to bring to this debat. And we have plenty of time, as nothing much is going to happen this side of the Scottish Referendum in September – and the issues and challenges will still be here whatever the voters decide.

So it would be interesting to hear from anyone who has tried to organise learner voice in this way, whether in the UK or elsewhere, or who simply has some ideas about how it might be done.

And a few closing words on resources. In practice, the Scottish Government has prioritised young full-time learners, particularly in higher education. As a result of selective funding cuts, colleges alone have lost over 196,000 enrolments of part-time further education students since the current government took power in 2007; almost all of these were adults and well over half were women.

Decide for yourself what this tells us, if anything, about the scale of the political challenge ahead. But the history of adult education has always been a history of struggle, and no one in Scottish adult learning expects a statement of ambition alone to change that fact.

 

A legal requirement for open access?

Last Thursday, the German state of Baden-Württemberg approved a new law on higher education. It covers quite a number of areas, from access to degree study to an Ombudsman system for doctoral research students, but it is the section on open access publishing that has attracted far the most attention.

Under the new law, universities are required to support their researchers in exercising their right to a non-commercial reproduction of their work after a period of one year. As the publishers do not accept that researchers have any such ‘right’, it is entirely unsurprising that they are bitterly critical of this provision.

Theresia Bauer, the Green Party minister who guided the law through parliament, argues that open access is desirable in principle as a way of informing public opinion. She also cites more practical grounds: the public already pay for the research, and the rising price of journal subscriptions means that even university libraries struggle to pay once more for the published findings.

Conservative opposition politicians have supported the publishers, arguing that it contravenes copyright law. Some prominent academics have even argued that the requirement to make their publicationsavailable in an institutional is an attack on academic freedom.

Mercedes-Benz-Welt, Stuttgart

You might not know much about Baden-Württemberg, but that doesn’t make it a minor backwater. It has nearly 11m inhabitants and its capital, Stuttgart, is home to some of Germany’s best-known quality car manufacturers. It could serve as a model of the successful, dynamic city-region, with a high density of researchers among its population. The state also houses a thriving wine industry and the beer is pretty good too (I once enjoyed a pint – yes, a pint – in a bar that claimed to have been Hegel’s regular when he was a student).

If Baden-Württemberg chose to declare independence from the rest of the federal republic, it would be one of Europe’s most prosperous and attractive countries. So I am starting to wonder what would happen if the Scottish Government adopted a similar principle, and insisted that all academics in publicly funded universities in Scotland should similarly make their work available online.

If Holyrood were to reach such a decision, they would find themselves in open conflict with the UK Government, which has opted for the far more publisher-friendly model of ‘gold open access’. Picking fights with Westminster is what Alex Salmond likes best, so long as he is on a winning wicket. In this case, I am pretty sure that he would find widespread support for ‘green open access’, both in the research community and among the wider public who pay for our research.

 

 

Legal advice on the EU and tuition fees in an independent Scotland

The debating chamber in the Scottish Parliament

I’ve been banging on for a bit now about the Scottish Government’s belief that the EU would allow it to charge fees to students from the rest of the UK in the event of a Yes vot in September (I’m assuming that the independent monarchy of Scotland would be an EU member, mainly because I can think of no good reason why it would not be, and if the UK is still a member, I’m certain that it would be arguing strongly in support of Scotland’s membership).

The Government’s White Paper on independence guarantees free tuition for Scottish higher education students, while charging tuition fees to students from the rest of the UK. This proposal has been challenged by a number of European officials and former officials. Huw Lewis, the Welsh education minister, has predicted that he will have to join a queue of people wanting to sue the Scottish Government if it attempts to proceed with its plans.

The Scottish Government’s response has been to repeat the claim in the White Paper that it has been advised that it will have an ‘objective justification’ for exempting Scotland from EU law on equal access to higher education for all European citizens. It claims that this is consistent with the legal advice it has received (but which it will not publish), and that ‘This is a point made by Universities Scotland too’.

Universities Scotland commissioned its own legal advice, which is now in the public domain. It received eight pages of cautiously worded advice in April 2013. I’ll happily discuss it in greater detail if anyone is interested, but I imagine most people will be satisfied with the conclusion, which consists of the following two paragraphs:

As a matter of EU law it would appear that it may be possible to rely upon a residency requirement for access to preferential fees and grants regimes so long as that requirement is applied to all students regardless of their nationality and can be objectively justified.

It will be for the government seeking to introduce such a regime to establish, on evidence, that there is a legitimate aim which can be objectively justified which would allow them to derogate from the overriding principles of freedom of movement and non discrimination.

Decide for yourself whether this suggests any realistic prospect of the Scottish Government persuading the EU to over-ride its core principles of non-discrimination and free movement of labour.

Why the Scottish Government is wrong about tuition fees and the EU

>If Scots vote to leave the UK in September, the Scottish Government plans to continue to charging tuition fees for students from England, Wales and Northern Ireland, but not for anyone else in the European Union. I’ve argued before that this is unlikely to happen, and today a former EU Commissioner for Education and Training is quoted as saying that all EU students would have to receive ‘the same treatment’.

Only in Scotland, and only this year, would anyone think this news. The legal position is quite clear. European legislation on free movement of labour – one of the central founding principles of the EU – covers higher education, which is treated legally as a form of vocational training. There have been challenges in the past to the definition of higher education as a form of vocational training, and the courts have always rejected them.

If you’re interested in reading about the origins and rationale of this rather quirky legal status, you can always get a library copy of my now rather dated book on European education policies. But the main consequence was that it allowed the EU to develop a series of mobility schemes and collaborative projects, and still underpins such programmes as Erasmus+.

So under current European law, the Scottish Government must treat all EU citizens equally in respect of access to higher education. Of course, the Government can try to get the law changed, and it might well wish to have higher education redefined as an area of national rather than European competence, but it has not said it will do so. And at present I can’t see how a small, new member state will be able to gather together enough support for the European Commission to change its current stance.

In its White Paper on independence, the Scottish Government effectively says that it will seek an opt-out. It doesn’t use that phrase, of course, which is popularly associated with the Coservative Party. Rather, it says that it will if necessary present an ‘objective justification’ for an exemption, based on the unique and exceptional position of Scotland in relation to other parts of the UK, on the relative size of the rest of the UK, on the fee differential, on our shared land border and common language, on the qualification structure, on the quality of our university sector, and on the high demand for places.

Michael Russell, Scotland’s Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning

Will this wash? Well, I think it just about possible, but highly unlikely. If accepted, it would open up a massive boîte de Pandore. And here are just a few of the most obvious reasons why.

At the most general level, it runs against current EU policies on higher education, which aim at improving professional mobility by increasing the numbers of students who attend a university in another European country than their own, and aligning the qualifications structures of universities in different European countries. More particularly, it would present a precedent for other countries in similar situations (eg. Denmark/Sweden, Wallonie/France, Netherlands/Flanders, Luxembourg and everyone). It would also annoy the socks off higher education ministers and rectors who have persuaded university staff to teach in English. The practical consequences elsewhere would also be significant, starting with the effects in our neighbouring island of Ireland.

So you can just imagine how other ministers of education will react when Mike Russell, Scotland’s Cabinet Secretary for Education and Lifelong Learning, sets out his plans to the European Council on Education. I would like to be in that room.

Turning mediocre PISA results into a good news story – or how the BBC swallowed a government press release

An article on the BBC website carries the headline “Record levels of Scottish school leavers going into work, training or study”. Similar stories ran across other Scottish media, reporting that the proportion of school leavers achieving a “positive initial destination” reached 91.4 per cent in October 2013, the highest level on record.

All these reports show a striking similarity to a Scottish Government press release. Most quoted heavily from the Education Secretary, Mike Russell, repeating his claim that ‘earlier this month the OECD rated Scotland as doing at least as well as, if not better than, a number of leading world economies in literacy, numeracy and science’. None of the journalists concerned appear to have undertaken any investigation of their own, but rather took the press release on trust, and swallowed all of the claims that it made.

The first claim concerns the ‘record’ number of school-leavers entering ‘positive initial destinations’. You’d think that a journalist would be curious about this term, but instead they seem to have assumed that it meant employment, education or training. These are certainly included in the concept of ‘positive initial destinations’, but it also includes voluntary work, and the new Activity Agreements introduced in 2010-11.

If we compare the most recent figures with the previous year, we see the following pattern:

• The proportion entering higher education fell by 0.8%
• the proportion entering further education fell by 1.1%
• the proportion in full-time training rose by 0.4%
• the proportion in employment rose by 0.6%
• the proportion covered by activity agreements rose by 0.4%
• the proportion in voluntary work rose by 0.1%

 
In other words, what we see is a small fall in the numbers who stay in full-time education, and a small rise in the number who enter jobs or become trainees. This is exactly what we would expect if overall economic activity rates are rising, and the youth labour market is favourable. And the data are silent on whether young people entering work are receiving training, and on the quality of that training.

Then we come to Mike Russell’s claim on PISA. There are well-known technical and design limitations to the PISA survey, but let’s leave these to one side. The findings for Scotland indicate that 15-year-olds were slightly ahead of their English counterparts on literacy and maths and slightly behind them on science. In each case, the difference was so minor as to fall within the margin for error.

The English Secretary of Education is dissatisfied that English children still fall behind their counterparts in Scandinavia and the Asian nations. The Scottish Secretary of Education, on very similar scores to England’s, describes the results as evidence of world class standards.

In both cases, the media meekly followed the lines set out in the respective sets of government press releases. Are education journalists in a position to hold government and education systems to account, and subject them to public scrutiny? And if not, what is to be done to promote an informed public?

A constitutional right to free education?

Alex Salmond, Scotland’s First Minister, has called for a constitutional guarantee of ‘free education’. Speaking to the BBC, he described a written constitution as integral to a ‘modern democracy’, which would enshrine a number of civic rights. So far as education is concerned, he stated that:

Scotland pioneered free education hundreds of years ago. We have a policy that has restored free education, but it should be a constitutional protection.

Before anyone accuses me of extreme gullibility, let me make it clear that I am award that Salmond is a politician, and his main priority at present is building support ahead of the 2014 referendum. No one has ever accused him of spending too much time contemplating the finer points of democratic legitimacy, and I am not about to start. But he clearly thinks that the idea of ‘free education’ is an appealing one, and it is therefore worth exploring it a little further.

The first thing to note is that a number of opposition politicians in Scotland have recently called for a new debate over tuition fees in higher education. For example, Labour’s Scottish leader Johann Lamont last year claimed that the current arrangement, whereby Scottish undergraduates are funded by the state, was financially unsustainable and likely to erode ‘excellence’. She also claimed that it was unfair, as university graduates not only get ‘higher lifetime returns’, but a ‘disproportionate number’ are from more privileged backgrounds, making the current system ‘essentially regressive’. So this is a hot political topic, and the parties – Lamont as much as Salmond – are looking for political returns.

The second thing that I’d say is that if a constitution enshrines a right to free education, then the law courts will need to test what is included and what is not.  Even in Scotland’s universities, most postgraduate students expect to pay a fee, and at the top end many companies pay premium fees for executive education programmes. Local councils in Scotland charge adults for community courses. In Stirling, for example, a typical class – beginners’ IT or creating writing – costs £71.40. And then there is a vast mass of commercially provided education, from teach-yourself materials through to study tours.

Third, and somewhat pedantically, Mr Salmond has rewritten the past. For most of their history, Scottish universities charged students to matriculate (or enrol), then they paid a fee to the professor for each course that they studied, and again to sit the exams and graduate. When Adam Smith won a scholarship to Balliol College, he complained that his Oxford professors were uninterested in teaching, because they were paid from endowments and not by their students. (The serious-minded Presbyterian and Unionist Smith also detested the political and religious sympathies of Balliol, where many staff were inclined towards Jacobitism and Catholicism).

Fourth, public funding involves trade-offs. In the case of Scotland, the government has decided to use public funding to support the universities, and to reduce dramatically its support for colleges. It has required the funding council to concentrate its cuts on part-time study, so that participation by adult learners – particularly women – has fallen dramatically. It is simply not the case that ‘free education’ has no implications – we have learned in Scotland this year that ‘free education’ for university undergraduates means ‘no education’ for many others.

So basically, I’m suggesting that it is unrealistic to expect that all education can be free. A constitutional right to free education will need to be highly qualified, and will be subjected to legal challenges. And I confidently expect it to be rewritten every time there is a change of government. Little wonder that other ‘modern democracies’ like Germany do not enshrine this right in their constitution. I admire the intention, but it’s unworkable.

Then there’s the specific question of higher education. Do we really believe that a mass higher education system can be funded today on the same basis as a much smaller system that used to cater for a tiny elite in the past? Whether fees should be charged is essentially a question of morality. Those who believe it morally right for the state to fund the system through taxation should be willing to argue openly for higher taxation, or for lower quality. Those who believe state-funded higher education is socially regressive, and produces stronger private returns than public goods, will presumably argue for fees much more explicitly and openly than Johann Lamont has done so far.

And do I expect our leading politicians to take these morally justifiable but politically unpopular positions any time soon? Let the clichés roll, from melting rocks to flying pigs.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-scotland-politics-21028617

Raising demand for skills: the role of public procurement policies

Governments have limited policy instruments at their disposal in promoting lifelong learning. Of course, they can intervene on the supply side, through funding decisions and through attempts to steer provider behaviour by setting targets and so on. But their ability to raise demand for skills and training is more constrained. Attempts to incentivise demand, by subsidising individuals or firms, usually combine high levels of bureaucracy with the risk of fraud. Legislation and regulation are politically unpopular, allegedly undermining competitiveness through a tangle of ‘red tape’.

But does that mean governments can do little to raise skills demand? Hardly. Public authorities employ a lot of people, and governments – local as well as national – can try to set an example. And public agencies spend an awful lot of money as purchasers of goods and services. We are already familiar with government using public contracts as a way of promoting equality of opportunity and fair trade principles among firms that supply goods and services. Now, in its consultation on public procurement, the Scottish Government is proposing that it should use major public contracts as a way of promoting skills and training.

The consultation proposes that agencies responsible for public procurement should:

• Ask every company undertaking a major public contract to produce a training and apprenticeship plan; and
• Encourage sustainability, for example by inserting community benefit clauses to provide training and jobs for local people.

It also proposes that the company should publish its training and apprenticeship plans for those contracts. It has less to say about enforcing any such clauses, though the consultation asks respondents for their ideas: What sanctions might be appropriate for failure to comply?

This is, I believe, a welcome attempt to raise demand for training and skills. In the forty years since Prime Minister Callaghan’s speech at Ruskin College on Britain’s skills deficit, UK governments have proven remarkably unwilling to tamper with the demand side. The few exceptions, such as the empowerment of trade union learning representatives, have been tentative and rare.

There has been no such coyness on the supply side. On the contrary, one administration after another has tampered with funding, structures and systems in an attempt to make providers ‘more employer-led’. The underlying assumption is that employers are doing fine – they know what skills are needed, they know how to use them, and they know how to develop them – and all that is needed is for colleges and other providers to listen more closely to what employers have to say.

This is reasonable, if limited and unimaginative, if the employer has a long term view of skill and innovation. We might point to the German example, where training and apprenticeships are largely employer-led, albeit in a context which reserves a major partnership role for trade unions. But what if the employer is driven by short term margins, or sees training simply as a cost, or is clueless as to the skills they need?  

In this context, the Scottish Government’s proposals deserve support. Of course, they are not perfect. On their own, they will resolve neither the unemployment crisis nor the problems of skills demand. There is a notable gap when it comes to enforcement. Any skills clauses will need to be backed by monitoring and, if need be, penalties for non-compliance. Nor is the principle new new. Others have gone down this path already, including some pioneering local authorities.

Still, a coherent and consistent strategy at national level, affecting all major public contracts, could help to leverage a significant change in the culture and behaviour of employers. And in the UK, this will make a refreshing change.

The Scottish Government consultation on its Procurement Reform Bill is available at: http://www.scotland.gov.uk/Resource/0039/00398733.pdf