A Government bereft of ideas...

Further action over the lecturers’ pay crisis looms in colleges. Hard-fought gains in adult learning over ten years have been wiped out by government policy in just over one year. Top-up fees in higher education are leading to open student revolt. And the Government’s much-vaunted priority housing programme has brought negligible gains to urban college staff recruitment.
Over the past five weeks, three senior advisers and consultants to government working within these areas have used an identical phrase when I asked them what they think is happening. With varying degrees of exasperation, they said: “This is a government that seems to have run out of ideas.”
Can that really be true? We have the Leitch skills agenda, Train to Gain, Skills Accounts, the radical shake-up of education and training pre- and post-19, revitalisation of 14-19 diplomas (before they have even started). The list goes on.
In fact, John Denham, Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills, and his ministerial gathering are behaving not like a government in decline but like a new government desperate to push through radical change in the early years before settling down to consolidate gains in the hope of re-election.
However much people dislike the employment-skills-driven utilitarian agenda, they surely cannot say this shows a lack of ideas. So what really lies at the heart of the critics’ comments? Alan Tuckett, director of Niace, the national organisation for adult learning, cast the issue in a very interesting light when he spoke to me recently.
He said: “For some, the changes in further and adult education amount to broken promises, for others it’s a retreat from difficult situations. For us (Niace) it’s the undoing of ten years of hard-fought for gains in adult learning.” Interestingly, he is also a strong advocate of the Government’s skills agenda. “But not at the cost of everything else.”
The Niace survey results this week (for Adult Learners Week) show a drop from 40 to 33 per cent in the number of skilled manual workers taking up learning opportunities. With an overall 3 per cent drop in the number of adults participating in learning in the last year, and no discernible rise in the number of adult learners in social group DE, the semi and unskilled workers, unemployed and retired people, the headline findings of the annual survey – Counting the cost – shows that government policy has hit the neediest groups hardest.
Mr Tuckett said: “The survey’s major finding, that participation has fallen among key target groups for the government’s learning and skills strategy, calls into question the balance of current policy instruments.
“One goal of policy is to engage those who say they have done no learning since school. The findings that over two-thirds of them agree that learning and training can have a positive impact upon their working and family lives - yet just 15 per cent plan to get involved - shows the size of the task if the Government’s goals are to be realised.
“Despite the real gains of the Skills for Life and Train to Gain strategies, the very groups identified as key to the achievement of the Skills Strategy and in the Leitch Review are bearing the heaviest burden of the re-balancing of funding.”
Returning to the three advisers – one of whom was Mr Tuckett – what emerges on closer examination is that the government seems to have confused the concepts of “ideas” and “initiatives”. It still has plenty of initiatives but no idea how to sell them in the marketplace of its own creation. Instead, ministers berate the populace with arguments about what is good for them and good for the economy.
But, as Barry Lovejoy, head of colleges at the University and Colleges Union, said: “When ministers talk of the economy, what about the inflation of the real cost of living for our members?”
For him, the state of lecturers’ pay epitomised the “broken promises” mentioned earlier. Instead of bridging the 10 per cent gap with schools, as labour pledged ten years ago, ministers obfuscated and then handed the problem back to college corporations, without giving them the cash to do it.
For many others, failure to scrap A-levels symbolises the “retreat from difficult situations”. The government swept aside the results of a major national inquiry on the future of A-levels and, instead, said let the markets decide between them and the new diplomas.
As for the ”undoing of hard-fought gains”, as Niace survey evidence shows, we have seen the loss of 1.4 million adult learners from colleges and related institutions over the past two years as a result of the skills policies.
So, the mounting problems and discontent that ministers face within the FE workforce – and here colleges are a reflection of the national electoral picture – is that lots of individual groups are finding different causes for disillusionment. Everyone blamed Prime Minister Gordon Brown personally on May 1 for the worst local polling for 40 years. In fact, the disaster was the result of the accumulation of individual grievances: the credit crunch, house prices, pensions, savings, the 10p tax fiasco, wider discontent and strikes in health, education and the oil industry etc. And so it is with FE.
It’s easy to identify and apportion blame but what is the solution? The Government task is no less than to tackle all these issues – and it can through current and near future legislation to move on questions such as those of lecturers’ pay and access to adult further education. So, what was it those critical advisers wanted? A completion of promises made in a way that showed ministers were listening; not just more of the same under the name of reform and modernisation.