It is the most talked about puzzle. How is it that despite all the money allegedly committed for the education of adults and children, all the talk is of a crisis of funding and there is a general air of depression?

Yes there are signs of optimism. Within our primary schools children continue to make great progress and overall our performance is taking us up the league table in comparison to other countries. However in terms of the Adult Learning world the fact that the Conservative Education spokesman Damien Green could seize upon the alarming if imperfect statistic, that the number of adults enrolled on courses has gone down by 190,000 since 1996 is indicative of the current malaise.

‘To discover that the government has spent £663 million on adult education, and yet the number of enrolments are tens of thousands less than when they took office, is another sign of how the initiative culture is failing the most vulnerable.’

He could have gone onto say that despite this investment and numerous major reports and initiatives the Adult Learning landscape looks much the same. As College prospectuses go through the letterboxes across the land there are likely to look much the same as they did seven years ago. Yes they will be glossier and the variety of the offer will be greater but I doubt that they will paint a sufficiently different picture to tempt non-traditional learners back into learning.

As the former manager of the East Leeds Family Learning Centre where we tried to create a new offer to attract adults back into learning, I know at first hand the difficulties of trying to be different.

Fortunately there were some brave individuals who were prepared to back the vision but the overriding pressure was to use the additional funding to do more of the same rather than more with the same.

The Adult Learning sector is not renowned for its innovators and its pioneers. Those that are find it an uphill battle to make the necessary changes. In my experience there was a magnetic pull to return to the comfort zone.

The treatment of Information & Communications Technology illustrates the point. As with schools there has been a major investment in IT equipment. There has also been an increase in the uptake of IT courses, but the jury is out about the extent to which the availability of IT has genuinely transformed teaching methodologies.

The US Secretary of Education Rod Paige makes the same point about the position in that country.

"It's not enough to have a computer and an Internet connection in the classroom if they are not turned on. It's not even enough to turn them on if they are not integrated into the curriculum, and it's pointless to integrate them into the curriculum if they don't add value to student performance. So our mission should be about the quality of education, not the quantity of computers".

The acquisition of IT qualifications has often become an end in itself rather than the means to enable the learner to take charge of their learning across all subject areas and to access resource materials and capture these with an ease and in a way they had never previously imagined.

Gareth is a nurse living in a rural area of North Wales and member of the Royal College of Nursing. As a member he has access to the Learning Zone that was praised last week by the Secretary of State in his speech to the Union Learning Fund Conference. The Learning Zone provides a new learning experience to nurses through which they have easy access to online information and resources relevant to their work. Gareth recently used the Learning Zone to research for evidence about flexible working and stated:

"Normally such a literature review would have entailed many trips to the nearest nursing library, queuing to use computers and databases and continually re-referring to librarians when articles could not be found in the library. In this situation I was able to sit in my study … and access every bit of information I required ... as a result of my efforts I recorded (in my e-portfolio) my experience as an achievement, wrote a reflective passage and set myself a goal of sharing this Learning Zone resource with my colleagues".

Axia CitizenConnect the company responsible for developing the Learning Zone also developed learndirect-futures that is now freely available through learndirect. Currently over 1,000 people are registering each week and using a number of interactivities through which they can discover for themselves those Job Families that best match their skills and interests.

Axia CitizenConnect are also about to join a pilot that is investigating different methods of assessment. The challenge is to improve the achievement and retention rates on care NVQs through creating a new assessment process that is accessed through the Internet.

One of the leading lights in the creation of e-learning Don Clark rightly indicates that IT on its own is only part of the solution

"learning is about people, not technology".

In a white paper published earlier this year, Mr Clark argues that the demand today is for less crude, monolithic solutions.

"Learning is not like stock control. Learning is a complex set of people issues. The e-learning market has had to respond with less emphasis on large, single-sourced, Learning Management System-led solutions, to more sophisticated and integrated blends."

That blend not only needs to address different methods of delivery but it also needs to give attention to addressing key issues like the quality of the childcare. The recent announcement of the creation of 32 Surestart Childrens’ Centres nationally included three that were either based at the ELFLC or within a mile radius.

The challenge is to provide a new blend that seeks to utilise the investment that has been made and focuses on the total learning experience and critically makes the best use of the technology available. More of the same will continue to produce the same results

Author:
Chris Peat OBE, Director of Business Strategy,
Axia CitizenConnect