Week 17

#BigConversation 28.6.21

Provocation 1: Economic Dimension (individual, community, movement).

#AdultConversations #52weeks52speaks

Week 17 Dr Lou Mycroft

This is a transcript of Lou's provocation at the Big Conversation in June 2021.

Individual

You don’t need me to rehearse the narrowing of adult community education to proxies of ‘employability’ such as maths, English and ICT.

I hate that word, ‘employability’.

It’s worse than you think it is. It’s not just a word, it’s a whole architecture of thinking about human beings which takes us back to the 1930s and beyond. It strips away community, leaving the individual standing alone.

I’d love to know who the architect of the word was - to make them a villain.

But as anyone who watched the last season of Line of Duty would know, the oppression of human beings - whether criminal, social or economic - is not always that dramatic. ‘Employability’ is most likely to have been thought up by a committee of suits, in a room in Sheffield in 1999.

The philosopher Glenn Rikowski writes about “human capital”. I’m making myself out to be an avid telly watcher, but the herald of this was the term ‘human resources’ (or, as I sometimes hear evidence of ‘inhuman resources’, no offence). And surely no-one could forget Stan the caretaker in the sublime Victoria Wood sitcom “dinnerladies”, saying “Human Resources!”

We are all ‘human resources’ and most of us always have been, statistically. Sadly, I don’t think we are going to ever reach the sort of nirvana where the nurse is valued as much as the barrister, though I live in hope of us doing better than we do. Since the Industrial Revolution we have exchanged our labour for capital and we’ll need to end capitalism before we overcome that.

Yet work doesn’t need to be without dignity. I’ve always seen work as a noble pursuit. I’m not going to romanticise the days of steel works and sewing factories, though I’ve a right to mention them as I grew up around them. But there were good wages and good times along with reasonable prospects of ‘getting on’ - a move to the office as a draughtsman or overseer in the sewing factory. Think of Stan Barstow’s 1960s classic, ‘A Kind of Loving’ (I read books too). And people always had businesses of their own, particularly before supermarkets sucked all the life out of the high street. My home town of Mexborough has what must be one of the most depressed high streets in the country; my mum remembers it having six greengrocers. Something we forget when we look back through our rose tinted spectacles.

Dignity. The dignity of work. And ‘employability’ stripped that all away. How about we put the social purpose back into it?

I know that many people working on employability programmes resist and subvert the dehumanising message. I’ve worked with you. I SEE YOU. How many people here are from the volcom sector, the third sector? Third sector, raise your hand. You’ve done so much of the heavy lifting recently.

But that’s also part of the problem. Adult community education is scattered to the four winds. Again, I think it’s un-serendipity (malchance?) rather than a masterplan. If it was deliberate, I’d be starting to admire the evil genius masterplanner in a weird kind of way. In fact, what Thatcher did was to pit us against one another. We did the rest of the work ourselves.

We are split off from one another, not for any logical reason but because of how we have officially constructed adult community education. I’m not suggesting we all come back into the one silo. I’m suggesting we organise together.

Community

What’s the public sector 20 years on from PFI? What’s voluntary mean that community doesn’t? What’s community mean that voluntary doesn’t? Why do colleges take up all the airspace in FE?

There are employability programmes in prisons, in schools, in colleges and community centres, on buses and barges, in football clubs and workplaces. I know, because for a dozen years I was a teacher educator at The Northern College in Barnsley - a centre for social purpose education - - just like Fircroft. Over the years I taught 1000s of social purpose educators, some of whom are here today, many working on some form of ‘employability’ provision and rarely a single one worked in an FE college. Almost all worked with adults. In communities of some form or another and using social purpose pedagogies that put relationships - and community - first. Think about that for a moment. We know it, but we too often forget.

Think about all the colleagues we have, working on community programmes, including ‘employability’, who are not even considered when policy is set. Out there, grafting away. This separation from one another is a social construct.

I did my PhD fieldwork in 2019 with a top-up in 2020. 400 people responded to my question, which was to reimagine community education. The whole project was designed to make the visible, invisible. To put briefly to one side all those social constructs that keep us apart.

The 400 respondents were utterly engaged with ‘employability’, though of a very different variety and only one of them used that word. They want meaningful work, for themselves and their families. They want to be paid a living wage - who doesn’t? But that wasn’t the driver.

The driver was the desire for a rewarding and meaningful intergenerational life - in communities on and offline. Work is part of that and ‘employability’ was as much for them about unpaid work as about paid, meaningful voluntary work, passing skills onto others and being prepared for work as a whole human being: self-directed, emotionally literate, self-responsible and concerned and connected with the world around them.

Movement

Civicness. Social purpose. What could employability look like if we embraced all of that? And if we created a movement across *all* of us (not just those of us funded by the adult education budget). A movement which didn’t infantilise, which would make it much less likely that adults would act like kids (I’ve got a great respect for ‘kids’ by the way and I believe my son’s generation should be running the world already).

We’d have to find a new name for it, and that’s what we are trying to do over the next six months. Language shapes the way we think - that’s irrefutable. As long as we use that word ‘employability’ we dehumanise ourselves and others.

And as long as we don’t even know what to call what we are talking about here today - adult learning, ACL, community education - we’ll never be able to get hold of it as a concept, or tackle it together. The language itself divides us. And do the systems, structures, hierarchies and funding streams that we labour within.

How many of us today think beyond the Adult Education Budget when we think ‘ACL’ (or whatever we call it?) Yes, there are partnerships in local areas, which work on programmes together, but do we genuinely co-construct or do we buy into competitive cultures by having ‘lead’ organisations which subcontract to others? Third sector colleagues, what do you think of when you think of the local ‘adult education’ provider? Fellow travellers or somewhere to go for the crumbs from a table which is looking increasingly bare?

Whenever I attend gatherings of people who are campaigning for adult education, I don’t hear beyond calls for better, broader funding. Those calls are important - yes, we need that. But the container is too small. The thinking is too small. If you’re in these spaces too I know that you are possibly not thinking beyond the Adult Education Budget, beyond the sector called ‘FE’, because I have seen so many of you not hearing me. I have seen you not seeing my questions in chat. I am sorry to be so blunt, but I can’t think of another way to get it across to you - you are recycling words amongst yourselves and in doing so you’re missing the big picture. I’m not blaming you for that. With honourable exceptions t’s like the Berlin Wall between ‘FE’-hosted adult community learning and what’s happening more broadly in communities. To be honest, even within FE, college-based educators of adults would not often identify themselves as being part of today - you’ll hear more about that from Jo. We act divided because we have been poured into different containers at government level. Money for ‘education’, money for ‘communities’. I don’t know how we influence that high up (and they are not listening either), but I do know how we influence at the grassroots and our #AdultConversations campaign has a role to play in that.

When I talk about mobilising, I mean *all* of us - no matter what our ‘sector’. Three years ago, I called for those involved in adult community education from an ‘FE’ perspective to fix up a coffee with colleagues in ‘ACL’ and get to know one another. Despite initial enthusiasm I’m not sure how many people actually did that and in any case I meant it only as a precursor to finding other people in their local area who also have a stake, by which I mean everyone. Participatory action research, genuine partnerships where people are equal as thinkers when they get together to think, with role, rank and ego left at the door. Thinking shops, not talking shops. A civic skills agenda drawing on local intelligence and assets, co-created with the whole person in mind, which puts people back in touch with each other, using social purpose pedagogies which enable people to find their purpose.

It’s hard. It’s culture changing. And it’s doable only if we start forgetting what we think we know, all those assumptions about what adult community education was, is and should be. All that cultural, structural and linguistic noise that quite literally controls our thinking. We have models of local co-operation like Wigan, Preston and Rochdale to show us the way. We have the 400 participants in my research to tell us it’s possible to make the visible, invisible just long enough to put the clutter to one side and glimpse something new.

Social purpose education which enables us to find purposeful work and in which we all have a stake, perhaps even literally. Values-led journeys towards that destination. We have the opportunity through digital engagement to begin those conversations. But, as in any good thinking environment, it’s time to stop talking quite so much to the same people, and time to start listening to what everyone else has to say.

Provocation

When you are in your thinking space today, you might like to consider:

What constellations can we draw, to start a movement?

You can connect with Lou on Twitter @loumycroft