FE expert Baroness Wolf of Dulwich has issued three challenges to the sector. And while they may not be as “click-worthy” as challenges that have spread through colleges in the past (remember the ice-bucket challenge, and, God help us, the cinnamon challenge?), they do have the potential to improve adult education across the UK.
She told the audience at the Rethinking Skills Symposium at City of Glasgow College that access to “second-chance” education for adults has “gone backwards” in the UK.
The author of 2011’s Wolf Report said: “Skills training is always the area where people say, ‘Oh, we believe in it, it is so important,’ and in reality, it is always the one that gets left behind.”
To her, the main challenges the sector faces are:
Access
How can we make it possible for adults to engage in retraining, to do something in the middle of their lives? Wolf said that while what’s on offer is important, it’s also about how that provision is funded by the government and “how we impress on employers the importance of making it possible to take time off”.
Unknown future
The most intellectually challenging issue, she said, is about what it is we actually want people to learn. In these ever-developing times, Wolf said we should be cautious of training people in specific skills needed for today’s jobs. Instead, the system should be flexible and concentrate on “quite general skills”.
Basic skills
Wolf said that “we need to get serious and stop pretending that [an adult’s lack of education] is something we can fix in 15 hours of adult literacy”. Basic skills, aren’t, in fact, basic at all, she explained.
She also issued a warning about education’s current favourite buzz-phrase: “the fourth industrial revolution”.
She said there was “a real danger that people are getting so hung up with AI and the fourth industrial revolution and so on that they will start designing things from the head backwards”.
“Things do come organically, because most things, in fact, are not revolutionary, but are incremental.
“What we do know is that the more you keep up your level of general education, the faster you are at learning new things.”
Wolf stressed that on the cusp of “lots and lots of change”, it’s important to give adults the opportunity to maintain their level of general education.
