Community Learning Development Resource 100 – 06
UNDERSTANDINGS ABOUT PEOPLE AS LEARNERS
SUMMARY
How people as learners might be described or labelled, by institutions and agencies that are providers of education and training opportunities is explored in this resource (100 – 06), with observations about implications for community development work.
1. Intending Learners (self-referring learners; existing learners)
People who are individually confident and competent to choose to refer themselves into formal education and training provision.
They feel able to choose to enquire, enrol and attend. They will choose to enter an institution that provides education and training and take up a learning opportunity. By doing so they become known as ‘existing learners’ or ‘active learners’. They are also often described by providers as ‘traditional learners’.
Intending learners who are ‘first-time returners’ (since leaving school or other formal education and training when they were younger), often become motivated and committed to engage in formal learning opportunities (courses, classes, programmes) over significant periods of their lives, when they become ‘traditional learners’. Terms for the ways in which people engage with learning include, ‘continuous learning’, where they make learning consistently part of their life, year on year, or ‘recurrent learning’, when they choose to engage in formal learning more infrequently.
Intending learners are ‘soft targets’ for providers within the marketplace. Because they are soft targets and likely to respond, their needs are understood by providers, and promotional and recruitment strategies may be designed primarily with this market sector in mind, where there is potential to recruit learners more easily in significant numbers.. This can become a tendency to market courses appealing largely to the ‘traditional learner’.
2. Non-confident learners (non-self-referring, inexperienced learners)
People who have not chosen to be involved in formal learning provision after leaving school or completing an ongoing period of post-school formal education or training. They are not seeking to take up formal learning opportunities. They may also be labelled as ‘non-intending’ learners.
Also described as ‘potential learners’ although recently, use of this term has been seen as suggesting that such people are not learning, when they clearly are learning experientially throughout their lives, in a variety of informal, non-formal and formal ways.
Some non-confident learners are also described as ‘hard to reach’, indicating a perception held by providers and workers, of the distance that they are, in terms of access and attitude, from referring themselves into formal education or training provision. They may also perceived as hard to reach, because they do not respond to the providers’ tried and tested methods of promotion and recruitment.
The term ‘hard-to-reach’ must only be seen as a traditional subjective perception by education and training providers. There is a danger that this will be seen as resulting from self-exclusion by non-self-referring learners, rather than acknowledging that it is our education and training systems that have led to the exclusion of many people. The experience of many people of statutory education and training beyond their early years has been of not overcoming the successive examination and reward hurdles and barriers and being labelled as failures. At some point our education and training systems have excluded most people.
Non-confident adult learners in local communities may need considerable pre-entry encouragement and support, collectively and individually, before they are able to choose to enrol into formal courses and classes.
There is an increasing recognition by Central Government, funding bodies and providers, that seeking to widen participation and to be inclusive, requires investment and initiatives, targeted into sectors of the marketplace which are excluded and under-represented within the profile of existing learners.
TARGETING LEARNERS.
Providers engaged in promoting and marketing adult learning and training opportunities and in recruiting people as learners, recognise varying degrees of success with sectors within the market place.
The easy to reach soft targets
- Confident learners – aware of the learning opportunities and are likely to be experienced and qualified through further and/or higher education, and adult learning
- These learners are likely to respond to promotional literature and are largely comfortable to choose to respond, contact provider institutions, seek advice and information and make their arrangements to take up learning opportunities
- They are likely to have a positive self-perception as learners and see learning as an integral part of their developing lives.
The hard to reach targets (Excluded Learners)
- Learners who are not generally responsive to paper-based promotional campaigns
- They may not be aware of their own learning abilities and of their capacity to learn and are less likely to have already gained qualifications either at school or after leaving school
- They are likely to be non-confident as learners, have a negative self-perception of themselves as learners and are also likely to feel disadvantaged, disenfranchised, marginalized or excluded
- For them learning may be an unknown or something they see as irrelevant in their lives
- Excluded people have long been the target of specific adult curriculum developments, including a long-established initiatives – the national literacy and numeracy, Basic Skills, strategy was launched in the early 1970’s
- There is often an assumption that most excluded learners have inherent learning difficulties, having additional learning needs, etc. This categorises non-confident learners as a problem and often unhelpfully labels them as deficient.
SHIFTING THE TARGET
Government rhetoric has identified in recent years, the economic wellbeing of the UK to be the most important universal driver for education and training provision and for the recruitment of learners. Enabling people to be in productive paid employment has become the basis for most funding of formal learning opportunities. This is linked to a second, just as significant but less trumpeted economic driver – the reduction of the cost of the national welfare and benefits bill, by enabling people, through education and training to become economically active and less dependent upon the state.
The concern to raise national skills levels to guarantee future economic prosperity and the demands for a skilled and productive workforce within the context of new technologies, is increasingly shaping provision, so that those without relevant skills and qualifications are increasingly being targeted. The national drive to target adult learners, who have not yet achieved General Level 2 qualification status, inevitably focuses attention on those who have least benefited in the past from educational and training opportunities.
Many agencies and institutions continue to operate with promotional strategies best suited to the market of included people who are aware and confident as learners. Such strategies using promotional materials in hard copy as prospectuses and posters or through websites, do not connect well with non-traditional, non-confident, and inexperienced learners, who may become further excluded by such marketing, adding to their life experience of multiple deprivation. In these circumstances, the job of community development and regeneration workers, is both to enable and support local people to engage with the learning opportunities in effective ways, and to bring about necessary changes in the promotional strategies of the agencies and institutions, to make them more inclusive.
PROMPTS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
- Is there an increasing emphasis on targeting particular people when we provide learning opportunities, and if so, is it justifiable?
- How do we feel about a curriculum for excluded learners, being only about Basic Skills/Skills for Life learning and education and training opportunities, which will enable them to achieve a minimum General Level 2 qualification?
- If excluded, non-traditional learners have not previously benefited from the enrichment offered by traditional lifelong or leisure-learning opportunities, should such opportunities now be part of the curriculum offered to them?
- If through learning we seek to empower people to be better able to make choices, how might they use their ability to choose, in relation to learning and learning progression?
- Is the only significant learning for excluded learners, that which enables them to become more economically active?