Community Learning Development Resource 100 – 09
VIEWS ABOUT LEARNERS FROM EDUCATION AND TRAINING PROVIDERS
SUMMARY
For a variety of formal education and training purposes, institutions and agencies seek to recruit people into their provision. They have an impact within communities and neighbourhoods, whether through networking or forming partnerships with local community development and regeneration projects, or simply seeking to recruit learners through their own promotion and advertising campaigns. This resource (100 – 09) reviews the nature of education and training provider understandings, approaches and expectations.
Some broad categories of adult learners
Local people can be put into different categories in relation to their readiness to engage in formal education and training:
- Those who are ‘traditional learners’ and are confident and able to seek out and self-refer themselves to take up learning opportunities. Such people have been described as lifelong or continuous learners. They are ‘soft targets’ for provider recruitment.
- Those people who in the past have enjoyed learning, but have not been ‘lifelong learners’ and now find themselves in changed circumstances where they need to engage once again in education and training. These people are relatively motivated and confident to seek out information and advice about learning opportunities. They are also ‘soft targets’ for providers.
- People who are non-confident and non-self-referring learners, inexperienced and unaware of their own capacity to learn. They may be negative in their attitude and feelings about learning, about education and training and about themselves as learners. They are likely to be unaware that they can and do learn and may deny any ability or desire to learn. These people are ‘hard targets ‘for providers.
Within communities and neighbourhoods prioritised for community development and regeneration work, the majority of local people are likely to be within the ‘hard target’ category, presenting challenges for providers and for other agencies and workers seeking to engage them in learning experiences.
SOME STATEMENTS ABOUT PROVIDER PURPOSE AND ACTIVITY
- Provider agencies and institutions are looking for learners to take up opportunities and fill course places, thus their purpose of seeking to work with people in community settings is to recruit learners
- For people needing help with identifying their learning needs and their own capacity to learn, the provider purpose of initial contact, is to provide information, learning assessment, guidance and support
- Providers need feedback from communities, including from excluded or non-participating people, to evidence effective evaluation of their education or training provision and its community relatedness
- Providers need consultation or feedback from excluded people to help plan and organise provision, which they hope will be appropriate, relevant and successful. This is about having effective needs identification and assessment, and targeting promotional activity and provision
- Providers may recruit and encourage experienced learners to become ‘Learning Ambassadors’ or ‘Learning Champions’, who will promote learning and learning opportunities in communities and neighbourhoods, by relating to local people, and helping and supporting individuals into provision. These experienced learners are seen as people who can bridge the gap between the community and providers and can reduce the barriers of low self confidence and self-esteem and the fear of failure, etc., for non-traditional and excluded learners
- Such purposes, which are determined by economic and employment considerations, a provider/funder led agenda or target setting, have at their core, the recruitment of learners
- The purpose may also be about building provider capacity in the growth and development of the curriculum offer. This purpose inevitably focuses on numbers of learners, volume-capture and through-put and being able to capture significantly large numbers to fill places, largely within learning groups, to justify and guarantee provision and its continuity. This may be the realistic stance that providers perceive that they are forced or required to take, in order to fulfil funding driven targets, and to avoid the loss of funding
- Success criteria are principally about programmes delivered – recruitment, retention, completion, achievement and progression. However performance within such a framework by learners, who are less experienced, confident, comfortable and happy, is often characterised by comparatively poor completion and achievement rates, and repetitive start-up and failure experiences for individual learners.
PROMPTS FOR PROVIDER REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION:
- As a provider – what is the focus of our provision – what are our purposes and how do we work with people?
- How do we ensure that our provision connects with excluded people who are less-confident and experienced as adult learners?
- How might we improve the retention and successful completion rates for those who are less confident and experienced as learners?
Working with people in the community – before they take-up formal learning opportunities
We should recognise that progression for many inexperienced adult learners starts not at the point of recruitment into formal educational and training programmes, but much earlier within informal community settings, beyond the provider institutions.
Progress by excluded, inexperienced and non-confident adult learners has an early beginning – criteria can be identified, which recognise progression during a first contact non-formal learning phase. If a non-confident inexperienced learner subsequently self refers, we usually find that this has been after informal and non-formal learning experiences during which the individual has already made significant progress. Within this pre-provider activity, we need to be able to recognise, measure and evidence the key steps of progression, which lie alongside this initial capturing of inexperienced learners.
The pre-recruitment learning journey of a non-confident and inexperienced individual learner may well be slow and lengthy – a matter of months and years rather than days and weeks!
In the beginning of any ‘return to learn’ initiative, the learning for non-confident and inexperienced learners must first enable them to be successful and to feel good about themselves. What is learnt is less important than how the individual feels about the learning experience.
This a key area of change in supporting individuals to shift from ‘can’t do’ to ‘can do’ thinking.
Some quotes from providers finding it hard to recruit sufficient numbers of learners to run courses:
‘’When does talking to the community, kick into marketing ? If marketing in the community includes finding out about needs, there is a concern that when people are asked if they want to participate, they say yes, but then don’t turn up or only come for one or two sessions. Education is not free, numbers are needed to make courses viable’’.
‘’The average person doesn’t care about lifelong learning. They learn what and when they want to learn. When they want to learn they seek us out and much of what they want to learn relates to work or getting a job, or to how to solve problems in their daily lives, like how to stop a two year old having tantrums’’.
‘’Within unemployed communities, in deprived areas, with a high crime rate, learning is not in their culture. Although women are more receptive then men, they want short-term immediate effects. Through having a community liaison officer we can produce quick responses with small numbers, in courses like ‘An Introduction to the Internet’ – a quick fix’’.
PROMPTS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION:
- What do these quotes tell us about the nature of inexperienced and excluded learners in the community and what we need to understand about them and their learning?
- Is a curriculum offer, which focuses on education and training linked to employment, workforce development and economic well-being – relevant, accessible, balanced and appropriate, in relation to the learning needs of excluded people?