Community Learning Development Resource 101 – 10
THE CASE FOR LISTENING TO LEARNERS
SUMMARY
People have an entitlement to be meaningfully consulted and listened to in respect of the activities of any statutory or voluntary services or organisations that might impact on their lives. Listening to learners, particularly those who do not engage in formal learning or are from non-traditional learner sectors is seen as crucial in ensuring the community relatedness and responsiveness of learning opportunities and support, within any provision.
Listening through consultation
There should be client feedback and access to consultation and influence, in the shaping of learning opportunities, access and progression routes – in:
- Identifying and assessing people’s needs, wants and concerns
- Development and improvement the quality of opportunities and services
- Planning for equality of opportunity and access
- Planning and delivering a curriculum – learning opportunities and support, which is relevant and responsive to learner requirements
- Developing policy and practice
- Managing provision and services
- Developing and improving the quality of opportunities and services
- Developing strategies and mechanisms by which learners are accessed to meaningful consultation through effective participation and influence.
Opinion
Current provision relates to purposes, which are shaped either by the needs of the labour market or by providers needing to recruit learners in numbers, and their need to build capacity or develop their curriculum offer. Community based needs identification and assessment strategies are not commonly strong aspects of provider practice.
Recruitment may be about numbers – volume capture and through-put, and being able to capture a significantly large and coherent collective voice – substantial enough to fill places and / or justify and guarantee provision. This may be the realistic stance that providers perceive that they are forced or required to take.
Success criteria are principally about the provision, the programmes delivered – recruitment, retention, completion, achievement and progression. The use of the profiling of adult students in terms of their lives and the context of their communities, neighbourhoods, and their experience of inclusion, etc., as a contribution to how provider success is measured, is less well developed.
Performance particularly by learners who are not confident, comfortable or happy, etc. may be characterised by comparatively poor completion and achievement rates, and repetitive start-up and failure experiences for individual learners.
There needs to be a recognition that progression starts at the point of first contact not at the point of engagement with formal learning programmes or at some point where learning by an individual within a programme is perceived to have been achieved/ completed and they are moving on.
Progress for a learner begins at the beginning – criteria can be identified, which recognise progress at the entry phase, the barriers overcome and the learning journeys prior to entry into formal learning provision.
REFLECTION – Recognition of capacity for access:
An experienced post-school learner:
- chooses to make contact and self-refer
- is confident to identify and discuss learning needs and constraints
- takes up a learning opportunity.
An inexperienced post-school learner:
- probably does not choose to make contact or self-refer
- probably does not have the knowledge, understanding and confidence to articulate their learning needs
- probably needs individual care, support and friendship to progress to a point where they are confident enough to choose to progress themselves.
PROMPTS FOR REFLECTION AND DISCUSSION
- For many hard to reach, non-confident adult learners will any praise or suggestion that they are making progress, be a novel experience for them?
- Making progress is a very important confirmation of individual success – how can this be used to motivate the learner?