To parliament the other day, for the launch (over a good lunch) of a report by the Aldersgate Group, who say they are “leaders for a sustainable economy”. The report is: Skills for a New Economy: a paradigm shift in education and learning to ensure future economic success. [Note 1]
The image on the front of the report is a series of cogs, none of which interlock, which seems a good enough visual metaphor for the present set up. The report itself is very attractive, with cute artwork. But it’s written in small print, with piles of even smaller footnotes, all set out in restfully harmonising tones of mid-brown and pale blue. The result is not easy to read. This is quite a triumph for an outfit that goes on a lot about skills.
I wish I could say that the substance of the discussion on the day and the contents of the report make up for all this. Sadly, they don’t. One example from the report will serve to make the point. This is the curious case of higher education (HE). I cannot understand why HE doesn’t feature in the section of the report on Coherence (pps. 18/19) which has foci on 3 “different actors and age groups”: pre-19, FE, and business. This seems an extraordinary lacuna. What became of “whole system design”, I wonder. HE doesn’t feature in the Proficiency section (pps. 20/21) of the report either. Should I conclude, as far as the skills agenda is concerned, that all’s well with HE, or that it’s deemed irrelevant? It looks very odd, and not worth much as an argument.
I read a lot of papers / reports like this as ESD folk are fond of pulling them together; they all usually have two things in common: [i] they are a wish list of what tomorrow's schools are going to be like; and [ii] they say little about how to get there from where we are at the present. This is because they are mostly about educational idea(l)s rather than the messy business of actually running a school and thinking about curriculum and pedagogy now. This is not to say that I disagree with much of what's in here; rather, its just useless as a strategic document.
I thought for one moment during the discussions on the day that something useful might be emerging; something along the lines of seeing formal education, training and workplace (and community-based) learning as a continuum with both coherence and progression. In this view, perhaps, primary schools would aaa, lower secondary schools, bbb, and the 14 to 19 range ccc (and probably ddd). FE and its sister, HE, would then eee and fff, leading seamlessly to ggg (and maybe hhh) which occurs in the workplace and in life more extendedly.
aaa, for example, would be something around socialisation, basic skills, and a love of, and facility for, learning as a means to social / personal fulfilment and economic activity, and a foundation for everything that comes afterwards.
But it was not to be. We had some who said MBAs were the key; others rooted for primary schools. Oddly, there’s no trace of the report on the Group’s website. Maybe they are as disappointed as I am.
Note 1 – Goering is widely misquoted as the originator of: “Whenever I hear ‘culture’, I remove the safety from my Browning”. Actually what he said was “When I hear ‘paradigm’ …”. I feel much the same, except I reach for Housman.
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