Education and Social Capital

The title of what I have to say today is ‘education and social capital’, which I hope is a title mysterious enough to cause some people to wonder for a moment about exactly what it is I am going to say.

Well let’s start with education. Now by this I mean education in the widest sense. This includes, obviously, the formal education that we receive – the duty we set ourselves as a society to ensure that the next generation is more or less educated, can read and write, possesses qualifications, produces from among its number a range of people likely to take up higher education and gain the degrees and expertise able to carry on the education torch, or to take part in the next generation of scientific discoveries, or whatever. This should not be of course to underestimate the worth of vocational education, of educating round pegs for round holes – for ensuring that the car mechanics and landscape gardeners of the future are competent at mending cars or designing gardens.

That I imagine would be agreed by all present as being a pretty non-negotiable duty of society – and interestingly, when we have occasional debates about whether we should pay our taxes, or whether we have a moral right to refuse to pay that element of our tax which goes towards nuclear weapons or arms, the concept that you should only pay taxes towards education because you either have or intend to have children does not come up.

But there is a further question on education which arises, and on which there is far less general agreement. This is the degree to which society gas any further obligation to educate beyond that which is deemed formally necessary for the purpose of producing a younger generation more than one step removed from savages.

This is essentially a question about government – since government is, in our representative system, a method of extracting the legitimacy of the ‘will of the people’ onto a daily basis of decision making without having to resort to continuous referendum – (that is, unless you have the misfortune or good fortune depending on your point of view – of living in Switzerland.).

So does government have any responsibility to provide for, or encourage, education which goes beyond these basics? Does it have any sort of obligation to its citizens to provide for lifelong learning – the sort of education characterised by evening classes, but in truth taking place across a range of locations and in a variety of ways? Is it not just up to the individual if they want to take a class in pottery or flower arranging or French, and that is that?

Now we know it takes place, and on a widespread basis

It encompasses all sorts of learning – from basic literacy to advanced scholarship and may happen in very different ways – formal study, reading, TV, training courses evening classes the experience of work and so on. For many people the lifelong bit of it does mean, however, that these processes assume an integral element in your life – learning may not be continuous but is it not an occult activity. It is part of everyday life. Your skills and your learning are advanced regardless of your circumstances, throughout life.

I can advance three reasons why this might be of interest to government.

The first is an appeal to self-interest. Globalisation and the knowledge economy put a premium on learning and re-learning as we go along. The skills that you learn in your formal education or through the training you do before you get your first job may have been enough to last you in previous generations, but, by and large, not now. Even a job that is fundamentally ‘the same’ undergoes enormous changes. Jobs that were in the past not regarded as highly skilled now need keyboard skills, or knowledge of computer operations in a way unimagined just a few years ago.

Furthermore, the notion that you get a job and fifty years later you retire with a gold clock having essentially done the same thing is no longer tenable. People will in this generation probably change the definition of their job perhaps five or six times during their working lives. On each occasion, new skills will be needed to cope with the new circumstances. So the habit of being open to new skills, new ideas and new practices will increasingly be to your personal advantage.

The second is an appeal to national interest. We know, with globalisation that increasingly, countries across the world are competing with each other as never before. Jobs and prosperity can be exported at the touch of a button, and indeed are. If you have a computer and you ring one of the ubiquitous help lines to guide out of a software cul-de-sac, the chances are you’ll be connected to someone in a croft in Ireland, or someone not in the British Isles at all. Call centres for services are increasingly located in one centre for the whole country. The incoming call may tag where it is coming from so that the person answers with the name of the company or the district you are ringing from, but in reality they will part of a large team in one place. They may not even be in the UK at all. British Airways telephone booking is in India.

If we are to compete as a nation in this new fluid world, we need an adaptable workforce, which is good at new skills, and learns new approaches. The habit of lifelong learning is the key to this.

The third, which I believe in many ways to be the most important, is an appeal to community. Learning about the world, and propping the mind open for new learning automatically conveys on the learner an approach which opens them to others – to other peoples points of view, to the possibilities available through activity in the world: it is no accident, as the Political scientist Robert Putnam found that societies where there is an abundance of clubs and societies of reading groups, of choral societies of allotment societies, all involved in learning in more or less obvious ways are also societies where there is a higher civic engagement – where government is fairer, where things run better, where crime is lower, where people volunteer to perform civic tasks –in short, where learning creates, or more properly, sustains in that society the second part of my title: social capital - the richness of which guarantees the viability of that society as a whole.

Now it’s worth spending a moment or two on this concept. It is interesting because it is a concept almost wholly ignored by sociologists and political scientists in recent years, They have tended to measure ‘civic engagement’ as conflict – who is demanding what from whom at llcoal level. But people just getting on with things doesn’t register. Partly this is due to the difficulty of measuring this – and the possibility that your results do not mean what you think they do. You may measure a society where it appears people are ‘just getting on with things’ but in fact what you are observing is a withdrawn, inward looking society that is disengaged from society and is just existing – the supposed phenomenon of the urban wasteland – and the next stop down that line is activity =- but activity which is destructive of that community either through crime or self destruction through riot.

The way to distinguish between the two types of ‘just getting on with things’ is to look at what people actually do when left to their own devices – do they associate, do they form clubs and groups do they set up allotment societies dram groups, mother and toddler groups and so on? I guess most people here will know this in their hearts that a vibrant congregation is one that is among itself doing just that – well I think we can apply that to society as a whole, and political scientists such as Robert Putnam and in the UK David Halpern have done just that.

What is interesting for government is the spin off – the existence of a rich social capital in a community leads to a virtuous circle – people will be more willing to perform tasks of community government: and that government will be more effective, less corrupt, more responsive: crime will be lower, and so on. Interestingly, you can correlate almost exactly the level of glass collection in bottle banks and electoral turnout.

And this is where lifelong learning comes in. You can also correlate all this to the lifelong learning process. This is an essential function of lifelong learning. Not only is self-education a central component of ‘social capital’ but participation in all these activities is also in direct proportion to education – those with literacy problems, for example, almost never participate in any form of civic engagement, be it school governors, voluntary organisations, local councils, social clubs or whatever – and in setting this point out, we are writing off perhaps 20% of the population to start with.

Social capital in a community strengthens it immeasurably.

I think, in a world where we seem to be best with the dangers of dogma and ignorance that a society that is strong enough to resist these lures and assert the values of openness equal treatment and ordered community governance is something well worth having, and that society only guarantees its own health if it makes available to its citizens the wherewithal to take that learning on board.

So you can take any one of those three, and ion many ways they lead to the same outcome. The enlightened self interest of a large group of people reskilling themselves leads to a better community, and leads to a stronger, more competitive nation. In a sense, it doesn’t matter at what point you enter the virtuous circle.

I hope I have established that government has an interest in this, but what can it actually do?

Government has a role because with some exceptions making the opportunities available, or at the very least creating the circumstances where the opportunities do become available is its job. We know from experience that leaving it all to the market will allow us to go only some of the way. The market may well supply to a limited extent, the training necessary to fill gaps in skills where there is a direct incentive to do so, but is far worse at making available to people the more general skills and learning that I am describing today. We only have to look at the collapse of apprenticeships that has accompanied the increased mobility of labour to be clear about that.

This Government has made a number of such opportunities available, and to be fair, so have previous government to a greater or a lesser degree. The availability of evening classes, of further education, of literacy classes, of the opportunity for enrolment on university courses as mature students, of fresh start training courses, of skill centres and so on are all examples of the government carrying out this duty. There will be different approaches to this, according to government, and things may have different names and we will argue about whether there is enough provision, or whether its cost to the recipient is too high and so on, but basically it will be there.

I am going to say next something like ’ the big difference I feel between the present government’s approach and what has gone before’…. But to introduce what I want to say in this manner would, however, be an over-generalisation because much of what has gone before is valuable and enduring. I heard just recently that Harold Wilson conceived the idea of the Open University whilst sitting on a rock in the Scilly Isles. My reflection on that is that we should locate that rock and put a plaque on it.

Having said, that, there is a real difference now in that more money is being put forward to support education, and importantly, not just into the traditional routes of formal education.

We are meeting today a week after the comprehensive spending Review. That has just announced that, over the next three years, education as a whole will get funds running at 5.4% above inflation. Sure Start funding will more than double to £500 million. There will be extra money for books and equipment The Educational Maintenance Awards will be extended to cover much of the country. All this makes a difference. It is necessary to the development of lifelong learning, but as the philosophers would say, is it sufficient? And the answer is no. Because the missing ingredient is Access. Without access to all this provision, it doesn’t end up meaning a great deal.

Now access can mean a variety of things. I can recall two formative experiences when I first started lecturing, I might add that, a little while afterwards I stopped lecturing for a long while and got a ‘proper’ job. I recall being invited by the workers Education Association to give a series of lectures in a place called Milford on Sea. I prepared this series very carefully, and launched myself towards Milford on Sea full of the virtues of learning that I would bring to its citizens. The first week six people turned up to listened to me the second five, the third four, and after this the series was cancelled. So I learned that learning has to be relevant. I also had another hard lesson, being asked to lecture to a Naval Base in Gosport. I would come along once a week – the class would march into the room, and look at me stonily as I attempted to enthuse them with the delights of American Government and politics. So I learned also that learning has to be a co-operative activity.

I also remember much later, teaching mature students who had an unbelievable thirst to learn their subject: they passed the first two criteria with flying colours, but something else was missing: they had to learn all over again how to study. They had got out of the habit of learning, and just as the first two-mile run is excruciating when you haven’t done ant exercise for ages, so the mind needs regular exercise to keep it in shape.

That’s why I think taking a holistic approach to lifelong learning is so important. Exercise for the mind starts early. A child who has fallen behind in reading and numeracy and who leaves school with a thoroughly negative idea of the whole learning process will not become a lifelong learner. Another piece of potential has been lost. So the sure start initiative, which ensures that children get the best start in their educational liv3es is vital to get people going. The numeracy and literacy classes, which are equipping junior school children with the essentials of learning and paying dividends, are vital. The literacy summer camps where children who might otherwise make the transition to secondary school still unable to read or write and may then switch off the learning habit entirely within a couple of years of secondary schools are important. The Educational Maintenance Grants which enable young people who might otherwise give up on learning because they cannot afford to continue when the option of a paid, if dead-end job seems to offer them more immediate solutions to their financial difficulties play a big role.

Many people have poor or non-existent computer skills, and the 700 ICT centres now rolling out across the country will help rectify this. They deal with computer learning from scratch – both with taster courses located conveniently to the neighbourhood of the learner, to more advanced learning.

The new foundation degrees, able to straddle the world of work and of higher education give people who wouldn’t otherwise consider higher education the access to the learning they want to obtain. The Individual Learning Accounts, allowing people past formal education and well into a working life to invest in lifelong learning with Government help make their contribution.

The new learning and skills councils now coming into place which combine responsibility for post 16 education and training and ensure that the often artificial divide between resources for education training and FE will be important.

The connexions programme producing careers and vocational guidance to all between 13-19 – and particularly providing individual mentoring to young people will enable informed choices about options to be made, supported by skilled advice

All these measures affect different aspects of the education and training system, but have in common that drive to access, which will ensure that talent and potential is in a position to reward itself, and that the seed of lifelong learning is firmly planted.

I have always been struck by the idiocy of the phrase ‘you can take a horse to water but you can’t make it drink’. If you have provided the water and the horse needs the water, believe me it will drink. Getting access to the water and providing the motivation to drink it seems about the right thing for government to be doing. I hope I have indicated today a few ways in which we are doing just that.