Adult Education and Lifelong Learning

Lord Rees of Ludlow Excerpts

Thursday 28th January 2016 Lords Chamber

[Lord Rees of Ludlow (CB)]

My Lords, as the noble Baroness, Lady Sharp, so eloquently explained, there is a growing national need for flexible part-time education for young people seeking to qualify for gainful employment, for those in later life wishing to update their skills and for those in the third age simply wishing to follow intellectual interests.

There has been a huge expansion in higher education since the student days of most of us in this House. I pay tribute to the noble Lord, Lord Willetts, for his strong commitment to this when he was the responsible Minister. However, this welcome development had two downsides. First, it led to a lack of focus on apprenticeships and further education, now, gratifyingly, being reversed. Secondly, a degree became a prerequisite for many jobs for which it was not needed in the past, and that impeded social mobility. Young people who have been disadvantaged or unlucky in their schooling will not have a fair chance of university access at age 18, even if they have great potential. Worse still, they generally have no second chance.

Universities can ameliorate this problem. For instance, our most selective universities could earmark some proportion of places for students who do not enter straight from school but have gained “credit” through study at another institution or through part-time or online study. Indeed, there is a general need for more diversification among universities. Degree-level competence need not be achieved by continuous study in the traditional residential university. Moreover, there is nothing magic about that level. “Credits”, even if they are not sufficient for graduation, are worth while in themselves, and should be formalised into a system that more readily allows transfer between institutions and between part-time and full-time study. Indeed, many speakers have echoed the concern about the decline in part-time enrolments.

The Open University model, extolled by so many speakers, has vastly more potential in the era of the internet and the smartphone than when it was founded. We can all freely access wonderful material on the OpenLearn website, prepared jointly by the OU and the BBC, two institutions with a global reach.

The OU is surely ideally placed to take a lead in the worldwide dissemination of MOOCs. Top universities in the US are developing these, and all UK academics should surely seize similar opportunities to widen their impact. But rather than getting locked in to an American platform, like EdX or Coursera, they should contribute content to the Open University and support the further development of its FutureLearn platform. In most higher and further education contexts, MOOCs are, at best, supplementary, blending in to what is already on offer. But they are a genuine stand-alone option for mature and motivated students studying part time at home, whether seeking vocational qualifications or studying for its own sake.

Another benign spin-off from the internet is the democratisation of research, as well as of learning. Many archives are now available on the web, which is a huge boon to researchers and scholars around the world. For example, amateurs are now studying ships’ log-books from the 18th and 19th centuries; these are a fascinating social history, as well as containing important historical data for climate science. The involvement of amateurs has been traditional in some sciences, such as botany, but the scope for citizen scientists is now far wider. In my subject of astronomy, there are so many data that the professionals cannot scrutinise them fully. It is now possible, and it has been done, for eagle-eyed amateurs to access these data sets and themselves discover new planets.

So there are huge opportunities, but to exploit them for maximum benefit our system needs a more diverse ecology—a blurring between higher and further education, between full-time and part-time, and between residential and online. As the noble Baroness, Lady Williams, so eloquently told us, we should cherish the Open University and the BBC for their leadership and pioneering role in this. With such an ecology, we can exploit the benefits of the internet, offer a better second chance to young people who have been unlucky in their earlier education, and promote lifelong learning for us all.