Understanding Participation in Lifelong Learning in

Northern Ireland: schooling, networks and the labour market

John Field

University of Warwick

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Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association Annual Conference, Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland, August 27th to August 30th

Introduction

The concept and practice of lifelong learning are now generally treated as highly desirable policy goals. What practical priorities flow from the espousal of this broad goal. Most policy-makers would concur with adult education scholars in concluding that the decisive steps in creating effective adult learners are taken during childhood: nothing breeds demand for lifelong learning like early success. However, while this conventional hypothesis generally holds good, it has rarely been examined in detail in concrete social settings.

Taking the six counties of Northern Ireland as a focus for inquiry, this paper examines empirical evidence of the relationship between (a) initial schooling and (b) adult participation in learning. Far from confirming the conventional hypothesis, the Northern Ireland pattern demonstrates a strong divergence between initial attainment and adult participation. While structural factors such as emigration account for a part of the divergence, I contend that social relationships and values have also played an important if largely unnoticed part in reducing demand for training and education among adults; these have also influenced the nature of schooling in Northern Ireland, in ways which may run counter to the development of lifelong learning. The paper introduces these factors, which are analysed with the help of recent debates about ‘social capital’. I conclude that these deep-rooted features of society and schooling offer a number of robust challenges to policy-makers and educationists in Northern Ireland.

Divergence between initial and continuing education

In a well-established standard text on adult learning, Patricia Cross concluded that:

Of all the variables that have been related to educational interest and participation, amount of formal schooling has more influence than any other.... In short, learning is addictive; the more education people have, the more they want, and the more they will get (Cross 1981, 54-5).

This conclusion has attained almost canonical status among adult education specialists. It has been repeatedly confirmed by researchers since Cross, and in a variety of different socio-economic settings. Thus OECD, in its authoritative twelve-country international study of adult literacy, confirmed yet again that

participation in adult education and training increases with the level of education initially received: the higher the level, the more likely a person is to participate (OECD 1997, 94).

However, it has never been clear whether this association is primarily a causal one, and if so how strong the causal ties are; nor, although it is clear that it applies to social groups (particularly social classes) as well as to individuals, it is unclear whether it operates for spatially-distributed social groups such as the population of a region or a nation.

This paper is based on an investigation of initial attainment and adult participation in Northern Ireland and Scotland, being undertaken within the Economic and Social Research Council’s Learning Society Programme. While later stages of the study have involved a series of focus groups and interviews with decision-takers in the fields of training and education, the initial stage was concerned with exploring and clarifying the statistical basis upon which our approach would be grounded. Early findings suggested that there was in fact a marked divergence between initial attainment and adult participation in both Scotland and Northern Ireland (Field and Schuller 1995). Further analysis has indicated that the divergence in Scotland is considerably less clear-cut than that which appears to exist in Northern Ireland.

Evidence of a divergence in Northern Ireland is not hard to come by. In view of the scholarly consensus over initial education and later participation, this should come as something of a surprise. Initial educational attainment in Northern Ireland is comparatively high, at least by British standards. This can be measured relatively simply, since most pupils in Northern Ireland schools take the same academic and vocational qualifications as their British counterparts. Table One summarises the picture in 1994/1995, but the same broad pattern has been apparent throughout the last decade: both in GCSEs and A Levels, the performance of Northern Ireland pupils at the upper end has clearly outstripped that of British pupils. At the other end of the attainment league table, in recent years the proportion of Northern Ireland school-leavers who have no graded examinations results has fallen well below the UK average (Table Two). Northern Ireland school-leavers are more likely to enter higher education than their counterparts in England and Wales; and Northern Ireland is the only UK region where significant numbers of children from manual working class backgrounds go on to enter higher education (Field 1997b). While these overall statistics conceal marked regional variations as well as some areas of weakness (Field forthcoming), it is still reasonable to conclude that examinations performance in Northern Ireland is consistently higher than in the rest of the UK.

Recorded participation in adult learning, by contrast, is comparatively weak. As noted above, this runs counter to received wisdom, and the evidence therefore warrants some attention. The most recent survey data for general adult participation come from the 1996 adult learning survey; these showed that 52% of adults reported having done no organised learning since leaving school, compared with 36% in the UK as a whole; 62% said they were unlikely to take up learning in the foreseeable future, compared with 54% in Britain; moreover, non-participants in Northern Ireland were more likely to cite ‘lack of interest’ as a factor than were British respondents (Field 1997a, 92-5).

Data from the Labour Force Survey are consistent with this overall picture. Those who are in employment are less likely to receive training than are British employees: in Spring 1996, for example, under 5% of manual workers in Northern Ireland underwent training in the four-week period under study, compared with 9% for the UK as a whole; the figures for non-manual workers were 12% and 18% respectively (Pullinger 1997). The LFS also shows that the Northern Ireland workforce is considerably less likely to possess formal qualifications than is the case in Britain (Table Three). In fact, all the available evidence points in the same direction: fewer adults take part in organised learning in Northern Ireland than elsewhere in the UK.

Explaining the divergence: structural factors

A review of the quantitative evidence confirms, then, that there is a clear divergence in Northern Ireland between (high) levels of initial attainment and (low) levels of adult participation. Explaining this divergence is a potentially complicated business, since it is likely to involve the assumption that the Northern Ireland position is abnormal; in particular, by comparing Northern Ireland with either the other component nations of the UK or with the Republic of Ireland, it implies that these represent the norms to which policy-makers and providers in Northern Ireland should aspire. Any explanation should therefore acknowledge the basis for comparison, and recognise the particularities of Northern Ireland society.

A number of what might be called structural factors may help to explain the pattern of participation in lifelong learning. First are those which affect the supply side.

  • While Northern Ireland’s school system has a well-deserved reputation for excellence, the quality of opportunities for adults may well be lower than in a number of other western European societies. With the exception of Belfast, the further education system is notably failing to recruit adult learners; it was widely criticised in both our focus groups and individual interviews for focusing its efforts on recruiting school-leavers, rather than providing a bridge between initial and continuing learning.
  • Physical accessibility is a greater problem than in more urbanised and peaceful societies. Opportunities for adult learners are centred on the towns, with predictable problems for those living in rural and remote areas. Even in Belfast and Derry, the geography of sectarianism and the perceived risks of night-time travel are said to have deterred would-be learners from making a regular commitment to attend courses.
  • Northern Ireland’s initial system has an excessively narrow focus. My earlier portrait of divergence is a broad-brush picture. While participation among adults is relatively low in both vocational and general adult education, initial attainment displays considerable variation between academic education (generally high) and study towards vocational qualifications (comparatively low). Since much adult learning is work-oriented, the largely academic focus of the initial system constitutes a supply-side barrier which has to be crossed by those returning to learning later in life. The incentives for FE institutes in particular to recruit adults are relatively low; particularly outside Belfast, flexibility is low and there are substantial barriers to access (Stationery Office 1997, 24).

Supply-side problems are largely amenable to policy solutions; while these may be expensive, they are also obvious and have a high probability of being visibly implemented. More substantial difficulties lie on the supply side, where a range of factors help to depress the demand for adult learning.

  • Many highly-qualified school-leavers - usually around 40% of all those who go on to higher education - attend university in Britain, and the majority do not return to Northern Ireland on completing their degree. This outflow of the best-qualified reduces the numbers who would be most inclined to demand high quality opportunities for adult learning.
  • Differential emigration has reduced the number of those who have high initial qualifications. One study of adult migrants concluded that far from belonging to a kind of underclass, “the majority of migrant leavers are well-trained, capable individuals”, possessing “not only a superior qualifications profile to the Northern Ireland population at large but also to the current generation of young adults” (Compton 1992, 12). External migrants belong to precisely those social strata who are most likely to participate in continuing education and training, and their absence consolidates the trend identified above.
  • For demographic reasons, Northern Ireland has a high rate of growth of labour supply. Measures geared to easing the transition from school to work have a high political value, and employers find it relatively easy to recruit young and comparatively inexpensive labour; the incentive to recruit and retrain adults is weak.
  • Peripherality is a much-debated feature of the Northern Ireland economy. The conventional analysis of the branch-plant syndrome insists that enterprises are least likely to concentrate investment on their most remote and marginal sites; certainly Northern Ireland’s private sector includes a significant number of externally-owned firms, and although the likely pattern is highly differentiated, the conventional analysis probably holds true at an overall level.
  • Long term unemployment (LTU) is considerably higher than in the UK, or indeed elsewhere in western Europe. While there is something of a vicious circle in the relationship between skills/knowledge and long-term unemployment, the association between the two is strong and extremely hard to break (Haughton and others 1993, 143-54). In Northern Ireland, the other causes of LTU are frequently combined with sectarian geography, reducing willingness to travel outside very small areas in search of training or employment (Leonard 1998).
  • Northern Ireland is a relatively poor region; incomes are, on average, some 80% of British levels. While this certainly makes training too expensive for some people, it is largely counter-balanced by the impact of transfers from the EU and above all the UK government, a sizeable proportion of which is specifically targeted on training. However, this subvention has created a climate of opinion in which the State rather than employers or individuals is regarded as responsible for meeting the costs of training.
  • Northern Ireland’s employment profile shows comparatively large numbers in self-employment, family-based employment, or working in small and medium sized enterprises. Levels of training in these types of enterprise are typically well below average.

There are then a number of culprits on the demand-side, and these factors play a powerful role not only in depressing demand but in shaping the nature, range and quality of the supply side. They are harder for policy-makers to control than are supply-side factors; moreover, public interference in a complex market for training is always liable to have unintended consequences (as in the example given of perceived responsibility for financing training). However, such factors are a conventional component of human capital analysis; what tends to be ignored in such approaches are the wider social and cultural factors that also help to shape patterns of learning.

Social Capital

The policy background

In the past five years, governments and other key stakeholders have poured forth a small flood of documents supporting moves towards a lifelong learning system: The Learning Age in England and Learning is for Everyone in Wales gushed along the same river bed as the European Commission’s Teaching and Learning: towards the Learning Society, and similar sentiments flowed from the OECD as well as from governments in Germany, the Netherlands and Norway, while the Republic of Ireland is publishing its first ever policy statement on adult learning in a Green Paper.

Much of this debate has spilled over from the narrow channel of government into the wider tides of civil society. Proposals for a learning bank in the Republic, for example, have been widely covered in the national press. In Britain, the English and Welsh Green Papers attracted substantial coverage in the educational press, with lively and largely positive responses from employers’ bodies and trades unions; more significantly, the two ministries concerned received an unprecedently large number of responses from private individuals.

Much of this debate has passed Northern Ireland by. Of course, people have had other things to think about recently (though education is hardly irrelevant to that debate). Even so, the debate over lifelong learning in Northern Ireland is both recent and muted. The previous government’s statements on lifetime learning received a very narrow circulation, with responsibility being confined to the Training and Employment Agency rather than shared with the Department of Education. The ministerial consultation over The Learning Age was low key, and did not include any suggestion of any significant Northern Ireland dimension to the government’s proposals.

Indeed, what is remarkable is the fact that it was ignored for such a long time, both by policy-makers and by researchers. For many years, the Northern Ireland government preferred not to dwell on the evidence of low participation in continuing education and training. The Training and Enterprise Agency’s contribution to the UK Skills Audit stressed that:

Overall NI compares well against the UK as a whole in terms of new entrants to the labour force in terms of both NVQ levels 2 and 3. This is a more useful comparison than comparing the labour force as a whole since it reflects current trends in education and training provision (DfEE/Cabinet Office 1996, 64).

Behind this remarkable complacency lay the government’s understandable desire to attract inward investment into Northern Ireland. In a typical promotional statement in 1997, the Industrial Development Board listed 10 Good Reasons to Invest in Northern Ireland, the second of them being “A reliable, adaptable and well-educated labour force”. Only more recently has government started to acknowledge that lifelong learning presents it with a considerable challenge (Worthington 1998).

A failure to address these deep-rooted problems potentially carries a number of penalities. Social exclusion and sectarian division

References

Compton, P. (1992) Recent External Migration Patterns for Northern Ireland. Labour Market and Skills Trends Bulletin, 4, 8-15.

Haughton, G., Johnson, S., Murphy, L. and Thomas, K. (1993) Local Geographies of Unemployment. Aldershot: Avebury.

Leonard, M. (1998) Journal of Urban and Regional Studies.

Stationery Office (1997) Northern Ireland Single Programme 1994-1999: mid-term review. Belfast, Stationery Office.