Rescuing Community Education in Scotland from the Smothering Embrace of Partnership

Rescuing community education in Scotland from the smothering embrace of partnership

Jim Crowther, Ian Martin and Mae Shaw,

University of Edinburgh, Scotland

Introduction

There are different – and sometimes contradictory – ways of reading the current interest in partnership working and inter-agency collaboration. What is striking, however, is that there is so little real debate about what this way of doing our work is doing to us, or where it is taking us. In this paper we consider recent experience in Scotland where community education, once a distinctive and relatively autonomous local authority service, has been drawn into partnerships which seek to incorporate it within the new Scottish state’s managerialist agenda for ‘delivering community to policy’ (Shaw, 1997). Along with others, we are now seeking actively to resist this and to reassert the vital connection between community-based education and democratic life, and to show how such resistance can be resourced educationally.

Such a project, of course, has special resonance in Scotland today as the promise of ‘democratic renewal’ gives way to a weary sense of deja-vu. It was in response to this that we recently circulated an ‘Open letter: Whatever happened to learning for democracy?’ This reads as follows:

We see our work in community-based education as part of a broader democratic process. This is about enabling people to demand social justice and equality for themselves and others. There is now an historic opportunity to renew democracy in Scotland, and yet we are beginning to feel a profound sense of disappointment about the way in which both our own work and the lives of people in communitiesare being managed, regulated and controlled.

Community learning is being tied into state policy rather than policy being informed by democratic learning. Despite much good practice on the ground, there is a systematic and debilitating reductionism at work in the policy agenda: lifelong learning is largely reduced to instrumental and economistic terms, to learning for a living rather than learning for life; community development is largely reduced to delivering the community to policy through pseudo-democratic forms of participation and partnership; working with young people is largely reduced to surveillance and preparation for employment. There can be no vision of a different kind Scotland in this systematic reduction of democratic purpose to managerial procedure.

This is not the way to activate citizens for democratic renewal or enthuse them about the possibilities of democratic life. Moreover, there is a real danger of a new kind of democratic deficit developing. The real threat to Scotland’s new democracy comes not from apathy but from cynicism.

What is required, in the first instance, is a much more open, democratic and imaginative dialogue and debate about what kind of society we want to live in, and how we can begin to build it in Scotland today. Education and learning in communities can contribute to making this vision a reality, and they are a rich resource for tackling significant problems in society. Ordinary people need the opportunity to have their say, to be listened to and to talk back to the state. This is essentially ademocratic process. It cannot simply be managed and measured; it has to be nurtured and cultivated in communities. It requires faith and trust in the people, and a valuing of genuinely democratic dialogue and debate.

This paper gives an account of the thinking behind this initiative, which seems to have struck a chord with a great many people working in adult/community education in Scotland today. Given that the managerialist state is by no means unique to Scotland, we expect that colleagues elsewhere may wish to compare their experience with ours.

The problem of partnership

Partnerships are to be found everywhere. Collaborative governance is, ubiquitously, the favoured strategy for policy goals as diverse as social and economic development, public service delivery and democratic participation. Of course, partnership working in public services is not new. As a means of mediating, or modifying, the relationship between state services and their recipients, it has been an aspect of policy development since the 1960s. In recent times, however, partnership has become a much more muscular concept, embodying (indeed, enabling) the changing relationships between the state, the market and civil society. This has been described as a shift from government to governance; from ‘rowing’ to ‘steering’. In the old world of ‘rowing’, partnership was regarded at best as a complementary process of political negotiation, most commonly between local and central government. In the new world of ‘steering’, partnership is given a much higher status, as a desirable outcome in itself; as a means of shifting responsibility from the public to the private sphere, with a special role for communities and a much-reduced role for local politicians.

This shift has produced predictable tensions for local democracy. For example, in research conducted for the Joseph Rowntree Foundation in 2002 exploring the role of councillors in partnerships, there is a real sense of concern at the premature ceding of ‘too much power of decision to external bodies’ at the expense of the democratic imperative underpinning traditional conceptions of local government (Wilkinson and Craig, 2002). In other words, partnerships have destabilised representative forms of local democracy by posing (or imposing) participatory democracy as the favoured option. The problem with this formulation for democracy is that such participatory spaces have increasingly been colonised by the market and mediated through the managerial state. Far from expressing a commitment to marginalised groups, the community and voluntary sector has ‘become preoccupied with the business of the state’ (Meade, 2005, 350).

Partnerships may now be more accurately understood as ‘a means of pursuing core objectives of public policy…. not merely a way of providing a few additional services around the edges of the welfare state’ (Ling, 2000, 88). It is precisely the centrality of partnership to contemporary policy which makes it so problematic as a mechanism for democratic inclusion. And yet it remains seductive at a rhetorical level (if no other), for who can argue against partnership or, indeed, its sidekick, empowerment? This kind of commonsensical outflanking through ‘the art of euphemism’ is characteristic of much Third Way politics (Cornwall and Brock, 2005). The discursive thrust of policy-making marries the hard politics of the market with the softer politics of social democracy, whilst emphasising the latter and obscuring the former. In this way, the ‘ghost in the machine’, as Fairclough (2000) describes the invisible role of the market, is free to do its nefarious work.

As already suggested, the partnership paradigm is essentially a global one, everywhere shifting responsibility from states onto communities and civil society, working with the grain of market forces to produce active consumer citizens. Whilst the partnership paradigm may have been refined for specific contexts, it nevertheless constitutes an important institutional mechanism through which social consensus is mobilised (or manufactured) in support of neoliberal socio-economic goals. According to Atkinson (2000, 225), narratives of policy which are congruent with these goals are constructed to create a mutually reinforcing discourse ‘which makes it difficult, if not impossible, to think of alternative ways of organising society and tackling problems’. Partnership is one such policy discourse, in which debate is excluded by discursive fiat: ‘the social and political ends of partnership are pre-ordained in this neo-liberal commonsense’ (Davies, 2007, 6).

This is an important way of understanding how partnerships are framed not least because it focuses attention on those mediating agencies and professionals who are caught up in facilitating the partnership model at community level as ‘the only show in town’ and exposes the tensions and dangers for those local communities on whose participation partnerships are predicated. Writing from the Irish context, Meade and O’Donovan (2002, 1) describe the rise and rise of social partnerships as part of a deliberate neo-corporatist agenda:

In the corporatist system of representation, the state confers a monopolistic representational legitimacy on certain organisations and grants them a presence in policy-making arenas in exchange for observing some restrictions on their articulation of demands, and support for agreements reached through corporatist negotiations.

In other words, communities are offered some status on the basis that they will restrict their demands to those agreed by and within the partnership. As Craig acknowledges, this offers some gains for communities ‘in the sense that their profile is now higher, their legitimacy is underwritten, and they can make claims on resources’ (Shaw, 2004, 41). It is certainly ‘sold’ as a decentralisation of power. However, the way in which the work of partnerships is framed strictly around government priorities, operationalised by a range of ‘stakeholders’ which include the private sector, and policed through various kinds of managerial surveillance pre-empts and neutralises their democratic potential: ‘Central government sets the rules of the game that localities have to accept if they are to at least have the possibility of access to scarce funds’ (Atkinson, 2000, 226). Indeed, so compromised is their participation that some commentators make a case for exit strategies on the part of community organisations.

What is becoming increasingly clear is that there is an inescapable contradiction between the decentralising strategy of partnerships and the centralising logic of the managerial state – what has been called centralist localism. In this way, a kind of corporate consensus is easily manipulated in order to reflect powerful interests. In other words, the context which has emerged is one which is paradoxically authoritarian and inclusivist at the same time, because it seeks to turn problem constituencies and groups into ‘compliant collaborators’ (Clarke et al, 2000, 18). This paradox has been institutionalised in the partnership model. The question is - at what cost?

The changing context in Scotland: enabling partnership through community learning and development

The dominance of New Labour in Scottish politics has reinforced the growth of the partnership approach in the delivery of welfare services with predictable consequences for those professional agencies and groups charged with ‘delivering community to policy’ in this way.The restructuring of community education into community learning and development reflects a new politics of welfare. This simultaneously presents the development of partnerships as the means for communities to be involved in addressing goals linked to social inclusion and active citizenship whilst disguising the reality of increasingly top-down, target-driven and controlled terms of engagement: ‘stitched-up thinking’ (Shaw, 2005).

One casualty of these changes is the Community Education Service, which developed following the publication of the Alexander Report Adult Education: The Challenge of Change (Scottish Education Department, 1975). Perhaps a more significant casualty is the commitment to build democratic learning processes from the bottom up.The Alexander Report was underpinned by a liberal democratic philosophy which believed that community education was a resource for understanding a changing society and that an educated public was an important resource for democratic change.

A key recommendation of the report was the proposal for realigning youth work and adult education as ‘committed allies’ in a new local authority Community Education Service (see Tett, 2006). The idea was that the experience and expertise of youth and community workers, based in ‘disadvantaged communities’, would provide a network of links to enable a more formal adult education service to reach individuals and communities who did not participate in its provision. In turn, the skills of adult educators in curriculum planning and development would brush off on the work of youth and community workers. Put crudely, both sectors of the new service would gain - as would the general public, especially traditionally non-participant groups. That was the theory at least, even if the reality proved more problematic (Kirkwood, 1990).

The current emphasis on partnership has been one way of legitimising the restructuring of Community Education as a service into Community Learning and Development as a process. The key stages in this transformation have gone largely uncontested. The Osler Report Communities: Change through Learning (Scottish Office, 1998) proclaimed that community education was an approach which should permeate policy planning and service delivery across the board. By 2003 the Scottish Executive had officially replaced ‘community education’ with ‘community learning and development’. This has had an important impact on the community educator’s role and the scope for ‘bottom-up’ educational engagement. The planning process creates ever greater demands for management information systems whilst, at the same time, the surveillance net is cast wider and drawn tighter to ensure community partnerships meet targets which express the priorities of the state.

Learning for democracy, however, should mean interrogating policy rather than simply doing it. In this respect, it is worth noting that there is a very particular kind of terminology coming to be associated with Community Learning and Development. This matters because thewords we use tell us how to think and what to do. For example, a quick glance at the recent Scottish Executive document Working and Learning Together to Build Stronger Communities reveals the following ways of saying what the work is about: delivering outcomes, closing the opportunity gap, growing the economy, managing consensus and building social capital. There is nothing at all about political education or learning for democracy. It is worth emphasising what is happening here: community education has been de-marginalised at the expense of becoming simply a partner in delivering state policy – as distinct from an agent of democratic politics.

Learning for partnership or learning for democracy?

To ask such a question in ‘Smart Successful Scotland’ is, of course, to be a dissident and a dissenter, but it is worth remembering in these days of managed consensus that there can be no democracy without dissidence and dissent. The awkward citizen has always been much more important to democracy than the conformist partner. So, a few words about what we mean by the notion of ‘learning for democracy’ may be in order. What this doesnot mean is that democracy can somehow be learnt like a subject or managed like a procedure, let alone ‘delivered’ like a pizza. On the contrary, what it suggests is that learning is for democracy, ie a truly democratic society can only be achieved and sustained through the common commitment of citizens to learn and argue and debate and, if necessary, to differ and disagree – and to live with the consequences. This is about building a deliberative democratic culture - which is not something we can trust to strategic partnerships, let alone sub-contract to private sector consultants.

It seems strange that there is so little sense of history about all this. After all, Scotland stands at a unique historical conjuncture. And yet we seem to be expected to talk about our work as if the historical moment did not exist - or did not matter. There is nothing that betrays even the slightest sense of history in the slick and glossy documents churned out by the Scottish Executive in the bright new dawn of lifelong learning. Perhaps being smart is more important than being part of a democratic tradition in post-devolution Scotland. If so, we are profoundly at odds with the historical traditions of social purpose and political engagement which should inform our work in community-based education.

By way of illustration, it is instructive to compare the ‘vision statement’ of the Scottish Executive on lifelong learning with two statements from earlier times. At the beginning of its recent consultation paper Lifelong Learning: Building on Success (2006,1), the Executive states:

Our vision for lifelong learning in Scotland is to provide the best possible match between the learning opportunities open to people and the skills, knowledge, attitudes and behaviours that will strengthen Scotland’s economy and society.

In contrast, here is a very different kind of statement from another historical moment. It comes from a book by Harold Shearman called, significantly, Adult Education for Democracy, which was published by the Workers Educational Association (WEA) in 1944:

Democracy implies the formation of social judgement on the basis of informed discussion. It requires that men and women shall decide on particular issues, not as a result of passing moods or casual opinions, but in the light of a philosophy of life. Such a philosophy, if it is to be anything more than the repetition of slogans, must be formed as the result of much reflection on the problems of social organisation in general and on the aims and purposes of society. Knowledge is essential; but it must be mixed with experience; and the pooling and comparison of experience in the light of new knowledge, in a group of people with common interests but bringing varied contributions to be drawn from daily life, is the essence of democratic Adult Education. (Shearman, 1944,77)

And, just for good measure, how about this from the 1975 Alexander Report Adult Education: The Challenge of Change?

Society is now less certain about the values it should uphold and tolerates a wide range. Individual freedom to question the value of established practices and institutions and to propose new forms is part of our democratic heritage. To maintain this freedom, resources should not be put at the disposal only of those who conform but ought reasonably to be made available to all for explicit educational purposes. The motives of those who provide education need not necessarily be identified with the motives of those for whom it is provided. (Scottish Education Department, 1975, 25)

The question is: Does the notion of partnership connect in any way with the open and unfinished message of learning for democracy understood in this way?

It may be useful here to make the distinction between policy and politics (Shaw and Martin, 2000). Bypolicy is meant the top-down imperatives of the state, and the invited spaces they offer for various kinds of managed consultation and partnership. By politics, in contrast, is meant the bottom-up aspirations of people in communities, and the demand for democratic spaces in which to articulate and pursue them. We need think no further than the ‘community planning’ process in Scotland today, facilitated by strategic partnerships of one kind or another, to realise the extent to which the managerial state now charges community-based educators with responsibility for ‘delivering policy’.