When Angela Smallwood invited me to join you today and gave me licence to speak for 25 minutes on the role of higher education in lifelong learning, she made clear that her fee for such licence was that I should speak for 5 of those minutes on a primary purpose of this conference - developing a progress file for higher education, a transcript recording student achievement and provision for the planning of personal development.
Testing though it is for me to be relevant on anything for as long as 5 minutes, I accept my duty.
It is the easiest thing in the world for a committee as I well know, to pick up a pen and make a recommendation - in fact 92 recommendations as we did in the Report on Higher Education - and with a light heart leave it to others to translate our scratchings into practical, relevant applications.
I had great hope that you would do just that. In so saying I express great faith, for earlier experiences in higher education taught me that such is the acuteness of the academic mind, it only takes half a dozen academics to get together to work on a problem, and a couple of meetings to define the problem, for it to be elevated to such a level of complexity that the problem is insoluble. During my days as Chairman of the Funding Council, in facing the university community, with whatever our latest new idea might be, I soon learnt my chances of success were about the same as the poor Minister facing Sir Humphrey in the classic "Yes Minister" series.
But on this occasion, as with so much else in our Report, I have been delighted to find that so often we are of a common mind, and in the business of finding answers to tough questions. I am much in the debt of all those who have been engaged in the PADSHE project, and for their commitment to finding the good in the basic ideas of the Committee.
My own stirrings in this general area begin in my years in the schools world where it seemed to me that not later than say the term before the age of 14, the student should sit down with advisors - that is teachers, parents and careers advisors and begin to think where he or she wanted to be going to; how to get there; and how to take responsibility for the management of that process. Those thoughts were developed by a group under the Chairmanship of Nicholas Goodison, into the proposals for a Progress File. As we all know, the Government is now piloting those proposals in schools.
We saw real merit in the already established National Record of Achievement, and in tutoring students at school on how to use it at interview. We recognised the importance of recognising achievement beyond the formal curriculum. But as I have indicated, our interest extended to the student developing the capability to give direction to and to manage his or her life.
The motives for coming up with those ideas for near 14-year-olds were mixed. They were part aimed at prompting some hard thinking for those for whom the standard education diet in schools was not working, and to stimulate new purposeful thinking. They were also aimed more generically at introducing some first thoughts on purposes and outcomes, rather than a passive drift. They were in part to encourage people to assess their own strengths, to get to know themselves and to realise who they were and who they might be.
But those thoughts began to take on a harder edge as it became increasingly clear three or four years ago that we had a necessity to become a society committed to learning throughout life. If that was so, people had to learn, before they finished formal education, both how to learn and how to manage their own learning: in short how to take charge of the whole process of self-development through learning, throughout life.
When I read some of the papers that had been circulated for your day's work, I found myself without any ambition to counsel you that course A was better than course B or course C. Indeed experience has taught me that that is the best way of not achieving something in Higher Education. Rather I found myself developing some random, but hopefully, relevant observations.
On the other hand, whereas uniformity does not seem to be the necessary goal - except in the context of assisting the development of good practice - for the management of learning; for the recording of achievement, when we are thinking in terms of providing material from which the student can draw when making presentations about him or herself to employers, then from the employer perspective, there is much to be said for some common format. I know from the experience of looking through large numbers of applications for jobs as an employer, the benefit of user friendly documents - which means documents with which the user is familiar, and to a standard broad format.
If you needed any practical assurance of my personal commitment to the purposes of PADSHE, I will conclude these reflections with the assurance that the University for Industry is developing a lifelong learning log as a central feature of its offering to all learners as an online facility available at any time from a UFI terminal - and a series of online learning Management Support Services. Our work is still at an early stage and we wish to learn from your experience.
Enough of these quick reactions to a first read of your papers. My main wish is to encourage you in this enterprise and to thank you for responding so positively to new proposals that I am convinced will be of material benefit to the student, and which if the second of the reflections I have offered is apt, may have a long term influence on the practice of learning and the objectives of learning in higher education. It may be a more significant enterprise, over a 10 year horizon, than we might guess at this moment. If so, it will be to the benefit of higher education.
My remit to speak about the role of higher education in lifelong learning, and I hope that Angela Smallwood will note that I have offered more than the 5 minutes on the PADSHE initiative she prescribed. But I promise nonetheless to keep within my 25 minutes.
As to the role of higher education in lifelong learning, we all know that there are more adult learners already in higher education than traditional 18-year-old entrants. You will also know that in addition the programmes designed to lead to awards, higher education for decades has offered programmes for the sheer joy of learning to vast numbers of adults. So there is nothing new in the concept of higher education being extensively involved in lifelong learning. What has changed, and it is a process of progressive change rather than a sudden new challenge, is the prospect of the balance between initial higher education and learning throughout life changing fundamentally to reflect a widely shared aspiration to create a learning society.
Change Drivers
It may well be that this phenomenon will gradually change the practice of higher education as well as its structure. Let me give you 4 illustrations:
First, the adult learner in work, will seek provision times at which it is convenient to be engaged in learning ie the evening and the weekend. Part of the summer holiday may be reserved for learning. To the extent that higher education responds to this growing need, it should lead to new thinking about the form of the contracts of employment for university staff, involving options about the time committed to teaching at the different stages in a career, as well as in relation to hours of working and the balance for individuals at various times between teaching and research. I see that as an opportunity for staff rather than as a source for concern. I am not talking here about forced changes of contract, but about a wider range of options for people, reflecting their own priorities and aspirations. The well established comment that the University estate is used far less for teaching than is common in other activities will gradually be found to be out-of-date, as the response to adult learning is made.
Second, I would expect to see partnerships in learning between universities and large corporations, between institutions and sectors of industries, perhaps between institutions and a range of industries in their community area, becoming commonplace. It is commonplace nowadays that the pace of change in industry gets ever swifter and that as a necessity employers have to renew the skills and knowledge capital of their workforce. In the leading edge sectors of industry and commerce - and I do not see much future for Britain than anywhere else - companies will have to become learning societies. Public services will be expected to match the private sector in adapting to change, and they too will have to become more and more like learning societies. In response to this need the number of company universities in the United States is now said to exceed 1600. A similar process is beginning in the United Kingdom. A recent survey of 100 of these company universities showed some two thirds of them in partnership with a university. That is what I see happening here. There is nothing startlingly new in this. It is rather it may become increasingly a norm from which both sides will benefit in the faculty being kept in touch with the latest developments in thinking in their area of specialist knowledge. It will give openings for consultancy and research work. In return industry will get expertise in the business of learning and its management.
There is an alternative scenario here in which if industry and commerce cannot get what they require from institutions of higher education, they will increasingly move themselves into the business of being principal providers of graduate education, possibly in association with a major overseas university thus becoming competitive suppliers. The one thing that characterises the private sector of industry is that it is not slow to see opportunity, and if education, as I believe, is one of the major growth activities of the next century, it would not be surprising if there were predators, or if you like, entrepreneurs, who will see higher education as a major area of business opportunity. My hope is that by responding to the opportunities, we shall see a relationship of partnership rather than of competition.
Third, because the adult learner may well have needs from time to time that span both higher and further education, and because this is almost certain to be true of the learning needs of companies and public bodies, I see the present practice of universities developing constructive relationships with a range of F.E. colleges, becoming ever more the norm, if we are to respond fully to a society engaged in learning in life. I am not saying that this will be, or should be, true of all universities, or of all departments in a university, but that will be a developing pattern.
My fourth and final reflection is that because companies are increasingly global in their thinking and in their operations, and because their people will similarly, especially the middle and higher levels, be international in their understanding in order to be fully effective, learning for the mature student is likely - even more than for the undergraduate - to be international in its orientation. This would be something I believe that the university community would welcome since it is itself international in outlook, in the pursuit of scholarship and research.
I am one of the many admirers of British higher education. It has been one of the great success stories of the last decade: one that is too little sung, too little heard, in a society which seems preoccupied with denigration of its achievements and its institutions. Perhaps we have ourselves to blame for not getting the story across: if we do not who will? Whether the story has been got across or not, it is an excellent one. British higher education has proved itself to be highly adaptive and entrepreneurial and widely respected overseas. Yes, I will say right away that change is not easy and that it does not often come quickly. But if one looks at results, at what has happened, the story is a good one. I am therefore optimistic that whilst the future will be one of change, the universities will adapt, and adapt successfully to a society committed to lifelong learning.
In this, the creation of the University for Industry will offer universities a new channel of opportunity to be a key player. All members and colleges of higher education have received invitations to consider being members of local partnerships, learning hubs, overseeing the work of 1000 or more learning centres.
May I say in conclusion that part of that process of responding to the needs of the times is that which you are meeting today to carry forward. It is about preparing people to manage the one asset they have - themselves and also to present what they have to the greatest possible effectiveness. I am therefore delighted to have been invited to come today. Thank you for the progress you are making in the service of students
