On Magnets, Pawns and the Holy Grail: the Altered States of Adult and Community Educators

On magnets, pawns and the Holy Grail: the altered states of adult and community educators – a case study

Paper presented at SCUTREA, 32nd Annual Conference, 2-4 July 2002, University of Stirling

Cheryl Hunt, University of Sheffield

Background

I last presented a paper focusing on community education (CE) at SCUTREA’s ‘silver jubilee’ conference (Hunt, 1995a). Since then I have largely pursued other interests in reflective practice and spirituality. Although earlier research and teaching experiences in CE have continued to shape those interests, my active involvement in the day-to-day affairs of local communities has been fairly minimal in recent years. Indeed, my paper at the jubilee conference was an attempt to come to terms with my own metamorphosis from community educator to academic. The paper had been prompted by a phone-call from a local councillor to tell me that an attempt in Derbyshire, a large county in the English midlands, to implement a unique county-wide CE policy was now virtually at an end, following a decision to withdraw funding from the local Community Education Councils (CECs).

Derbyshire’s policy had involved two key strategies: the setting up of thirty-seven CECs, each comprising up to fifty local people with the power to decide on the nature of the CE provision in their district, supported by a professional community-based co-ordinator; and the appointment of a large number of community tutors, based in local schools. It represented a bold attempt, in a form never tried elsewhere in the UK, to create a CE service, as close as possible to the needs of local people, in which traditional barriers would be overcome between the hitherto separate adult education, youth and schools sectors of education as well as between education and other social services.

My own history had been sporadically entwined with CE in Derbyshire since 1986/7: I had co-ordinated a large staff development/action research programme for the newly-appointed community tutors and others involved in the early stages of implementing the policy, and had undertaken research projects examining the role and function of the tutors and the CECs (Hunt, 1995b, 1999a). However, I had been somewhat taken aback by the phone-call from my councillor colleague who had said: ‘I know you can’t do anything about it but you do know what’s been going on here. Can you tell people about what we tried to do?’

In my 1995 paper, still struggling to understand what it meant to be a full-time academic after years being defined by roles as part-time tutor, occasional community activist and mother of three school-age children, I raised the question of who benefits from the recording and analysis, in an academic arena, of the ways in which politicians, practitioners and local people try to turn vision into policy and practice. I noted that my personal journey from community involvement to academe seemed to have taken me, like Lewis Carroll’s Alice, through a looking-glass into another world where priorities are different; where, most notably, the written word tends to be more highly valued than the activity it describes. I wondered whether the role of those on the academic side of the glass might be to encapsulate the practices and processes of education in the community within a broader theoretical context - and to reflect this back into the ‘real’ world in a form which has the power both to celebrate and to change practice.

Even now, I am not sure whether that is an appropriate descriptor of the academic’s role in relation to practitioners and participants in adult/community education, or in any other local services for that matter. Nevertheless, in reflecting on my own ‘altered state’ - not just as a result of passing through the looking glass into academia but of since surviving a messy and painful departmental restructuring which continues to challenge personal and professional beliefs and values - I am acutely aware of the scant attention that is generally paid to the ‘state’ of practitioners in any setting, particularly as they attempt to mediate between new policy decisions, professional values, individual and local needs, and their own personal concerns and feelings.

Purpose

Using earlier work in Derbyshire (Hunt, 1999b) as the basis for a case study, the purpose of this paper is to focus on the altered states of adult/community educators in the county as changes in local and national educational policy affected the structures within which they were required to work, as well as the very nature of their jobs. Drawing on their own words, it will indicate how these changes did not simply alter what practitioners were required to do but how it made them feel about themselves and their work, a dimension that is often missing from policy planning and reports.

The timing seems apposite. It is 21 years since the first working party on CE was set up by Derbyshire County Council (DCC) in October 1981. At that time, interest in CE across the UK had been sparked by two factors. First, much political and educational debate was being driven by the evolving concept of continuing/recurrent/lifelong education and by a perceived need for public participation and accountability in local services. Second, recommendations in the Scarman Report (1981), following riots in several English cities, had pointed to the need to foster a sense of community to overcome feelings of alienation and rejection.

A generation on, little has ostensibly changed: the notion of lifelong learning now gives shape to much educational policy; and urban riots in the summer of 2001 have been linked to the problems of ‘fractured and divided communities, lacking a sense of common values’ (Home Office, 2002: 11). Under these superficial similarities, however, there has been a sea-change in British politics. I shall comment on it here only in the context of developments in Derbyshire.

Derbyshire’s ‘Holy Grail’

The vision

In 1989, the then Chair of Derbyshire’s Education Committee declared: ‘If education is not life-long in Derbyshire with the input that has been made, and the inputs that will continue to be made, then perhaps we are pursuing a Holy Grail after all’ (Lennox, in Hunt and Clarke, 1989: 47). The vision of that Grail had been sketched three years earlier in a policy document subsequently known simply as ‘The Pink Book’. It stated unequivocally:

The general aim of community education is to afford opportunities to people of all ages, whether in the statutory system or not, for growth and development as individuals and as members of communities and to encourage local people to take responsibility for their own learning.

… Community education is different from most operations of the County Council in the extent to which it crosses boundaries, not only between different parts of the Education Service but between different services of the County Council. Opportunities may be available through a number of providers, but in all cases four aspects are common.

(a) The provision is community based, not based on institutions;

(b) It must be demand or user led and not determined by the professional provider;

(c) It offers opportunities for people of all ages and at all stages of life;

(d)The professional’s role is that of facilitator through dialogue with the local community

(DCC, 1986, paras.1.1, 1.8).

The vision had been shaped over five years during an extensive consultation process informed by the development and monitoring of several pilot projects. The first major step towards turning the vision into reality had been taken in 1987/8 when well over one-hundred new CE staff appointments were made. At this point, the evangelical imagery of a Grail quest genuinely did seem to encapsulate the feelings of many practitioners - and of large numbers of local people who later offered their services to the CECs - that they were about to enter uncharted territory in pursuit of a cherished goal that no-one else had ever quite attained.

Among the community tutors whom I subsequently interviewed there was much talk of ‘addressing issues that are politically important’ and, as one put it, ‘just total commitment to the county’s philosophy and policy’. Another recalled: ‘1988 was for us in Derbyshire, I think, such a positive, such a hopeful time. … I can remember feeling as though I was being carried along on the impetus of something that was really exciting’.

The idea of ‘crossing boundaries’ between schools and communities, between sectors of education, and between education and other local services had clearly captured the imagination of many who had applied for the new posts. They saw them not just as a way of engaging with a particular philosophy but as an opportunity for self-development also. That both were achieved was evidenced in interviews four years later when tutors spoke of the major satisfactions they had gained from their work: frequently mentioned were the possibilities for ‘networking’ and ‘thinking/working outside the usual sector restraints’. As one tutor put it: ‘It gives me a real buzz to act as a “communications centre” and be able to help people because of my knowledge and contacts in the area’. Two other community tutors spoke with pleasure of the facts that:

‘Separate community groups are now realizing the importance of keeping in touch and supporting each other. Many people now know that skills and education are derived from just being involved. It feels good to have played a part in that’;

and:

‘It surprises me how many things I actually managed to keep going at once. Some of them were things I’d never tried before but it shows that if you set things up in the right way you can keep all sorts of plates spinning and really feel you’ve achieved something. I think the people I worked with in the community feel the same way too. Hopefully they’ll keep the impetus going when I’m gone’.

That final sentence is significant. In 1991, the community tutor posts were disestablished; a year earlier there had been a major re-shuffle of key officers in the county and the main architects of the Pink Book had left. In effect, a decade after Derbyshire’s vision of CE had first begun to take shape, and only four years after it had seemed to be well within the grasp of a dedicated group of practitioners, it had been all but lost. In retrospect, it is easy to suggest why.

Seeds of destruction

Even before the vision had been created, the seeds of its destruction had been sown. 1979 saw the beginning of the ‘Thatcher project’: a sustained period of Conservative government fuelled by notions of the market place and the importance of competition. Martin (1992: 3) notes that its purpose was:

… to change the way we think about ourselves and each other, essentially by seeking to legitimise self-interest as the basis for moral action. At the same time it initiated a radical restructuring of social, economic and political institutions.

When the first working party on CE was set up in Derbyshire in 1981, its ideology, rooted in the somewhat paternalistic, welfare-oriented approach of ‘Old Labour’ was therefore already under threat. Whether that had not become entirely evident when the Pink Book was published, or whether DCC simply decided it was important to go ahead and assert its own principles at a time when the powers of local authorities were being curtailed by central government, Derbyshire’s long-planned CE policy was finally made operational just at the point when enforced cuts had to be made in the education budget. Thus, from the outset, CE’s expected share was reduced by half, to £1.5m

This had a number of serious consequences for the newly-appointed community tutors. First, there was no funding until almost a year later to appoint community-based colleagues. Second, many tutors found themselves in schools, or clusters of schools, where priorities were not necessarily about establishing new patterns of CE, and the purpose of the new post was often not properly understood. Third, they were charged with developing a job for which the parameters were uncertain. The foreword to the Pink Book had stated:

We do not claim that this is the definitive statement in community education. Better let it be seen as a blueprint for development which will be a basis for policy decisions by the Education Committee, and which will help the practitioners to put policy into practice (DCC, 1986).

The reality of having to do a job on the basis of a ‘blueprint’ rather than established expectations was often problematic. One tutor said of the situation:

There was a lack of understanding of schools and how they function by CE (community education) officers. Lack of understanding of CE by the Head and governors and staff. I was expected to do a job in the middle of it all and no-one could agree on what the job was.

Others variously referred to: ‘uncertainty about where you belong in the admin structure, in school or out of school’; ‘working with a Head (or rather without him) who didn’t want to miss out on having a CT (community tutor) but doesn’t know what one is’; and ‘some staff expectations that I’ve never managed to dispel that I am a teacher’s aide or run-around … they treat me like a part-timer because I’m not always working in the building’. Speaking just after her post had been disestablished, one tutor summed up her task over the previous four years in the following graphic terms:

‘In retrospect, I suppose it was a bit like being told to build Noah’s Ark and find all the animals – and having to start by finding out where the trees for the wood were, how to make the tools to build it with – and all the time there was a sense of the rain getting closer’.

The ‘sense of the rain getting closer’ - a sense that time was rapidly running out for Derbyshire’s CE Grail quest - became widespread following the so-called Education Reform Act of 1988. The effects of this legislation were not immediate. Indeed, in the same year, several of the delayed community-based staff appointments were made and the CECs officially came into being. Embodied in the Act, however, was provision for local management of schools (LMS), a key feature in Thatcher’s ‘radical restructuring’ designed to weaken the powers of local authorities and create a free market within the schools sector.

LMS had to be implemented within three years. Before that deadline was reached, DCC decided to transfer the monies for the employment of community tutors to the general CE budget and instigated a review of how the ‘tutor resource’ should subsequently be managed. During the review period, the aforementioned political re-shuffle and departure of key officers was compounded by further financial problems, culminating in the disestablishment of the tutors’ posts. They were replaced by a very much smaller number of posts within newly-created adult and community education (ACE) teams. These signalled a virtual return to a separate sector-based service.

Although some schools later chose to re-employ their own community tutor, the introduction of LMS effectively destroyed both key elements of Derbyshire’s original CE policy. As a report from the inspectorate (HMI) observed, the links across the school-community boundary that many erstwhile tutors had struggled so hard to create were badly damaged when schools began to charge community groups for the use of premises; at the same time, because of the reorganization of the education department, most senior area education officers found themselves ‘unable to devote much attention to the development of the CECs and to the organizational changes in community education’ (HMI, 1992: 14).

Little wonder, then, that the quest for an integrated CE system began to fragment – or that practitioners who had invested so much of themselves in trying to make it a success should have felt lost and disillusioned as they tried to redefine their work and professional identities during subsequent reorganizations. The latter all seemed to be precipitated not under the aegis of any new county-wide vision but in response to further budget cuts and short-term priorities.

Pawns in a game

When I interviewed some of the former CEC co-ordinators in 1994, one spoke of having:

‘Oh – just so much resentment sometimes at what’s happened to us that, if I really stopped to think about it, it would be hard to do this job properly now. It’s only the local people, not (DCC) and the way we just seem to be pawns in a game to them sometimes, that make it worth going on’.

The disestablished co-ordinator posts had been replaced by new community development worker posts which had themselves later been absorbed into established ACE teams. Another interviewee said of this process:

‘I don’t know how you describe it (disestablishment of co-ordinator posts) in words. I was just completely gutted. I couldn’t believe it. … it made me feel as if everything I’d done was rejected, was valueless. … I felt as if it was targeted at me. I know perfectly well rationally, now, that it wasn’t, but you don’t at the time. I just felt I had given my all and my all had been thrown back at me. I still feel that. I still feel that if I’m honest. … I felt totally gutted … and a sense of despair because, of course, we had to go through the process of re-interview and appointment and … I didn’t know whether I would have a job.