The Culture of the Now: Barriers to Research in English Further Education

Tony Scaife

The culture of the now: barriers to research in English Further Education.

Tony Scaife

Lifelong Learning Centre, University of Leeds,UK

Paper presented at the 36th Annual SCUTREA Conference, 4-6 July 2006, Trinity and All Saints College, Leeds

I argue in this paper that in English Further Education (FE), there is a culture of the now [i] with its origins in the manufactured uncertainty of the risk society (Beck 1999). This culture creates significant barriers to sustained, well grounded research in FE. That is not to say there is no enquiry in FE - indeed as we shall see some are quickly responsive to the findings of accountants, consultants and indeed anyone but the staff within the colleges. There is very little organisational space or time made available systematic research.

There are three inter-related aspects to the culture of the now. Firstly there is an institutional dimension of frenetic instability with endless national and local policy changes and an audit culture of financial and curriculum inspections leading to frequent re-structuring and personnel change. Responses tend to be inchoate, short term and unsustainable thus serving to manufacture further instability.

Secondly research in FE appears an unattractive option for college strategic planners for ideological reasons. In essence the audit culture favours standardisation and easily replicable processes: it produces stultifying systems and controls leading to performativity ( Ball 2000).Whereas a research focus would ‘enhance individual responsiveness and flexibility’ (Brotherton, 1998) but would be also less amenable to superficial audit and control by systems.

Thirdly, despite the rhetoric to the contrary, colleges do not treat their employees as their most valuable asset. Rather in seeking to micromanage the activities of staff through one failed initiative after they help to create the climate of manufacture uncertainty which is so corrosive to sustaining tutor’s professional development in a complex learning culture.

In arguing my case much of the evidence is drawn, from the data collected during the three year life of the Transforming Learning Cultures in FE (TLC) project. I am pleased to acknowledge the wealth of data that my colleagues on the project have provided but must accept full personal responsibility for the interpretation of that data within this paper.

The existence of the TLC project itself and the evidence it has accumulated of diverse, dynamic, complex learning cultures sustained by tutors and students, shows that there is individual flexibility, responsiveness and creativity within the FE - despite the prevailing hostility.( see Hodkinson, Biesta and James 2007 for more detail.) Indeed there are even individual local practitioners, at the ‘sharp end’ who have produced good research. (See, for example,Rennie, 2002 and Kenwright, 2001). But the unfolding of the TLC projectitself also points to adds another less encouraging perspective.

Four English universities and four English FE colleges, spread across the country, worked in partnership to research in FE: the senior management of each of the four colleges signed formal contracts to support the work. An important element of the projectwas to be research in FE not onFE drawing upon and developing the research capacity of FE staff (James 2004) but in the relatively short life of the project 75% of the college based researchers on the project were made redundant by their colleges.

The institutional dimension

Just how prevalent then is this culture of the now: found in‘the dynamic and volatile world’ of FE (Huddlestone and Unwin, 1997)? During the project the English FE sector moved from one funding mechanisms to another. Furthermore, all four of the partner colleges underwent major restructuring (together with mergers or amalgamations in some cases). They all had full general ALI/OFSTED (Adult Learning Inspectorate / Office for Standards in Education) inspections each lasting a week and taken months to prepare for. Inspections like these are stressful and disruptive but they tend not to contribute significantly to the development of the college (Rennie, 2002).

Then there are the endless financial and curriculum audits which are now the norm in FE (Perry, 2000). In all 16 of the project’s specific programmes of study there was disruption inlocation, the removal of some learning resources and changes in staff. Theculture of the nowin these caseswas driven by financial and structural imperatives: there is no evidence of any pedagogical benefit

Papers by participants in the TLC project in James (2004) provide evidence of increasing class sizes, extended contact hours, increasing management and administrative responsibility and increasing curriculum standardisation; another tutor discusses the complexity they faced in delivering the curriculum within the context of overlapping uncertainties and declining resources . In another case the impact of an externally imposed curriculum did little nothing help his students with special learning needs.

One colleague argued the culture of the now was leading to an IKEA model of education. Where the innovation, creativity and enterprise which were once the hallmarks of FE teaching have been subsumed under ‘quasi commercial models of organisation’:

Students are “now clients or customers, to whom we deliver learning in packages…[ranging] from … bitesize courses to two year programmes. There are elaborate systems to measure customer satisfaction. Our Examination Boards issue ‘Product Updates’… Many teachers and managers… pore over spreadsheets of retention and achievement … trying to match their performance against national benchmarks” (see The IKEA syndrome in James 2004)

Getting the teaching ‘right’ is a complex and challenging problem which rarely receives much scrutiny. On the other hand getting these figures right has become an obsession. (James 2004)

Most of the TLC partner colleges have faced financial difficulties resulting in the redundancy of staff. Taking Holly Tree College as an example I have published elsewhere (Scaife 2004 p 3-4) a detailed account of the funding complexity; the senior management’s bewildered ruthlessness and the systemic turbulence that took the college from being commended for achieving the best ever inspection results for a general FE college to making 70 staff redundant in about 18 months.

For the TLC research project there is some evidence that participants had been distracted in some of their research activities – for example most have produced fewer reflective accounts of their work during this period. In one case planned events to disseminate the findings of the project had to be abandoned because of the institutional climate. (Scaife 2004 p5-6)

Thus whilst the TLC project represented a laudable attempt by university based staff and research funding agencies to develop research capacity in FE there have clearly been significant barriers to conducting research in FE. In part at least I argue there is an ideological dimension to this problem.

The ideological dimension

Generally research related activities ‘are not seen by FE managers as activities which should lie at the very heart of either the institution’s strategy or its operational priorities’ (Brotherton, 1998, p311). Rather college managers have adopted a “factory approach” which emphasises ‘the primacy of organisational system needs over those of its individual knowledge creators’ (Brotherton, 1998, p316-317).

Furthermore rather than tolerating experiment and pedagogic innovation (which is at the heart of the learning organisation) ‘the drive has been to make the informal more formal, and the implicit more explicit via conformance-driven structures, processes and routines’. (Brotherton,1998,p319). Thus for example there can be tension between responding to the individual student’s creative needs and the increasing standardisation in assessment and grading in vocational programmes (James 2004). Similarly there are ‘wars’ (manufactured uncertainties) between the differing strands of audit and inspection in a subject area.’ … auditors were more intent on believing the staff and the college were trying to defraud the funding body … than they were prepared to concede that students were actually engaged in some student-centred learning project’(Audit and Inspection in James 2004 ).

The former research fellow in OakTreeCollege is clear ‘… that beneath the benign respect for research among some senior managers there is a deeper indifference to recognising or supporting the processes and outcomes of research in college structures … ‘(private letter, April 2004, quoted by permission). This response had been anticipated by some. (Scaife, Colley and Davies, 2001).

A fundamental failure to recognise the nature of the research process was also reported from RowanTreeCollege:

… that the uncertainty surrounding college reorganisation and mergers can be heightened by participating tutors (in the TLC project). This, they feel, makes them a little more vulnerable in respect of potential redundancy.The central research necessity to spend some time just ‘thinking about it’ does not fit into (the costing structures) well. ‘Casting about’ can’t be ‘costed’. (Mixed blessings and ambiguities James,2004).

Ulrich Beck argues ‘The concept of risk reverses the relationship of past, present and future. The past loses its power to determine the future’ (Beck, 1999, p137). Above all ‘risks and risk perceptions are the unintended consequences of the logic of control which dominates modernity (risk) creates manufactured uncertainties… suggesting what should not be done but not what should be done ‘(Beck, 1999, p139). Now, for example, colleges readily appreciate that they should not fail to answer the seven questions of the Common Inspection Framework but there is considerable anxiety and confusion about what constitutes an appropriate, or rather effective, answer. Rather than the audit model of quasi research which the Common Inspection Framework provides David James provides a well argued model of just what well grounded research could achieve in an educational context (James 2005 p 93)

Instead, the audit driven IKEA model of FE, as discussed above, dominates. This situation is common throughout public service and John Quicke provides a powerful critique of how such an untrammelled market driven model will erode the very public service values the colleges were established to foster. (Quicke, 2000). Specifically I argue that in FE there a Faustian pact has been made which makes it very difficult for colleges to become learning organisations and thus sympathetic to research.

Thus, incorporation, with its gift of autonomy, also transferred ‘…responsibility for the policy effectiveness and, in particular policy failure, from government to institutions themselves’(Gleeson and Shain, 1999, p487). Adrian Perry’s paper discusses the way audit and inspection distorts the provision of FE. In a real sense colleges can never be secure – free of risk and uncertainty – because they are always at the whim of shifting policy. (Perry, 2000).

Elsewhere I have reviewed, at some length, the process of coping with the manufactured uncertainty of a major OFSTED/ALI inspection at HollyTreeCollege. Where despite the enormous monetary, physical and emotional costs of the process there was no consistency in outcome. The dominant ‘message’ of the inspection could not be organisationally agreed and remembered for even an 18 month period. Thus to paraphrase Beck the past appears to have no capacity to even influence the future let alone determine it. (Scaife 2004 pp9-10)

Brotherton gives a prescription of what is required to effectively manage risk and to counter that sense of powerlessness and paralysis which is the hallmark of the culture of the now:

Without a clear recognition of, and emphasis on, the primacy of people any strategy is likely to be sub-optimal at best, and disastrous at worst…it is the organisation’s people who possess the ability to generate the knowledge and products upon which the very survival and success of the organisation depends. FE institutions, and their managers, who do not recognise and embed this simple philosophy into their strategy are likely to significantly underutilise the fundamental source of innovation and value creation embodied in their employees. (Brotherton, 1998, p320,).

The human resource dimension

Many have written on just how contested is the terrain of FE professionalism and to remind us that there was no golden age from which contemporary FE has somehow regressed (e.g. Bathmaker, 2001; Briggs, 2003; Gleeson and Shain, 1999; Goodrham, 2003).

What some of the TLC findings show is just how difficult many working in FE find it to sustain professional development (generate knowledge in Brotherton’s sense) in the culture of the now. For example Gwen, is an NVQ assessor, who has resisted managerial attempts (assisted by sophisticated technology) to turn her work into assessment only. She has had to engage in underground teaching and in order to offer a full range of support for her students, support which is crucial in assisting them to achieve the outcomes which they and the college need. For the students, Gwen is the college and she presents it in the most positive light. Gwen’s working practises are deeply linked to her habitus – including a personal commitment to lifelong learning and sustained professional development. The failure of her managers to recognise and respond to this causes her both practical difficulties and emotional pain. Her managers are not being perverse they feel constrained to keep costs down or fear that they will lose the work all together (James and Diment, 2003). Far from recognising the primacy of people, Gwen’s college appears to undervalue the very source of their success; ignoring the processes which generate the knowledge upon which college’s survival depends.

Giving people time and space to reflect and research on their practice can lead to marked shifts in pedagogical practice. A lecturer reflects upon how their involvement in the TLC project helped them transform their practice and “help to create more autonomous learners” (Personal and professional change in James,2004).

Generating these kinds of insights though is time consuming and not without its own risks. For tutors to attempt transformation of the learning culture of their site is both highly complex and challenging. To make such changes means engaging in a critical examination of the social practises with the learning site … transformation may be far less about adopting particular teaching techniques than about transforming oneself (Transforming learning cultures the role of the tutor James,2004). I argue that only when the people in the college feel secure and that they really are the college’s most valuable asset will there be a general confidence in beginning to undertake transformations of themselves and their learning culture.

Instead they are more likely to encounter attitudes that Quicke has identified as being hostile to the whole notion of professional autonomy and the disinterested improvement of professional practice (Quicke, 2000). I have discussed the dismal staff perception in HollyTreeCollege of professional support and development elsewhere (Scaife 2004 p10-11). In addition across all the TLC sites, despite there being for five or six rounds of detailed interviewing, none of the participating tutors discussed effective staff appraisal schemes leading to pedagogic change, let alone transformation. None have mentioned having a comprehensive plan of individual continuous professional development, negotiated with their college/line manger, and in the context of an overarching career development plan. But from across all the sites there is evidence of tutors undertaking first or higher degrees with varying levels of financial, structural or emotional support from their colleges.

There is evidence of just how complex is the concept of professional identity held by FE tutors and how contested the terrain for tutors who seek ‘to give voice to critique and ideas emerging from the tensions between education policy and practice’ (Gleeson, Davies and Wheeler 2005, p457). Yet there is no recognition of this complexity or tensions in the latest government plans for FE. Instead we see the same emphasis on accountability and audit: where there are more than three times as many references to inspection as there are to teaching and learning. (Foster 2005)

It would appear then that the core professional interest is somewhat lower down the scale of priorities but nonetheless there is to be a new Quality Improvement Strategy for teaching and learning … again. (DfES 2006, p8). The TLC project produced a well-founded series of recommendations on improving learning in FE (TLC report 2004 p 52-59) drawing upon its painstakingly researched understanding of the cultures of learning in and the dispositions of tutors and students and yet the newly minted mission for FE (DfES 2006 p5) bears no relationship whatsoever to the TLC findings – or I would argue the reality of FE.

Conclusion

I have argued that further education is dominated by a culture of the now which creates barriers to research, professional autonomy and the development of a transformative learning culture. This indifference to research is based upon a false prioritising of responses to the real risks inherent in college autonomy. By largely collaborating exclusively with an externally imposed audit culture, college leaders tend to undermine the knowledge creation capacities of their staff.

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Tony Scaife 07761159 525