National sources of statistics
7401
National sources of statistics
H. C. Wiltshire, University of Nottingham
I take my task to be to survey the nature and the limitations of the major sources of information that are readily available to adult educators. I am concerned with what may roughly be termed non-vocational adult education - interpreting this, as did the Russell Committee, a ‘simply a convenient way of indicating that we should exclude the major areas of higher, technical and art education’. Within this area I am concerned only with adult education that is publicly provided and financed, both by Local Education Authorities and by Responsible Bodies.
1. DES: Statistics of education
In spite of gross defects and omissions the prime source is still, I suppose, Volume Three (Further Education) of the Statistics of Education published annually by the Department of Education and Science. At the time of writing (June 1974) the most recent issue is that for 1972 which is based on returns for the session 1971-72, and it is to this that I shall refer. A little digging in the Summary Tables 1 to 5 will reveal the total number of students enrolled in classes in ‘Evening Institutes’ (a term of art which includes Adult Education Centres, Community Centres, Community and Village Colleges, Youth Clubs etc.). This overall figure is analysed by sex and age only, and though the age distribution is given in years between the ages of 15 and 20 all students who are 21 and over are lumped together: so we know how many students are (say) 18, 19 or 20 but not how many are (say) 30, 40 or 50. There is no analysis by type or length of course. Much more serious, there is no subject analysis and has been none since 1958 when it was discontinued after consultation with and with the agreement of the LEAs. So that it is quite literally true that, over the greater part of adult education, we do not know what we are doing and, apparently, do not want to know. This lack of interest in the curriculum of adult education, this assumption that it does not matter what people are learning so long as they are in classes and (presumably) learning something, seems to me our most serious blind as adult educators.
But we cannot, of course, judge the value even of the overall figures that we have got until we know how they are collected. They are derived from Form 109 FE Statistics which is returned by each Local Education Authority and which usually contains consolidated figures for all ‘Evening Institutes’ in that area. These in turn are built up from the separate returns made (usually on the same form) by each institution. The only information asked for is the total number of 'students enrolled as at 1 November in courses and individual classes supervised by a paid instructor' analysed by age (up to 21) and sex. One does not have to be unduly cynical to wonder how accurate these individual returns to the LEA are likely to be in view of (a) the shortage of staff to deal with them and (b) the fact that the status of the institution and the salaries of its officers may be dependent upon them. Even more unpredictable are the effects of basing returns for a whole session upon a count of enrolments upon a particular day. The assumption is that by the beginning of November initial failures will already have taken place and the programme will have settled down into something like its final shape. But this takes no account of failures after November or, much more important, of new classes started later in the session. It is argued that these will cancel each other out but I do not know what the evidence for this is; it seems improbable.
So much for Evening Institutes. But Volume Three of the Statistics of Education is, of course, mainly concerned with Major Establishments and the information concerning those is much fuller than that concerning Evening Institutes - it includes, for example, analyses by type of course and by subject of study as well as by age and sex. But although we know that a great deal of the non-vocational, leisure-based adult education with which we are concerned goes on in Major Establishments - indeed that some institutions whose work is mainly of this kind may be classified as Major Establishments - no separate figures are given for this and we can only guess at the amount of it. The main difficulties are three: (a) the subject analysis applies only to ‘courses leading to recognised qualifications’; (b) the ‘evenings only’ courses may to a considerable extent be of our kind, particularly in the older age-groups, but to what extent we do not know; (c) not all the work of our kind will take place in evenings and some of it will certainly be included in the ‘part-time day’ courses, but again how much we do not know.
There are one or two other crumbs of information. Table 1 tells us how many Evening Institutes there are. Table 7 tells us how many full-time teachers there are in ‘Evening Institutes and Divided Service’. I find this figure impossible to interpret. There is no reference at all to part-time teachers - a much more significant category. There is a useful breakdown of the number of students and of establishments by regions in Table 9; unfortunately the section which expresses these figures as a percentage of the population in each region does so only for the 15 - 17 and 18 - 20 age groups.
Finally: Table 70 concerns ‘Courses of Adult Education provided by Responsible Bodies’ and Table 71 ‘Residential Colleges and Centres of Adult Education’. This is of course familiar ground to all of us, and it is to be noted that Table 70 contains the information (analysis by subject and by type and length of course) which is so sadly lacking for the much more important field of LEA adult education - though the analysis by age of students is lacking. Table 71 is much less informative, giving a breakdown by length of course and sex of students only. Both tables, though they refer to numbers of students give in fact (unlike the LEA figures) numbers of enrolments, so that the two sets of statistics (LEA and RB) are not wholly comparable. And that is about all that our major source of national statistics has to tell us: it is a miserable haul and it reflects our lack of any national policy or concern for adult education. The only virtue of these DES statistics is that they provide and have provided for a long time our only ongoing record; whatever their inadequacies, as long as these remain constant the figures have an unique historic value. The NIAE and the Russell figures, valuable though they are, are both one-off jobs.
2. NIAE: Adequacy of provision
The National Institute’s survey, published in 1970 as Adequacy of Provision is based upon material collected in the session 1968-69, so it is already beginning to look somewhat dated. But it is still of unique value for it is the only substantial source of information on four major topics: subject distribution, the class and educational background of students, student motivation, and patterns of leisure. Moreover it is the only substantial survey to attempt the difficult task of comparing the characteristics of attendees with those of non-attendees with parallel samples of students and of the adult population as a whole. The most significant of these comparisons are to be found in Tables G3 and S3 (class and educational background of students and of the general population sample), P31 and S16 (spare-time activities of students and non-students) and P12 and S5 (reasons for attending classes as seen by students and non students - though this is a notoriously difficult field of enquiry). The information on subject-distribution - almost all that we have on a matter of fundamental importance - is summarised in Table S4.
But, invaluable as this is, it is not and was not intended to be a national survey of adult education and should not be used as such - though, for lack of other sources, it often is. The seven areas on which the survey is based and, for certain purposes, sub-areas within these were chosen not as a representative sample of adult education provision but as a representative sample of the ‘socio-occupational composition’ of the adult population of England and Wales. Clearly the hypothesis was that the two are correlated: if, and only if, there are such a direct and consistent correlation this would be a representative sample of both. Unfortunately the correlation does not hold: for example, the area which is at the bottom of the socio-occupational ranking is second in the adult-educational-provision ranking. So there is little doubt that if this is treated as a sampling of adult education provision (which, as I have said, it does not pretend to be) it will be misleading in some respects: for example RB provision is probably over-represented and the LEA provision of physical recreation courses probably under-represented. Nevertheless it is the best we have, and must be the base for future enquiries and research.
3. The Russell Report
The statistical appendices to the Russell Report refer also to the session 1968-69 (with comparable figures 1963-64) but are derived from a questionnaire (reproduced in Appendix A, Annex 1) which was addressed to all Local Education Authorities in England and Wales and which was answered, no doubt, with varying degrees of care and accuracy. However, the totals of students aged eighteen and over in non-vocational adult education agree reasonably well with those in the DES Statistics of Education for that year. This should give particular interest to the figure given in Table 3, Annex 2 of ‘students aged 18+ enrolled on courses of non-vocational adult education ... at major FE establishments’; but it is difficult to see how this is derived from the questionnaire and it looks, in any case, too low. But there are two other respects in which these enrolment statistics go well beyond those of the DES: (a) provision ‘for special groups’ - e.g. the handicapped, immigrants, members of Women’s Institutes etc. - is shown separately (Table 4), and (b) both this Table and the preceding general one (Table 3) incorporate an extremely valuable analysis of enrolments by Regions.
But the main interest of the Russell statistics is not as a supplement to the DES general statistics nor, fortunately, as a replication of the NIAE survey. It is in their attempt to break into new and difficult areas: staffing, costs and students' fees. The main information about staff is given in Tables 5 and 28, and though some of these figures are difficult to interpret and some difficult even to accept at their face value they remain virtually our only source of information about the LEA staffing situation - admittedly as it was five years ago. An attempt is also made to establish how much time is given to adult education by senior administrative staff who carry it as part of their responsibility; accuracy is not claimed for these figures, but they are predictably low.
Russell is also virtually our only source of information upon the costs of adult education. Table 7 analyses the main categories of LEA income and expenditure and shows net expenditure on adult education as a percentage of expenditure on all services. Table 8 shows expenditure and income per student enrolment. (Tables 16 and 17 give some similar information for the Responsible Bodies and Tables 20 and 21 for the Long-Term Residential Colleges). Table 30 combines these figures to show total estimated current expenditure and income on adult education for the year. Some of the basic figures can, of course, be no more than estimates, but they are the best we have.
Lastly, there is a substantial and valuable section (Appendix C) on students’ fees, fee structures and of the effect of the raising of fees on programmes and on the constitution of the student body. This information was gathered by a separate questionnaire which is reproduced as an Annex. There had of course been substantial fee increases in the preceding few years, so that it was an appropriate time to undertake this difficult enquiry. The results are given in a series of inter-related Tables which must be read as a whole. The regional analyses, which show a wide range of different practices, are of particular interest, as is Table 20 which attempts to relate changes in fees to changes in enrolments.
Altogether the Russell Report is our major - almost our only - source of evidence upon most aspects of the finance of adult education. It is a pity that it contains no information on the salaries of Principals and Heads of Centres and the ways in which these are calculated, and none on the different methods of financing Centres themselves. For the way in which a payment is calculated or earned may have more influence upon policy than the size of the payment itself.
4. Other sources
The Reports of the UCAE and the WEA will be familiar to us all: the statistical tables in the first are particularly full and informative. Buchanan and Percy’s Emergent Patterns in LEA Adult Education (1969) though to some extent superseded by the Russell statistics still has useful material in it. So also has Luckham’s Library in Society (1971) and the related articles in Studies in Adult Education. Lowe's Adult Education in England and Wales deals, unfortunately, mainly in percentages. Glatter and Wedell’s Correspondence Education is mainly concerned with courses leading to advanced qualifications. There is of course highly, though indirectly, relevant material in the reports of the Publishers Association and the Library Association and in the Hulton and IPA Surveys of Newspapers and Periodical Readership. But perhaps the most useful of these ancillary sources is the Sillitoe Report Planning for Leisure (1969) in spite of the fact that with a sample of 6000 or so the grid is so big that formal adult education drops straight through it.
I think that there can be no doubt that the informational feedback that we get from national statistics is miserably inadequate and that we are far worst served in this respect than is any other sector of the educational system It is not that we need statistical information in order to make policy decisions, for these usually and quite properly are based upon other criteria. We need statistical information so that we may check the results of policy decisions - and then perhaps amend the decisions. And we need them because policy in adult education is the result of a great many local decisions all independently taken, so that we cannot know what is the total and cumulative effect of these until national statistics are published. So it is good to know that a Working Party at the DES is discussing the whole field of adult education Statistics and that Darlington may be producing more information for us than it currently does (including information concerning subjects of study) in a couple of years time. We may be in for some shocks.
Reproduced from 1974 Conference Proceedings, PP. 1-4 SCUTREA 1997