8846
Universities and education for social purpose
John McIlroy, University of Manchester
Bruce Spencer, University of Leeds
Abstract
British university adult education is in crisis, departments are being forced into educational fund-raising much of which threatens traditional university values. A review of provision for both trade union and social work education allows an examination of the common issues involved and illuminates future strategy for work with sponsoring agencies.
Universities and education social purpose
The crisis in British university adult education
Since the 1970s a new strategy for British university adult and continuing education has been developing, essentially emanating from governments but supported also by many within higher education, it emphasises income generation and the sale of university adult education services. The assertion that adult education must become less dependent on state finance has been accompanied by cuts in resources and by new funding formulae emphasising payment by results, cost effectiveness and value for money. This has steered departments of adult education and extramural studies, to a far greater degree than previously, into the field of post-experience vocational education (PEVE). In particular it is argued that the adult education arms of the universities could generate income by selling their services to a wide range of sponsoring agencies whose educational requirements it is asserted they are well placed to meet.
The development of this general strategy for UK universities has been documented, argued about and alternatives prescribed by the authors elsewhere[1]: the purpose of this paper is to consider to what extent working with agencies can also be married to past concerns of university adult education. Can it continue education for social purpose, redefine and rejuvenate what is best in the tradition of UK university adult education? This question will be examined via a study and comparison of two areas in which in the recent past university adult education (UAE) has sought to combine liberal education and vocational relevance: education for trade unionists and education for social workers.
An exploration of these two areas reveals similarities. In each we can observe a clash between notions of a liberal university education and conceptions of ‘professional’ training for service; tensions between the philosophies and goals of the academic host and the external agency; anxieties on the part of the ‘client’ that the provider’s autonomy and defence of academic freedom produces a curriculum which is subversive and ‘politicising’ and as such dysfunctional to professional and organisational efficiency; internal university concerns about the appropriateness of the location within the institution of such ‘applied’ studies; attempts by the sponsoring bodies to develop provision in other educational institutions where the approach is perceived as more hospitable and amenable.
In the limited space we have available our central theme will be to explore the tension between the ‘sponsor’ and the educational ‘provider’ over liberalism versus vocationalism in educational objectives. The role of the third ‘actor’ the central university will only be discussed in passing whilst that of the fourth, the state, has had to be omitted.
Trade union education
Individual unions and the Trade Union Congress (TUC) were involved in the early development of workers’ education, with their memberssupporting the early extension lectures and later the sustained (three year) tutorial evening courses. The positions taken by individual unions and trade unionists in the arguments surrounding the interwar debate over independent workers' education - between supporters of the Workers' Educational Association (WEA) trade union committee and the National Council of Labour Colleges (NCLC) - tends to blur shared concerns for ‘emancipatory’ education which would also equip those attending courses to work within labour movement organisations. It is important for our purposes to recognise the fact that both key providers of education for trade unionists were free to maintain and develop UK adult educational traditions because they operated within a decentralised regional structure and at a time when the TUC had few resources and a limited role.
The post Second World War growth of university adult education (extra-mural) departments within most English and Welsh universities allowed for the development of sustained and linked courses for specific industries and unions within the UAE departments - with perhaps the best known example being the miners’ courses undertaken first at Sheffield and subsequently at another half dozen UAE departments. Some of these were day release with optional certificates available at the end of the courses. Discussions took place with sponsoring bodies but we can find little evidence of educational policy divisions between providers and client prior to the 1960s.
Earlier attempts by the TUC to take a leading role in union representative education came to fruition in 1964 when the NCLC was integrated into a new TUC education system with the intention of providing a unified provision for the increasing of workplace representatives. The TUC education sub committee, with its new regional education officers - the former NCLCers - began developing regional provision building outwards from the universities and the WEA to college-based courses. Whilst the adult education methods of the former providers were considered useful in the early years, their concerns for a liberal and sustained programme (admittedly insome cases masking a hostility to labour objectives) were soon to be considered handicaps by the TUC by comparison with colleges which were thought more to be in tune with ‘training’ and practical skills development. UAE departments were left with a limited amount of work and they failed to forge a broad and rigorous education programme for trade unionists which could have perhaps been embodied in national certified provision.[2]
More recently the TUC’s concern for practical training has been allied to their Education Department’s emphasis upon student-centred and workplace problem-based courses. This has been presented by some commentators as being within the best traditions of student-determined adult education practice, but this ignores the extent to which these apparently self-directed programmes of study are centrally determined and exclude rigorous and critical examination of much that was previously recognised as central to ‘industrial studies’. For example, economics, politics, theoretical approaches to unionism and industrial relations, and a study of labour movement history are largely ignored.
This shift has also served to heighten further, tensions between the central university, which express concern about university standards and courses appropriate to university level study, and UAE which have been keen to open up new areas of multi-disciplinary study such as industrial studies or cultural studies. These attempt to marry relevance and academic rigour drawing across subject boundaries and, in the examples of industrial studies and applied social studies, practical application. UAE has wanted to maintain a commitment to socially purposive adult education whilst rejecting a narrow ‘vocational’ training approach. In this sense UAE has been caught between the demands of the client, an attempt to defend liberalism and autonomy and the traditional central élitist concern of the university with ‘standards’.
Social work education
University involvement in social work education in Britain can be traced back to the end of the nineteenth century and was particularly associated with the charity work of the educational settlements in the East End of London. Lecture series appropriate for those working in charity and child-care agencies were offered between the wars and a number of different educational and research institutes were established in British universities. The first professional social work education course was established in London in 1929 but it remained the only professional course in the 1930s and early 1940s. Only after the war when there was a growing interest in Welfare State provision did social work and social work education take off. The changing emphasis in social work towards a social psychological approach in case work gave a boost to educational courses exploring this new emphasis. UAE departments had retained an interest in ‘social work’ courses, many targeted at out-of-working-hours mature students and charity volunteers. Courses were offered which led to certificates in child welfare and criminology (attracting prison staff) these courses linked UAE concerns for liberal adult education for social purpose with those who were first-line providers of services for the working classes.
Many traditional universities were uneasy about the development of social work practice as an academic subject, believing it to be professional training without any academic base. This was a concern which in some cases prevented the development of internal applied social studies courses and departments. In the 1950s, reports (principally those associated with Younghusband) on social work began emphasising the importance of the good management of case work and by the 1960s local authority employers came to question the value of academic sociology for practising social workers. At the same time there was a demand for generic social workers and for appropriate broad-based training for these new non specialist case workers, a training which some suggested may be more suited to non university providers.
However, some internal university courses did develop to provide undergraduate education and professional training which was considered appropriate. At first many UAE departments were slow to respond to an educational provision which some university adult educators considered most appropriate to mature entrants - an applied multi-disciplinary study which could draw upon experience and academic work. Sheffield UAE department was the first to offer in 1962 a mature postgraduate, one year, full-time certificate (later diploma) course and five other UAE departments quickly followed with all gaining direct government funding for the new provision (not DES but DHSS and Home Office). This supplemented shorter day and evening provision for more typical extramural students. To some extent this prevented a drift away from the liberal social studies base of social work courses which was envisaged by earlier proposals to move courses out of universities to polytechnics and colleges. This allowed the retention of a liberal approach on these courses whilst meeting some of the objectives sought in the change of emphasis by employers and the profession. All courses attracted the Certificate of Qualification in Social Work (CQSW) which was recognised by employers as granting professional grade status.
The concerns over the lack of casework skills and too broad an educational approach were pushed back at the end of the 1960s by the ‘rediscovery’ of social problems and of poverty, which was associated with the failures of British capitalism - highlighted by the ‘new left’ writers at the time. Thus liberal and radical concerns took the stage - emphasising community approaches and seemingly questioning the efficacy of individual casework. These lasted until the late 1970s when again practical rather than theoretical issues were being raised and were to displace them in the utilitarian 1980s. This later emphasis has been associated with greater employer involvement and the developing role of the Central Council for Education and Training in Social Work (CCETSW). In particular the launching of a college certificate on a day release basis for ‘caseworkers’, the Certificate in Social Service, emphasises practical and to some extent professional concerns rather than radical socio-political theory.
Struggling to deal with this, many radicals, also unhappy with what they saw as remote academic concerns, searched for a new, practical, radical view. But to some extent their emphasis upon practical solutions only ends up denying the validity of ideological perspectives. Some have argued for integration of training and education and, for example, for the need for practical work to be undertaken by tutors alongside students. But these later demands, whilst superficially attractive, pull against sustained academic work and deny the distinctive role of academic study which could be seen as supplementing the practical experience of students.[3]
Only a detailed study could reveal the extent to which liberal concerns were retained on courses, and inevitably the picture would vary but the ‘interference’ in institutional provision was ‘indicative’ - with CCETSW laying down guidelines - rather than giving directions. When CCETSW proposed in one report to lay down specific educational provision, Professor Halsey was moved to express concern about universities’ academic freedom and about upsetting the delicate balance between meeting professional requirements and university needs to pursue open enquiry.[4]
Conclusions
There are contrasts to be made between sponsoring agents: in the case of TUC we have a bureaucratic institution incorporated within the existing order and yet representing a movement ‘oppositional’ to it. Given its nature and its view of what universities are offering it is perhaps not surprising that it has developed a policy which is both ruthless and strategic. This can be contrasted with CCETSW’s approach, which is of course coming from a profession more at one with academia. It has greater sympathy, is more liberal, has more confidence and therefore a greater desire to accommodate to academic freedom.
Social work is of course a ‘job’ whereas lay union representatives are people fulfilling a voluntary ‘role’. There are therefore more resources available for social work education - more time to study and availability for time off from employers who want to improve employee skills. In the case of union representatives the limited legal rights to time off helps reinforce the technocratic approach to union education.
There have always been ‘moral panics’ about unions and workplace representatives whereas this is relatively new - perhaps only in the last ten years for social work. Consequently the arguments in social work education have been broader and perhaps more honest even if bordering on ‘ultra-leftism’. By contrast some tutors in trade union education have themselves been prone to dismiss academic freedom as a bourgeois concept, and have leaned towards the technocratic view of union education therefore they have integrated less well within liberal adult education institutions than those in social work. Even if it is true that social work has drifted more to the polytechnics it is still a more academic environment that local colleges.
Those UAE departments with individual union supported courses and those with CQSW courses have retained an organised sustained education within university traditions in which the ‘sponsor’ has accorded partnership rights to the ‘host’. However the denouement with many trade union courses going to local further education colleges and many social work courses going to internal university departments or polytechnics illuminates the predicament of the modern extramural department.
The new emphasis on shorter PEVE type courses has in many cases avoided discussion of educational arguments and of the fundamental social purposes of UAE provision. If providers are serious in wanting to make universities available to a wider public (across the whole spectrum from community education to PEVE) and are not just seeking ways to make money they should take note of the tensions inherent in sponsor/host relations highlighted above. If these relations are executed adroitly they need not clash with the universities’ past concern with education for social purpose. Indeed if openly argued and negotiated, work with these kinds of sponsoring agents could help rejuvenate and redefine what is best in the tradition of university adult education. But in the absence of a clear assertion of the universities’ purposes, academic freedom and university autonomy will gradually be abandoned in the face of creeping vocationalism.
[1]University adult education in crisis, Leeds Studies in Adult and Continuing Education, University of Leeds, 1988
[2] See i