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Vision, policy or accident? Critical explorations of the development of continuing education at a northern university, 1970-1995
Keith Percy, Lancaster University
Preamble
The emphasis of this paper is upon exploration and reflection. The art of exploring recent history is not well used in continuing education. We react so often to the immediate and the occasional, and are so much caught up in the flux of events, that we do not often pause to reflect upon the larger processes which have taken us from where we were some time ago to where we are now. To do so, we need an explanatory and interpretative model which goes beyond both the deterministic and the narrative.
This paper takes the example of twenty five years of continuing education at Lancaster University and asks if there is a model of explanation appropriate to developments there. The emphasis is upon the analysis, not upon the detail of events. The author was an actor in these events throughout the period: the objectivity of this analysis must obviously be at risk.
The question
There is a framework of historical fact. Twenty-five years ago, in 1970, Lancaster University was six years old. It made no continuing education provision except for the occasional post-experience short course; it had no part-time undergraduates and was not ‘responsible body’ for extra mural studies; it did, however, claim at the time to be exceptional among universities in welcoming mature undergraduate students. In 1969, the Lancaster Senate had considered the report of an ad hoc working party set up to consider if there was a ‘need’ for extra-mural studies at Lancaster. On looking at the working party’s limited and cautious recommendations, the Senate decided to ‘wait for Russell’ (the Russell Committee on Adult Education, whose report was delayed until 1973)[1]. This was a normal university method of burying the issue.
Twenty-five years later, in 1995, Lancaster University has a Department of Continuing Education of forty-five staff of all grades with a current turnover of about £1,200,000 per annum. It houses the administrative unit of the Open College of the North West and has programmes of continuing vocational education and training, continuing professional development, liberal adult education, outreach to non traditional students, Summer residential credit and non credit provision, graduate studies and research and development. The University as a whole reported to the Continuing Education Record for 1993-94 provision of 300 FTEs of liberal adult education and 590 FTEs of continuing vocational education[2].
This paper is not the place to chronicle the detail of this change between 1970 to 1995. Such a chronicle would show that the bulk of the development has taken place since 1987. It would also pick out at least two key events - the temporary secondment in 1979 of a member of staff part-time to re-visit the question of a University contribution to local adult education and the transformation in 1994 of an administrative unit into an academic department of continuing education at a time when some other universities were dismantling such departments and dispersing their functions. The chronicle might indicate that the 1979 move was undertaken half-heartedly by the University under local pressure and that the 1994 reorganisation was mainly a tidying up operation to bring what was now a large unit into the mainstream of university accountability[3].
That, then, is the framework of historical fact. In histories of British higher education or university continuing education to come, it might earn a line or two, or a footnote. But the question, how can the Lancaster development be explained, has merit. What does it show about British society, higher education, continuing education and continuing educators over the past twenty-five years? The paper will explore five types of answer to the question and seek to reach a synthesis.
Five possible answers
1. Societal
Can one say that the emergence of continuing education at Lancaster was simply a response to changes in the societal context in an analysis similar to those made, for example, of the evaluation of medical education in higher education in the early 19th century[4]) and of the diversification of technological higher education in the United Kingdom at the turn of the 20th century?[5].
What changes in the societal context between 1970-1995 might form part of an analysis? One might, perhaps, refer to (i) economic change: the declining performance of the British economy with consequent political emphasis upon wealth production and upon the role of education in economic performance; (ii) political change: a government supported radical critique of many of society’s institutions and their privileges, including universities, and a questioning of their productivity, relevance and reliance upon public subsidy; (iii) demographic and life-span change: changing patterns of work to the short- and part-time; emphasis on updating the work force; earlier retirement; increased unemployment; more leisure-time; 'greying' of the population; (iv) educational change: increased educational aspirations, opportunities and performance, reform of the school curriculum, development of further education, expansion of higher education; (v) international change, in particular the evolving place of the United Kingdom in Europe.
Certainly there seems to be prima facie validity in claiming that shifts and changes in continuing education are related to, mirrors of, occasioned by, even a response to such macro-changes in the societal context. In a general sense they must be, but is that saying much? Through what structures and mechanisms, through whose minds and actions, are macro-societal impulses transmitted to what happens on the ground at a single university? The obvious linkage appears to be the structure and culture of the higher education sector, of which Lancaster has been a part, and the movement of university continuing education within it.
2. British higher and adult education
It would take many thousands of words to document the changes of structure and culture of higher education in the period. The main milestones would be, for example, the success of the Open University; the evolution and assimilation of the polytechnic tradition, the growth in number of part-time undergraduate students, the reduction in unit costs; the ending of academic tenure; the declining status and comparative salaries of university teachers; the modularisation and credit-rating of curricula, the emergence of quality and research assessment; the transformation of the relatively independent University Grants Committee first to the Universities Funding Council and then to the Higher Education Funding Councils; the growth of managerialism; and the general emergence of a climate between universities of competing for scarce resources.
Between 1970 and 1995 the number of continuing education enrolments reported by universities in the United Kingdom grew by 223%[6]. University continuing education departments have diversified from a simple fare of extra-mural studies (with perhaps a leavening of Forces’ adult education and summer schools) to a variegated range of activities including part-time degrees, continuing vocational education, access provision, training for adult educators and more. At the same time, polytechnics have provided a new model of university continuing education dispersed throughout their institutions without a single department or unit having a major or unique responsibility.
Higher education, and continuing education within it, has become a world in which institutions plan, compete, behave strategically, market, diversify funding, behave politically, watch their backs, emphasise their role in wealth creation, and look for opportunities. Many of the areas for manoeuvre - part-time degrees, work-based learning, non-traditional students, access provision - have come in the old universities often to be associated with the continuing education function. Is this, then, the explanation of Lancaster’s continuing education development? But the explanation remains very general: how was it mediated to a single institution?
3. Lancaster University
Lancaster in the early 1960s had a clear institutional image of itself. It was ‘new’; it was going to innovate in higher education[7]. Its culture was that of the past and the future. The past was residential and collegiate; the future lay with a broad-based civilising undergraduate curriculum influenced by the examples of Keele and Sussex and the expansion of student numbers confirmed by the Robbins Report[8].
The University was badly shaken by severe student troubles of the late 1960s and early 1970s and even more by repeated financial crises from the mid 1970s into the 1980s. In the mid to late 1980s a new culture emerged in the University. It rested on four principles: internationalism; research excellence; relevance; and financial entrepreneurialism. It is worthwhile asking what the dynamics are of the creation of such institutional cultures and values. There seems to be a process of negotiation of meanings and coalescing of related tendencies around easily understood symbols. External pressures, historical residues, interpretations of the situation by powerful actors and a groundswell of aspirations, understandings and expectations by all players seem to intermingle and, over time, produce a world picture acceptable to all (or which contains elements, at least, to which everyone can relate). That world picture could be taken as part of the explanation of the emergence of continuing education at Lancaster. But is there nothing intrinsic, about continuing education as a field of knowledge, which can add to this explanation?
4. Continuing education research and theory
Certainly in the period 1970-1995 there has been an increasing volume of continuing education research, and that research is now supported by an institutional superstructure. SCUTREA was founded in 1970; UACE has a research network; NIACE has had research projects and officers; and ACACE between 1978-1984 a wealth of commissioned research reports. In the 1980s, organisations such as UDACE and FEU commissioned and managed a remarkable series of research and development projects; in the 1990s UFC/HEFCE dedicated £4.5 million to university continuing education research. During the period, too, Studies in AdultEducation (founded in 1969) has grown in stature; other journals have followed.
Nevertheless, the overall judgement must be that most of the resulting corpus of research has not been fundamental in nature and we await the development of significant theory. There are exceptions (but it would be invidious to mention them). The research has often been policy-orientated; statistical; descriptive; or ‘developmental’. It seems difficult to argue that continuing education as a field of knowledge has yet reached such maturity that a university such as Lancaster would feel compelled to be associated with it.
5. Visions and values of leading actors
Institutional histories of higher education normally concentrate upon the roles of individuals and their ideas. However, there is little evidence at Lancaster that the shape, size or nature of continuing education by 1995 had been envisaged, foreseen, planned or aspired to by any of the relevant actors in the situation. All of the three Vice Chancellors who led the University 1964-1995 were lukewarm or neutral about university continuing education. Of the more powerful or influential professors and heads of department on Senate during the twenty-five years, none was an unflinching sponsor of a continuing education mission for the University.
Of course, the author, and those of his colleagues who came to join him in the 1980s, had ideas (even visions) of what they would like to achieve. An examination of public documents - committee papers, briefing documents, position papers prepared by them in the 1980s and 1990s - would not, however, reveal those ideas or visions. In the political arena of the University, agreement to action came because it appeared that it would bring money, reputation, students, allies or favour with a funding body or other external agency, not because of its intrinsic merits.
Synthesis
We set out to look for an explanatory model which would make sense of the development of continuing education at Lancaster University. Essentially we have discounted explanations which attribute complex outcomes to visions or plans of particular individuals or collective decisions of heterogeneous institutions. Of course, individuals contribute, but are mainly allowed to do so because the time and context is right; institutions make decisions but often these are formal ratifications of prior settlements negotiated by interested internal parties.
We have also largely discounted an analysis which suggests that between 1970 and 1995 the corpus of continuing education theory and research established continuing education as a field of knowledge to which a university such as Lancaster was naturally attracted. We recognise, however, that the considerable institutional superstructure which continuing education has developed during the period has made continuing education acceptable in terms of the externals of research organisation.
We have acknowledged that any explanatory model would necessarily find a place for the macro trends of societal change. The difficulty lies in describing the linkages between those trends and the levers of development and decision-making at sectoral and institutional level. Essentially, our explanation must emphasise at the (higher education) sectoral level and the institutional (University) level both structural and cultural factors. In the higher education sector, government became more dirigiste as it sought to encourage its version of needed economic and social change. Its chief tools were the Funding Councils with their codes of transparency, accountability and cost-effectiveness. The culture, consequently, of the sector became more competitive, opportunistic, flexible and, indeed open to change as institutions adapted to cope with the pressures upon them. At the level of Lancaster University, the structure remained in essence much as it had done since the foundation - with a balance of power between departments and the central administration - although some internal commentators claim to detect movements to managerialism and centralisation. The culture did, however, shift to one which harmonised well with the goals of the Funding Council and, in emphasising both relevance and financial entrepreneurialism, opened the doors to new developments in continuing education which could justify themselves in those terms.
What has happened with continuing education at Lancaster has been made possible by these structures and this culture. It is a product of the times and as such is vulnerable. Despite the parameters of the new world of higher education, a department which is not like other departments would do well to assimilate itself to the mainstream. Ironically, the changed Funding Council requirements for the funding of liberal adult education may help in this respect. However, this historical analysis does suggest that the Lancaster Department of Continuing Education would be wise to address the other key features of the Lancaster collective culture which emerged in the 1980s - international reputation and research excellence.
[1] Department of Education and Science (1973) Adult education: a plan fordevelopment. London. HMSO
[2] USR