Women in further education: a case study
John Wallis
University of Nottingham
In 1973 the Regional Advisory Council for Further Education in the East Midlands surveyed all colleges of further education in its region to clarify the pattern of usage displayed by women students. This paper reports the central findings of a replicated survey using FEFC data collected in 1993, the last complete year available, and the results of a series of interviews carried out with twelve senior college staff throughout the region who were invited to comment on the findings, in Autumn, 1995.
The first point to note is that currently female students outnumber male students in the colleges in all areas of study with the single exception of the relatively small amount of work categorised as higher education. This marks a reversal of the 1973 pattern. The salience of a female presence may relate to the changed position of the colleges since incorporation following the 1992 Act. Placed in direct market competition with other post-compulsory providers, some colleges have seen their established student pool reduced as sixth form colleges, school-based sixth forms and private training agencies have entered the field. Combined with a sharp decline in ‘traditional’ apprentice-based provision, colleges have had to seek out new constituencies. One such area has been the category of mature women - the ‘women returners’ so often referred to in the literature.
It is at this point that market necessity and concern for ‘difference’ appear to intersect. Vigorous efforts have gone into targeting this group and many strategies have been adopted by the colleges. There is a recognition of the heterogeneity of the audience and the marketing approaches are carefully tailored to each gendered market niche. There is considerable evidence of what authors have referred to as specifically good practice to enable women to engage in educational activities, such as ‘women friendly’ access procedures which particularly encourage under-represented groups, child care, concessionary fees and flexible delivery patterns (see Coats 1996, McGivney 1991). What remains at issue is the extent to which this theory of interest goes beyond seeing these students as a convenient source of numbers in a shrinking market - the ‘bums on seats’ necessary to keep the institutions afloat (Thompson 1996). Perhaps the key question regarding ‘women returners’ relates to the kind of education to which they return. One indicator of this is the distribution of females across the curriculum categories.
In crude terms women are still largely entering ‘women’s’ areas of the curriculum; however, certain patterns emerge. Since the seventies there has been a marked increase in the number of females entering the colleges on a full-time basis and a market decline in employer-led part-time attendance. Both of these factors may be explained by changes in the labour market in that the economic recession and different modes of production have reduced the number of occupational roles available to young people and requiring traditional forms of training. Also youth unemployment has ‘encouraged’ more young people to stay in education who would have previously entered the labour market. These circumstances, coupled with state pressure on young people to train or be penalised in terms of benefits, may explain these shifts. However, the survey reveals that this full-time cohort are noticeably young women located in traditional areas of health care, business and general humanities. The picture becomes particularly interesting when age patterns and modes of attendance are considered together with the programme areas. There appears a distinct pattern of young full-time students and mature part-time students concentrated in the highly gendered areas of the curriculum. In fact the student statistics suggest a pattern of preparation for or re-entry to women’s work.
The mode of attendance is particularly suggestive for older students as women are dominant in the independent part-time category, which might suggest that many women preparing to enter the labour market may have to bear considerable financial burden in order to up-grade or gain skills. Additionally evening provision is again dominated by women which suggests that learning for many women may still have to be arranged around demands of families and their own paid work.
Finally, the depth of the gendering of work is well instanced in the case of areas of study categorised under science and agriculture, where women appeared in unexpectedly high numbers. More detailed statistical analysis revealed that women’s science concentrated on the soft ‘human’ sciences and associated with such work as nursery nursing or general care, while the women’s agriculture was largely confined to floristry or equine management - the terrain of the ‘stable girl’.
The second section of this brief assessment refers to the interpretation of the situation provided by those professionally engaged in the field. Twelve colleges were called to nominate key senior staff to comment on the broad - and perhaps largely predictable -findings. Ten women and two men were nominated from colleges in four local authorities. What follows is an abbreviated account of their commentaries.
Foremost in all interviews is a deep commitment to some concept of equal opportunities in connection with women’s work. Although varying in degree and sophistication this ethical position is associated with a clear recognition of the heterogeneity of the category. However, it was repeatedly pointed out that this increasingly sophisticated understanding of ‘difference’ within what has often been a crude categorisation is now being both undermined and perverted by the demands of economic survival.
You could think about analysing your findings in the light of which social groups suddenly present themselves as visible markets. We’ve ‘done’ women returners now; next its Muslim women who can use the place on Saturdays.
This re-definition of female groups from ethical to commercial ‘targets’ has also appeared to undermine work on equal opportunities in the colleges, leaving its expression encoded in mission statements and on letterheads, but with few sustained initiatives to promote change.
The re-working of the discourse of women’s education outlined above leads inevitably to issues of the nature of the educational experience once women enter the system. The complexity of the epistemological debate is well known (See Humm 1992; Lown 1995; Arnot 1995) but there is general agreement that in virtually all cases the pressure for educational work to become standardised and increasingly ‘efficient’ is overwhelming. The pressure on staff seems to appear from two sources. Firstly, there is evidence of increased intensification of work as course lengths are reduced in the name of efficiency and, secondly, a deeply felt tension between the reasons staff had entered this field of work and what they were now being expected to do.
I feel uneasy about providing very short IT courses in the minimum hours. In a way, everybody’s happy. The women get what they want and the courses make money. But at no stage do students get chance to go beyond that limited instrumental activity.
The most frequently observed position declared that the students needed saleable skills in the labour market, but that a vocational education - particularly for women - should include a more critical/liberal component. The ability to provide both appears to be diminishing, and the ‘space’ for any work outside the definable limits appears only where full-time staff are donating their own administrative or personal time to ‘enrich’ the programmes (see Deem 1993).
This apparent narrowing of the range of women’s education also raises questions concerning advice and guidance associated with good practice. Interviewees remarked that many mature women come to the college with low self-esteem and there is a temptation to limit advice to the immediately achievable, thus building in a potential degree of underachievement. This phenomenon was often associated with the self-limiting possibilities provided by the local labour market.
You have to realise that the only jobs around here are for women and they are becoming more difficult to get and they’re becoming part-time and casual. A lot think there’s no point trying to go much beyond that.
The link between the colleges’ activities and the local labour market also gives rise to a very pragmatic issue outlined by an experienced tutor.
Put yourself in their shoes. If you really want a job and you don’t want to go through a complete re-education, you’re going to build on what other skills you have. You can refresh what’s rusty, add a bit more and get up to speed and you’ll get a job - what you really wanted at the outset. They are being quite logical.
The idea of a limited logic raises the key issue of the degree to which an educational engagement needs to challenge such restricted horizons of meaning (see Hall 1982).
Central to all the issues is the question of college finance and the corporate status of the college. Some of the institutions, which we term ‘entrepreneurial’ saw their new status as liberating, and the increase in the range of activities as a challenge. Perhaps ironically, it is this group that has appropriated the language of difference, flexibility, multiple forms of provision, market research and lifelong learning. However, the majority of the colleges displayed a less sanguine attitude, often seeing themselves as service organisations gradually being stripped of their social function and with a fundamentally de-skilled staff.
At worst we hire and fire people like artisan tradesman [sic]. It’s assumed that what currently exists as vocational education is what should exist. There’s very little critical debate. Most part-timers are paid to deliver only what they’re contracted to. That makes curriculum development very hard, but its even harder in the NVQ/competency field. It’s very discouraging and frankly we feel we’re being de-skilled in the name of upskilling everyone else.
In many ways this distinction between the colleges is exemplified in their interpretation of equal opportunity and access. The entrepreneurs embrace the new forms of technology to enable any individual or group to ‘access’ the learning opportunities of the college. The most notable example is the college linked to a cable system in a city and capable of piping lectures, videos etc to virtual communities in any part of the conurbation. In this sense education is open and accessible to all in any social location chosen. However, the key issue relates to the concept of education that underpins such policy, and raises fundamental questions about the potential of the new technologies and where they should feature in the education of adults. Seen as a sophisticated system of delivering already determined educational content, unproblematised by an experienced educator such policy was questioned as the worst kind of ‘banking’ education (see Freire 1972) which serves to domesticate even further. For some, such policy is no more than a logical extension of what is happening in the colleges.
Technology is neither a good not a bad thing - it’s the way it’s used. If you think education is only about giving people access to the facts, then its OK, but it’s really only a sophisticated library service. If you believe education is about exploration and challenge and arguments, then it needs to be carried out with other people. It’s not just about gobbling down information or learning to do something differently without asking why, then we need places for that to happen. Perhaps we’ll end up back with the voluntary agencies.
This plea for an education capable of producing critical citizens was common, and if not drawn from the conscientisation tradition of Freire at least recognises the need for skilled workers capable of fostering a critical stance to knowledge. This leads on to the future of the ‘professional’ staff.
Firstly, it should be said that many staff recognised that professional development was virtually at an end as traditionally understood. Professional development has been re-defined as small imputs of practically valuable information.
We only talk about how not why things are done. The long courses are over now. How can you deal with something as complicated as gender inequality in a half-day - it becomes a joke and in the end it will be reduced to formal practices and minding your language.
However, for the entrepreneurial colleges the future of the professional appears very different.
I think we’ll be less concerned with classroom work. Our job will be to keep abreast with developments in our subjects, keep an eye on possible markets, provide good quality learning materials and facilitate learning in the increasing number of forms of delivery. We’ll probably find ourselves at quite a distance from the actual students. It may not really need a fully trained teacher to enable them to achieve in any case.
In the above case such a future was regarded as inevitable and desirable, the same scenario was viewed differently by others, and in one case seen as the end of the service.
As awards in general become more workplace-based, and as they are assessed there, I think the role of the teacher will virtually disappear - particularly for people working at the lower levels.
Others mentioned the emergence of a core-periphery labour pattern emerging in the college with a secure minority at the centre ‘outsourcing’ work to a peripheral casualised labour force.
This paper is drawn from a larger study (Mallia and Wallis 1996) and highlights only some of the issues raised. However, a number of more basic questions are hinted at. In the twenty years between the studies considerable efforts have been made to attract more women into the sector; by 1993 they comprised a majority of students. There is evidence of sophisticated attempts to enable access and provide support for women. Yet, the patterns of engagement remain deeply gendered (cf Middleton 1995), and while it is easy to propose the reductionist argument that colleges merely reflect the society in which they operate, the mechanisms by which these outcomes emerge would bear closer scrutiny from the point of view of the student.
At the very point women are entering post-compulsory education in significant numbers it might be that the ‘opportunities’ for ‘growth’ and ‘development’ have become devalued (cf Hyland 1994) and relate only to the human capital orthodoxy which seems prevalent in the new world order of globalised capital. The danger of this view of learning becomes hegemonic and re-placing earlier liberal and liberatory discourses is recognised, but challenge within the system may be hard to mount. Perhaps areas of civil society, free from direct state influence, may have to be the sites of serious resistance (Payne 1995).
In this bleak scenario the danger of educators being reduced to technicians and the curriculum being reduced to self-evident certainty may appear overstated, but those in the field see the danger. All this brings us back to the old key question of the values that inform the education of adults. A college principal concludes
The words are still there - the right to learn, equal access for all - but the meanings are different. Perhaps our job is to try to pour the original meaning back. Wasn’t it Gramsci or Humpty Dumpty who said we could make the same words mean different things.
References
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Coats, M (1996) Recognising good practice in women’s education and training, Leicester, NIACE.
Deem, R (1993) ‘Popular education for women’, in R Edwards et al (eds) Adult learners and training, London, Routledge.
Freire, P (1972) Pedagogy of the oppressed,Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Hall, S (1982) Managing conflict, producing consent, Unit 21 in Block 5, Conformity, consensus and conflict of D102 Social Sciences: A foundation course, Milton Keynes, Open University.
Humm, M (ed) (1992) Feminisms : A reader, Hemel Hempstead, Harvester Wheatsheaf.
McGivney, V (1991) Opening colleges to adult learners, Department of Employment.
Mallia, C and Wallis, J (1996) Women students in further education colleges in the East Midlands, University of Nottingham, Centre for Research into the Education of Adults.
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Thompson J (1996) ‘The great tradition: a personal reflection’, in H Wallis (ed) Liberal adult education: the end of an era, Nottingham University, Continuing Education Press.
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