Take the high road

Jean Barr argues that the Scottish adult education review offers a chance for resistance and transformation.

Liberal adult education has been a small but durable part of the profile of the "old" Scottish universities for many years. A diverse array of daytime and evening classes, weekend and summer schools exists throughout Scotland, offering low-cost, no-entry-qualification opportunities for (usually) uncertificated study both on and off campus.

Housed within adult and continuing education departments, such extra-mural provision has enjoyed a marginal status within the universities for all of its life, being perceived, generally, in the "worthy" category. Circular 53/94 of the Scottish Higher Education Funding Council, delivered to Scottish universities in the autumn of 1994, will have a dramatic effect on these departments.

The SHEFC review proposes that liberal adult education provision - re-dubbed "continuing personal education" (CPE) - should become credit-bearing, so as to be fundable through SHEFC's mainstream method of funding teaching.

The ostensible rationale of the review is the mainstreaming of continuing education, a process which is well under way in England. Some see the review's mainstreaming thrust as offering potential for a "coming of age" of university continuing education. Others see it as a blade thrust at the very heart of that provision.

In Scotland, in contrast with England, a phasing-in period of two years is being allowed for the conversion to award-bearing CPE, the implication being that most CPE funds will eventually go to such accredited provision. Funds for non-award-bearing continuing education may be made available later by some other mechanism but what form this might take is given no shape in the circular. There are already signs that some universities are following their English counterparts' example by planning to have the bulk of their "liberal" provision accredited by the end of the two-year period or as soon as possible thereafter - thus, presumably, leaving little money to underpin the non-accredited rump.

There are, indeed special temptations involved in the Scottish review. To understand these, a brief historical digression is in order: "Responsible body" status, whereby university adult education in England and Wales was funded via special earmarked grants from the Department of Education and Science, ended in 1990; this represented the first phase of mainstreaming.

When responsibility for the funding of continuing education was taken over by the Universities Funding Council, the amount of money which was distributed increased fourfold. Scottish continuing education departments made substantial financial gains. The switch to UFC funding signalled a more profound change in Scotland than elsewhere.

Scottish university adult education had never enjoyed the much coveted block grant "responsible body" status of its English and Welsh counterparts. For this reason, it (along with the Workers Educational Association, the other major provider of education for adults) received only administrative costs from the Scottish Education Department, teaching costs being largely dependent on the local authority education departments, within which the various universities were housed.

The first phase of mainstreaming, then, brought greater parity with continuing education in England and raised the stakes considerably for the second round. In other words, there is now much more to lose - and gain, and joining the mainstream will seem all the more attractive when Scottish regional authorities are phased out. The regions have, after all, been the source of substantial subsidies to adult education programmes in Scotland. The second phase of mainstreaming may, therefore, seem unavoidable.

Such feelings of inevitability, should be resisted, I believe. Non-certificated adult and continuing education is one of the few places where enjoyable and genuinely challenging curricula and methods have been encouraged and developed precisely because it is not subject to the constraints and standardising effects of assessment and certification. It is one of the few spaces left where the democratic control and development of knowledge can be and is pursued as an ideal of citizenship.

There seems little doubt that new subject areas can develop better outside formal structures and outside power divisions between subject departments in the university. Arguably, women's studies, for example, would not have got off the ground in the United Kingdom if adult continuing education in the WEA and universities, had not provided the space for its germination and growth throughout the 1970s.

There are many people in Scotland, perhaps the majority, who yearn for a new culture of pluralism and of devolved democracy which, in Joyce McMillan's words in a recent article, "might transform people's sense of themselves as citizens rather than cogs in a huge and ruthless economic machine". Assisting in the development of such a civic revival is an obvious task for adult and continuing education.

To be adequate to such a task, continuing education in Scotland will have to refuse to accommodate itself wholesale to the dominant agenda of credentialism. It will have to guard against metaphors of "coming of age" in relation to the mainstream, against being seduced into deafness to other voices by its aspiration to be in a position to embed continuing education principles and ideals in the mainstream.

The marginality of adult continuing education is part of its strength - a strength which cannot be captured in its definition as "part-time" and which gets lost in metaphors of "coming of age".

Nonetheless, in thinking our way forward we need not only to dispense with metaphors which betray an aspiration to be up among the big boys; we need, too, to refuse nostalgia for a past "golden age". It never existed. In Scotland, in contrast with England, everything remains to be played for. There is time to decide how we are going to respond individually and more importantly, collectively.

A modest shift to accredited work, within a much wider framework and holding to diversity of purpose, might bring fewer of the high value FTE units of measurement. Nevertheless, as a united response it may turn out to be much less costly. The problem is not accreditation as such, but the displacement by it of all other agendas, all other goals.

The question is this: is there a space in Scotland to seize the high ground? Could we use the review as an opportunity to put the politics of resistance and transformation back on the agenda of adult and continuing education? I think we can.

Jean Barr is a lecturer in continuing development at the University of Stirling.