My second part interview with the great Alice Peck. In this episode we focus on her new assignment as a principal of a Title I school in our district. What is Alice going to take with her to her new Title I school? What is Alice anxious about in going to her new school? Why Alice is excited about change. "If you’re not nervous, you probably shouldn’t be doing this!" How Alice is going to overcome her fears. "The greatest way to overcome fear is to face it and address it!" How Alice will deal with building trust as fast as she can. Hint: you can’t speed up trust. The importance of visibility as a school leader. Modeling the kind of work ethic she wants her staff to have. What advice does Alice have to be a transformative principal? Surround yourself with smart people. What helps Alice focus on what is most important? (I forgot to take a picture before I left her office! I’ll see if you can send me one.) Sponsor: Sanebox Web Site Transformative Principal on Stitcher Refer A PrincipalNew Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

I was talking to a student today about what kinds of things she thought needed to happen in her school with the new year coming up. She said something so insightful, that I could not believe that it was a 7th grader saying it to a bunch of adults. She elaborated on a concept that many teachers do not yet grasp. The clarity and simplicity with which she came to her conclusions was astounding. She said (a little paraphrasing from my memory), "We need to do something about the discipline at our school. When I see what these kids who have to go into ISS (in-school suspension) become…well I dot like the kind of people they are becoming. Going to ISS doesn't help them do anything different and that makes me sad."I asked her what she thought should happen and she said, "I don't know what the best thing to do is, but I know ISS is not working for the kids at my school, because it doesn't make them change anything." We were then able to have a discussion about what we, as adults, can do to help kids who make mistakes learn how to make better decisions. This girl was a little sheepish to say these things to a bunch of educated adults, but she was right on the money in her assessment of the situation. I admire this girl for saying what she believed. I admire her for being perceptive and aware of the situation. Have a Good Life. 

This week’s interview is with Tom Whitford, an amazing principal of 3(!) schools in Wisconsin. His mentor that taught him a lot about how to be a leader and how to push yourself and others to be better, book reads, and more. Professional Learning Communities in Tom’s ideal world. PLCs require a whole philosophy change to be effective. How to set the stage to be successful in having discussions with teachers. Power of change comes from stories. Create opportunities for conversation. How can administrators tell stories? Start with true stories. (Don’t make things up.) Provide opportunities for real conversation. What can we do to make this work, and what will prevent us from being successful? It is too easy for things to get said behind closed doors, and we need to address challenges early on, and then address issues as they arise. Focus the conversations on continuous improvement on faculty meeting time. "Jumpstart Fridays" - aides and others work with kids so they can do collaboration times. How Tom gets teachers to feel comfortable sharing their stories with Tom and the other teachers. "Speed of Trust" By Stephen M.R. Covey We don’t get better, unless we can talk about the mistakes that we made. How Tom figured out that his faculty did not like his strategy for getting them to have fun with his emails. (Background blog post - "Learning with your mistakes") Sponsor: Sanebox Web Site Transformative Principal on Stitcher Refer A PrincipalNew Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

This second part of the interview with Tom Whitford delves deeper into the great things he is doing. We discuss the following: Working with 3 different schools How he manages dealing with all that they have going on. Dealing with the new teacher evaluation system using the Danielson model What he has been focusing on as a leader in the three schools: PBIS and RTI. What RTI looks like on a day-to-day basis in his school(s). What ICE looks like at his school(s). What data they use, and how fluid their groups are. Why some students might get less support by entering Special Education than if they stay in their intervention groups. How to create opportunities for fluid movement and appropriate support between groups to meet the needs of the students. WADITW (We’ve Always Done it this Way) What advice would he give to principals? Relationships How being out in the hallways is beneficial (even during parent teacher conferences). What is in his office to motivate him? Great sayings in his office and his kids. Voxer usage helping him communicate with other principals. Shoutout to @gcouros and @mmiller Web Site Transformative Principal on Stitcher Refer A Principal Best Tools for Busy Administrators Survey Sponsor: SaneboxNew Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

This second interview with Bob Sonju is really great. You will enjoy every minute of it! We talk about the following: How to deal with cynical stakeholders. Why people need to be ready to change to make things better. How to make a good school even better. Why you wake up with panic attacks in the middle of the night as a transformative principal. The best time to change education was 20 years ago, the second best time to change education is today! The excuses we make to not make changes. There is no such thing as an optimal time to make changes, but we need to have a sense of urgency. The state of Utah lost 19% of students (that didn’t graduate with a diploma). That is 1 in 5 kids! Unacceptable! If you don’t find a better way… You fall back to how you did it before. We need to focus on using research-based best practices to help our students. The importance of the Professional Learning Communities and Response to Intervention. We don’t need to find new things, we just need to get good at PLCs and RTI. There is no quick fix for schools. We need to remove the things that A super quick overview of PLCs and RTI in case you aren’t familiar with them. Based mostly on the work of DuFour and Eaker in Learning by Doing What a principal can do to be a transformative principal today: Identify the research that drives your day-to-day work and recognize the sense of urgency we have to ensure that learning is not optional. What he has in his office or a story: Simplify and focus. Story about teacher telling him that he is right in pushing forward. How to get ahold of him (He is not on the Twitter, but he is willing to help you by giving his email address. Bob [dot] sonju at wash.k12.ut.us) Web Site Transformative Principal on Stitcher Refer A Principal Best Tools for Busy Administrators Survey Sponsor: Sanebox New Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

In case you haven't heard, we are moving to Alaska. I will be the principal of Kodiak Middle School! My family and I are really excited! You can follow our journey here:  http://wearedrivingtoalaska.com

My wife and I decided that we wanted an adventure a few months ago, and so we started looking around for principal positions that would be new and different for us.    We found one! New Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

My (former) school district recently hired a new superintendent, and I was able to sit down and chat with him. I think he is just what the district needs and I am really excited for what he will bring to the table. We talked about the following: Where Dr. Briscoe got his start in education and in administration His diverse experience as a leader of schools that were from incredibly high-achieving to greatly struggling. Engaging in the community by being involved in community issues (building new police station, hospital, etc.) The political struggles that lead Dr. Briscoe to retirement from his school district. Why he felt like Canyons School District was a good match for him. Why it is so important to be out and about and seen. How to build trust. Time. What happened in the past, is in the past. Let’s not worry about it. The culture he wants to create: Trust & Collaboration. Honoring the past. How he measures the success of his superintendency, not to be confused with his job description. Why that measure of success is so important. Sponsor: Sanebox Web Site Transformative Principal on Stitcher Refer A Principal Best Tools for Busy Administrators SurveyNew Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

As a new principal, I want to get to know all my teachers. I also want to know what they see as the vision of our school. So, I am meeting with them all. I am really excited because meeting new people and getting to know them is something that I really love. In order to make that a reality, I had to something that I really don't like much: I had to use the phone. Despite the hours spent on the phone courting my wife, I have never liked talking on the phone. It is just not fun to me. I had to call people to set up the appointments, which, by how I was procrastinating and delaying, you would have thought was a much more difficult task than pushing buttons on a phone. When I approach a task that I really don't like to do, I deal with it one of two ways:1. I reward myself by doing something fun. 2. I make a game of it. Today, it was all about the reward. The reward for my (hard to me) work is that I get to spend the morning tomorrow talking in person to many of my teachers. That will be worth it. What has been fascinating for me to learn is that different people enjoy different things. To me, talking to people on the phone is near torture for me. For other people, they would much rather call than talk in person. What I think will be vital for me, is to be sensitive to what people prefer and meet them where they are. As the principal, I am much more willing to make myself uncomfortable in order to make sure one of my teachers is more comfortable. Have a Good Life. 

The second half of my interview with Dr. Briscoe, the new superintendent of Canyons District. The strengths of Canyons school district. The importance of the involvement of families. We should try to do what we are doing even better. Teacher and principal input needs to be truly valued. Making sure everyone in the organization feels valued. Honoring the past before you build for the future. Principal qualities Dr. Briscoe is looking for: having a vision compared to implementing a vision. Humility. Accessible and visible. Patience. Admit mistakes. Regardless of the other person’s opinion, you need to respect the person and take their opinion or concern seriously. Focus on the vision and goal of your school, just take the time to meet with people and explain your rationale. Most of the time, if you explain what you’re thinking, the people who disagree are OK with your decision, even if they don’t agree with it. Don’t ask people for their input if you have already made your decision. How to deal with taking the hits: exercise, without your health, you can’t do anything. The importance of being recognizable. Walk up and introduce yourself to people out and about, and ask them if they have school-age kids. A school leader is a leader in the community. You must get out and meet with local clubs and groups. The benefit of being from a small district and being involved in every department in the district. How to be a transformative principal: Take a risk! What is in his office to keep him motivated? A poster that says, "If you don’t climb the mountain, you can’t enjoy the view." Sponsor: Sanebox Web Site Transformative Principal on Stitcher Refer A Principal Best Tools for Busy Administrators SurveyNew Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

Shawn is a principal in British Columbia and is doing some amazing things with technology at his school, including having kindergartners use iPads to create amazing projects. In this interview, we discuss the following: What Shawn is most excited about relating to technology in his school. Why do we use technology in schools? Learning as scaffolding and focusing on learning first, and technology second. Blended learning as having digital and physical tools in front of the student at the same time. Powerful for learning are situations that capture what a student is thinking. Shawn’s role as principal to teachers regarding technology in the school: Permission to try, permission to fail. How to gain trust from your faculty. We are in a relationship business. They need me to support them when they need support and challenge them when they need to be challenged. Reflecting in front of your teachers and being vulnerable in front of them. H/T to @ChrisWejr about 5 things to roar about blog posts. Positive blog posts went from no big deal to students finding those positive events in the school. Key elements to 5 things to roar about posts: celebrate success (student and staff successes) and give parents an idea of what learning looks like in our school. What can we do to be a transformative principal? Mindset, tell the story of your school and do it wherever you are comfortable. What reminds him about why he is doing this great work? For his own kids. Sponsor: Sanebox Web Site Transformative Principal on Stitcher Refer A Principal Best Tools for Busy Administrators SurveyNew Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

Sam LeDeaux is a principal at a K-5 school in metropolitan Chicago. His forté is working well with his parents and staff. 62 staff members and 869 parents working together to make things happen! Learning that people "somewhere" doing things were actually people who were doing these things right around him. Twitter and Social networking have been incredibly transformative and empowering. [#mannschool](https://twitter.com/MsKCairns/status/497443796661960704) Transparency is what makes him effective. Parents suggest and respond to ways to make his school better through social media. We can grow in ways that we never before thought was possible. Continuous sharing and positive collaboration makes technology transformative. You don’t need to have common planning periods to have time to collaborate. How to balance the difficult issues with being transparent. It is not about personal performance, it is about service to kids. When it is seen as a personal attack, you shut down when you are evaluated. When you see it as improving service to kids, you don’t get upset. Peer observations - invite and show the value. We do not let schedules get in our way of improving and service to students. What is the purpose of peer observations? Evaluations should be about growth. Sponsor: Sanebox Web Site Transformative Principal on Stitcher Refer A Principal Best Tools for Busy Administrators SurveyNew Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

Part two of my interview with Sam LeDeaux. You’re going to love it. Here is his blog How to balance the need for caring about the teacher with meeting the demands of the state and evaluation system. Evaluation in two simple steps Perspective of evaluation "your performance" vs. "service to kids". I want teachers to invite me in for lessons that could go any way and possibly be really different. Leaders, strive to be the weak link How Twitter has changed his practice. Parents want to observe the classroom to ensure they like what is happening only when you are not transparent. Dedicating entire days to being in classrooms, while still managing requirements of his job. The more I am out and about, the less things there will be that pin me in my office. Goal: 8 full days in the class per month. Sharing what he learns and fails at with the staff. Inspiring Twitterers: @gcouros @justintarte @8amber8, chats, and anyone who is willing to share something is really inspiring. How to be a transformative principal: be patiently perseverant. What inspires him: his son, is he meeting his son’s expectations for school, because all his students are his sons and daughters! Sponsor: Sanebox Web Site Transformative Principal on Stitcher Refer A Principal Best Tools for Busy Administrators SurveyNew Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

Jordan Collier, the principal of Central Arkansas Secondary School is an amazing principal. We barely scratch the surface of what he is doing in this first part of the interview! Jordan shares how powerful this podcast has been for him, especially the interview with Sam LeDeaux How it is different at a religious school compared to a public school. Discipline issues at a private christian school. Using Bible study time to work on issues with students. Telling the story of @CACMustangs. How the students get in on telling the story. Mustang Missions. - Helping kids serve others, love them, and be there for others. Sponsor: Sanebox Web Site Transformative Principal on Stitcher Refer A PrincipalNew Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

In part two of my interview with Jordan Collier, we dive into his plan for observations. Really informative stuff, and a good plan for any administrator. Observations - daily schedule. Jordan focuses on helping teachers when doing observations. Attempting to alleviate fears of observations by building relationships. How to facilitate a role-play to help teachers see what it is like to do an observation. How a two-minute conversation can change a teacher’s practice. The importance of set meeting times with teachers to talk about what they are doing. The schedule process. The greatest compliment in the world, "You’re never in your office." Trying to get kids to think you are following them because you are in their classes so often. You have arrived when you are being invited to teachers’ classrooms. Had a blast in 8th grade SCI lab. Kids and I learned about bias w/ Fruit Loops, Fruit Spins & Tootie Fruities. pic.twitter.com/ItUEHEhmKU — Jordan Collier (@JCollierAR) September 2, 2014 How to have the positive conversation and still focus on improvement. Dealing with uncomfortable situations. Freaky Friday folder. Staff Culture Check! Sign up fo Leverage Leadership Looking for consistency for staff culture check. Friday newsletter. What you can do to be a transformative principal like Jordan: Be obnoxiously positive about your school. Sponsor: Sanebox Web Site Transformative Principal on Stitcher Refer A Principal Best Tools for Busy Administrators SurveyNew Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

This week I interview Colin Andrews, principal of Blockhouse Bay Intermediate School in Auckland, New Zealand. Mr. Andrews is inspiring. He is doing so much cool stuff, we didn’t have time to get to everything. We start by talking about the learning fellowship that Mr. Andrews did many years ago. A four way study looking at transition from elementary to middle and then to high school. Forest, outdoor classroom, pest control, projects all directed by the kids. Envirokids, through process of inquiry and student voice that create amazing things. Pathway and other Envirokids project It is the ability of the teacher to be able to spot a question and really pursue it. Structure of envirokids: two-three blocks of time on Fridays, one teacher, about 30 kids. Working days for the families, kids need to bring one parent with them to participate in the work day (on the weekend). How to make manual labor sound exciting? 4 Ethics - Academics, cultural, sporting, and service to the community. Recognized through everything they do all the year long. Role of the advisor of Envirokids. One teacher teaches all academic subjects, so she changes her teaching on Friday to focus on the Envirokids. Sponsor: Sanebox Web Site Transformative Principal on Stitcher Refer A Principal Best Tools for Busy Administrators SurveyNew Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

Part 2 of my interview with Colin Andrews. How Colin hires great teachers Colin doesn’t ask any interview questions, he just listens to his VPs ask all the questions. An online form for parents to fill out student’s absences. How Colin inspires people to be the best they can be and ensure students have global, authentic connections. Sister schools in China, Korea, Japan, mainland USA and Kodiak, AK. How he gets connections with other schools in the country. How he took the school from $800 in the bank when he started to $200K for materials and PD. Global connections so kids can think about how to talk to kids across the ocean. Goal to connect each class to two overseas classrooms. Picks books relevant to his locale’s native culture and other native cultures in the other schools and share them with the students. How Colin started connecting with the schools he partners with now (No mention of Twitter!) How to be a transformative principal: Open doors for other people. "Give it a Go" What keeps him going: his grandchildren. Connect with Colin Sponsor: Sanebox Web Site Transformative Principal on Stitcher Refer A Principal Best Tools for Busy Administrators SurveyNew Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

  Mike is a principal of a pre-K-8 school. He is a great principal and also really great at using technology in unique ways. You can follow him on Twitter (@Techedvance). Spending a few minutes on his web site will teach you a ton about how to use technology to improve your professional practice. How Mike got into administration. The difference between public schools and private (religious) schools. Doing more with less. Relying on fundraising. We need to strike the right balance between instructional leadership and all the other stuff we are tempted to spend our time on. The most important aspects of Mike’s leadership. There is a little more flexibility in how things are done in the private school, and they are able to meet the needs differently. How to challenge teachers to do better. Hiring makes a huge difference. We give teachers tools and an opportunity to learn on their own, share with their colleagues and grow. What kind of people Mike is looking for as teachers: What is it about this age group of students that makes you want to teach them? Systematic Podcast appearance Mac Power Users Podcast appearance. Why Mike likes to share what he is learning and doing. The podcasts Mike listens to: 5by5 network (MPU, Back to Work, Systematic). Out of School, 99 percent invisible, Workflowing. Sponsor: Sanebox Web Site Transformative Principal on Stitcher Refer A Principal Best Tools for Busy Administrators SurveyNew Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

Mike is a principal of a pre-K-8 school. He is a great principal and also really great at using technology in unique ways. You can follow him on Twitter (@Techedvance). Spending a few minutes on his web site will teach you a ton about how to use technology to improve your professional practice. Turning off the red badge for email notifications. Blog Post Classroom Walkthroughs with Drafts The Drafts app. Dealing with things that come up through the day (do it now, or save for later). Mac Power Users Podcast appearance. Plain text notes held together by Dropbox is Byword, NVAlt, Fantasical all make him a better leader. How to be a transformative principal: Find one way that you can use technology to do your job. If you carry around a smart phone and you can’t answer the question, how does my phone help me be a better principal, make it a goal to find out how it does help you do your job. What keeps him inspired: The things in my office that remind me of my faith and my daughter starting in preschool at my school. Sponsor: Sanebox Web Site Transformative Principal on Stitcher Refer A Principal Best Tools for Busy Administrators SurveyNew Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

I've been blogging here for a long time, since 2006! I know there are a lot of people who follow this blog, but don't comment. If you don't mind, I would love to hear what you have to say.I'm moving this blog over to jethrojones.com. (Subscribe to the new blog here.) I hope you'll join me over there and provide some feedback about how I can create content that is interesting to you.Please take a couple minutes to give me some information about yourself and what you want to see more of on the blog!Take me to the Survey!!Have a Good Life.

Show notes at http://transformativeprincipal.com/ken-daly. Please take the listener survey at http://transformativeprincipal.comNew Episode of @TrnFrmPrincipal

Five years ago this autumn, the two-year Inquiry into the Future for Lifelong Learning, sponsored by NIACE and led by a group of expert commissioners, published its final report, Learning Through Life. The report posed a challenge to policymakers to create a framework for lifelong learning which was fit for the early twenty-first century, and the unprecedented technological, demographic and economic changes we face. It is a challenge which, to put it mildly, is some way still from being met. That is not to say that the report has not had influence. Its argument for access to lifelong learning as a human right, related to personal growth and emancipation, prosperity and community solidarity, is widely cited and influential, particularly internationally; and some of the more practical ideas it formulated have grabbed the attention of policymakers and sector organisations, for example its argument for mid-life career review, which has been developed by Stephen McNair and successfully piloted, with further roll-out likely. But, beyond this, and more substantively, the news is less good. At the heart of the inquiry’s approach was a proposed shift to a new model of the educational life course - comprising four key stages: up to 25, 25-50, 50-75 and 75-plus - with learning resources ‘fairly and sensibly’ rebalanced to reflect the changing social and economic context. Regrettably, despite much rhetoric to the contrary and one or two positive interventions, we are no closer to such a settlement. In fact, in a number of key respects, we seem set on undoing previous hard-won gains, leaving us, if anything, further away from what is, after all, a fairly modest and very well-evidenced proposal. The allocation of learning resources across the four life stages reported by the inquiry has changed little since 2009 when it was split, approximately, as follows: 86; 11; 2.5; 0.5. The report proposed a rebalancing in all public and private spending on education, by 2020, to: 80; 15; 4; 1. The costs of this adjustment, it said, would be significantly reduced by the projected reduction in the number of young people in the population over the next decade. At the same time, within each age group, ‘specific attention should be given to the fair and equitable distribution of resources’, including consideration of which groups benefit the most and which are excluded. This, the report argued, was essential to ensuring ‘a continuing commitment to equalising opportunity’, covering ‘equity both between sectors (HE, FE, community etc) and within them’. The rationale for this reallocation of resources was, then as it is now, perfectly clear. The 18-24 population was predicted to decline by nine per cent by 2020, while the third and fourth stage populations were projected to rise by 18 per cent and 28 per cent respectively over the same period. With people both living longer and spending longer in the workplace, the educational challenges - in terms both of up-skilling and re-skilling, and remaining active and engaged in society later in life - were obvious. Yet the big story (in England, at least) in the funding of post-compulsory education in the last five years has not been a shift in the distribution of resources across the age groups but the move from a system of state funding to one of state financing through loans - a very high-stakes gambit justified on the (it turns out, spurious) grounds that it would save the taxpayer money. This began in higher education and has been extended into further education. In both cases the impact on adult participation has been dramatic. The story in higher education is familiar. While enrolments among younger students held up, despite the trebling of tuition fees, there was a dramatic decline among mature students, and among part-time students in particular, with a drop of 46 per cent in part-time undergraduate entrants (the vast majority of whom are mature) between 2010-11 and 2013-14. These students - people attempting to develop new skills or improve existing ones while juggling family, work and other commitments - are precisely those we need to engage in learning if we are to respond to the challenges of an ageing and, increasingly, low-wage, low-skill, low-productivity economy. Their loss in such numbers suggests we are some way from the coherence of approach looked for in Learning Through Life. Strong part-time recruitment has been one of the big, if unsung, success stories of UK higher education. It has taken a long time and a great deal of effort and inspiration to build up. Now it seems in irreversible freefall, abetted by the longer-term decline in university lifelong learning. This was accelerated when the previous administration introduced the notorious ELQ rule, denying state support to any student studying for a qualification at a level lower than or equivalent to one they already possess. And while the extension of loans to part-timers brought welcome (if partial) parity with full-time students, the majority of part-timers remained ineligible (largely because of the ELQ rule), priced out by a system which is becoming ever more polarised, unequal and unfair. It is telling that it is the high-tariff, elite institutions - those which do least well in terms of widening participation - that have gained the most under the new system, while the lower-tariff institutions - those which do the heavy lifting when it comes to ensuring fair access - are doing the worst. This hardly demonstrates the commitment to ‘equalising opportunity’ the report was seeking. I suppose though it is unsurprising that a society so committed to putting everyone in their proper place should develop a higher education system which so heavily qualifies the success of so many of its graduates. This might suit the already privileged (which is why it is so hard to challenge) but it is hardly what we need if we are, as a society and an economy, to get the most from the talents and creativity of every citizen. A similar high-risk strategy has been pursued in further education in the form of FE loans for students aged 24-plus studying at Level 3 or 4 - with similar, highly predictable (but, perhaps just as predictably, largely ignored) consequences. In 2012-13, more than 400,000 people aged 24 or over took part in learning at Levels 3 and 4. Government figures for 2013-14, when funding was withdrawn for a range of courses for over-24s and the loan scheme introduced, show that only 57,000 students aged 24-plus took up loans at this level. The latest figures show that only 43,830 applications for the loans have been made between April 2014 and September 2014. This suggests both that there has been a very substantial drop in participation among older adults at this level and that recruitment is showing no signs of recovery. This bodes ill indeed for a future in which the development of a high-skill economy will depend on adults’ capacity to retrain and up-skill. But perhaps a high-skill economy is not where we are headed. As Learning Through Life argued, the debate on skills has been too dominated by an emphasis on increasing the volume of skills, with too little focus on how skills are actually used. Since the report’s publication the conviction that there is something wrong in the way in which we approach skills has taken stronger hold. We have seen a welcome increase in jobs, but they are, very largely, jobs characterised by low wages, low skills and job insecurity. Despite numerous skills strategies and near-incessant reform in the sector, the UK economy compares poorly to its neighbours in terms of productivity. Wage inequality continues to act as a drag on growth. Making better use of skills and creating the workplace conditions in which innovation and creativity can flourish are becoming increasingly significant policy concerns. A sustained, resilient, inclusive and long-term recovery depends on it. And, of course, the equity issue identified in the report, that access to training diminishes the further down the status ladder you go, remains as pressing a concern today. Far too few workplaces offer the kind of expansive learning environment the inquiry recommended. Those that do, as last month’s Smith Institute report on good work suggests, can expect to reap rewards in terms of enhanced staff commitment and productivity. But there remain far more for whom such a step would involve an almost unthinkable shift in culture. Skills remains an area in which the pace of reform (and the turnover of ministers) is frenetic. One of the biggest equity issues in post-compulsory education concerns the relative esteem in which the further education and skills sector and higher education are held. Incessant reform in FE is a symptom of this. So is the comparative lack of autonomy enjoyed by further education colleges, though there has been greater recognition of this since Learning Through Life appeared. Still, there is an evident lack of trust and confidence in the sector and its workforce, as well as an impulse to cut further education resources, almost unthinkingly, whenever budgets are tight. In a way, this is unsurprising. Few in the Treasury have any direct experience of further education, and most senior politicians these days seem to have followed the gilded path from public school to Oxbridge before walking straight into a political career for which they have merely academic qualifications. No wonder a coherent national strategy, in which all parts of the tertiary sector are recognised as essential and important, remains elusive. It may be that it will continue to elude us, unless we can find a way to widen the political gene pool. Despite the failure of the current generation of politicians to engage adequately with - or, for the most part, even to acknowledge - the challenge of an ageing and increasingly unequal society, the agenda set out in Learning Through Life remains relevant - a pertinent invitation to any political party prepared to think seriously about the challenges of demographic, technological and economic change. It has important things to say about credit transfer, localism, learning entitlements and improving the capacity of the lifelong learning workforce. And it has good ideas about making the system more intelligent and more coherent. As the report argued, national frameworks matter. Governments have a responsibility here, in creating the conditions in which lifelong learning can flourish, as they do in describing the values and vision which inform the sector’s work. They have a role too in ensuring the resources are there to deliver what is needed, though, as Learning Through Life makes clear, it is not expected that all these resources come from the public purse. We need a sensible, rational approach that balances personal, state and employer contributions. There may be an increased cost to developing a system fit for the twenty-first century but, as the report shows, it is one we can bear. The cost of doing nothing is much greater. Given the scale of the challenge we really must do better than hide behind the cloak of austerity, affecting to have no choice but to implement reforms which have little to do with saving money and everything to do with ideology. The next issue of NIACE’s journal Adults Learning - due out later this month - will assess the legacy of Learning Through Life, with contributions from its authors, David Watson and Tom Schuller, as well as from David Hughes, Karen Evans, Stephen McNair, Tom Wilson, Claire Callender, Ewart Keep, Ruth Spellman, Jim Crawley, Keith Wakefield, John Field, Mark Ravenhall and Alan Tuckett. Learning Through Life was published by NIACE in 2009. Many of the inquiry’s papers are still available to download from: http://www.niace.org.uk/lifelonglearninginquiry/.

Heraclitus, the notoriously enigmatic pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, thought that existing objects could be characterised by pairs of contrary properties, and that these properties, by virtue of the tension between them, were essential to the continued flourishing of the whole. He termed this phenomenon the ‘unity of opposites’. Somehow, he thought, the ongoing conflict between opposite properties enabled a single, unified object to persist. Although it is unlikely that Heraclitus - who is said to have preferred aristocratic models of government - would have intended it, his odd theory seems highly applicable in the field of politics (that is, as Heraclitus would probably have understood the term, ‘of, for or relating to citizens’). There is, I think, something to the idea that those societies that flourish and endure are, very often, characterised by just this sort of dynamic tension, between different classes or income groups - and that where the gap between those groups or classes becomes too great that cohesion is threatened. I was thinking about this on Sunday as I walked up Edinburgh’s Calton Hill, with its curious collection of classical monuments (Dickens described it as ‘a rubbish heap of imaginative architecture’) and its tremendous views across the city and out to the Firth of Forth. This must be among the best places in Edinburgh to begin learning about the city and how it developed, from the smoke-blackened, boozy disorder of the Old Town and its narrow medieval streets, to the precise geometrical elegance of the New Town’s squares and circuses. The development of the New Town in the late eighteenth century saw the wealthier citizens of Edinburgh move out of the cramped and unsanitary conditions of the Old Town to more genteel, spacious homes set on wide roads, with large, green civic spaces. The poor remained in the relative - and fast deepening - squalor of the Old Town. Overcrowding, poverty and inadequate sanitation led to epidemics of cholera and other diseases in the first half of the next century. The Old Town of the eighteenth century was cramped and it was dirty. But it was also vibrant, brilliant and exciting, a melting pot of new thinking and ideas, in which the poorest citizens rubbed shoulders daily with the wealthiest and most educated, and where the old order was taken apart and new principles put in its place. The Scots, David Hume wrote, were now ‘the People most distinguish’d for Literature in Europe’, and that at a time when ‘we have lost our Princes, Our Parliaments, our independent Government, even the presence of our chief Nobility’. This loss did not create a vacuum but rather a space for debate, fierce, convivial and fearless, much of it centred on the Old Town’s numerous taverns, of which Hume, among others, was a notable and enthusiastic frequenter. A number of factors made the Scottish Enlightenment possible, among them the quality of Scottish education and its openness to ideas from the continent. The growth in the educated population of Scotland meant this renaissance in thought was not confined to a small number of literati, or to the ranks of the aristocracy, as it was in France, but was, as the historian Tom Devine notes, ‘widely diffused throughout the ranks of the educated classes’. The ideas of the Scottish Enlightenment were not only aired and debated in the pubs of Edinburgh’s New Town, but were also ‘described, analysed, questioned and refuted in pamphlets and journals such as the Scots Magazine, in the contemporary press, in sermons and surveys like John Sinclair’s massive Statistical Account of Scotland, published in the 1790s, which provided an examination of the way of life of over 900 parishes compiled by the local ministers.’ It was this broad dissemination, Devine argues, that ‘ensured the social acceptance of basic ideas that might otherwise have remained arcane, remote and abstract’ and which helped ground them in observation and the practicalities of life in eighteenth-century Scotland. They saw human experience as the touchstone of true understanding. The Edinburgh literati may have been, to varying degrees, born to privilege but their lives were not so remote from those of other classes that they could be indifferent to them, while the spread of school education in Scotland during the second half of the seventeenth century and the rapidly expanding middle class meant there was a large and engaged audience interested in their ideas. Undoubtedly, too, those ideas and the rejection of hitherto unquestioned - and unquestionable (Scotland’s last execution for heresy took place as recently as 1696) - authority seeped into the consciousness of the poorer classes of society. The wealthiest had close, face-to-face relationships with the poorest, often sharing the same buildings (the rich on the upper floors, the poor on the lower ones) and they frequented the same churches, brothels and alehouses. Skilled artisans helped swell the membership of the city’s numerous learned clubs and societies, and university access widened to include the children of merchants and tradesmen. The nineteenth century saw Edinburgh’s New Town flourish, while the Old Town plunged deeper into squalor and increasingly wretched poverty. The rich and the poor began to lead separate lives. By 1880, when the educationalist, environmentalist and town planner Patrick Geddes moved there, the Old Town was notorious for its appalling housing and poor living conditions. Geddes moved into James Court, where David Hume had once lived but which was now little more than a slum. Geddes believed that social change needed to come from the bottom up, rather than be imposed from above (however well-meaningly). He improved his own building and encouraged his neighbours to work together in improving theirs as well as their wider community. Geddes also believed that a vibrant community required a mixture of people from different backgrounds living side by side and enjoying the kind of face-to-face relationships they had in mid-eighteenth century Edinburgh. He founded a hall of residence in renovated properties around Edinburgh’s Lawnmarket, including one in Riddle’s Court, another former Hume residence, which now houses, among other things, the Edinburgh offices of the Workers’ Educational Association (appropriately, Geddes’s Latin inscription above the archway to Riddle’s Court reads Vivendo Disciumus - ‘By Living We Learn’) Geddes didn’t believe in getting rid of tradition. His idea was to build around it, improving what was good and valuable, building better housing where necessary, and making use of derelict spaces, often through the creation of gardens and other green spaces, which he thought essential to the flourishing of community. He saw the city as a microcosm of society, as a kind of blueprint for wider social organisation. A flourishing community, he thought, meant people of different classes living common lives. This created the best conditions for making successful societies. Likewise, in his academic life (Geddes purchased the Outlook Tower on Castle Hill - now known as the Camera Obscura - to be a sort of sociological laboratory), he believed in bringing disciplines together, in thinking and learning holistically - that our view is better when we see the connections, the ways in which things are held together, as well as the things themselves. Places of learning, like people, need spaces in common. I’ve written before about Machiavelli’s Discourses and his view of social conflict as useful, even necessary, to the success of a state. He is perhaps as unlikely a bedfellow of Geddes as you could wish to find, but they do have one thing in common. Machiavelli, like Geddes, saw that a stable, successful society required a degree of commonality between classes, a sense that all classes are living comparable lives, a part of the same society. The rich, Machiavelli argued, should not become so rich that they become arrogant and indifferent to the needs and demands of other groups, and the poor perceive them as remote and out of touch. And the poor should not be so poor that they live without hope or the prospect of a better life. These ‘opposites’, to borrow again the language of Heraclitus, need to be in close enough proximity to make possible the sort of dynamic tension that is necessary for the survival and flourishing of a society. As Geddes also saw, vibrant communities are untidy communities, mixed, diverse and dynamic, with a rough equality between classes - enough at least for people to see that they are living their lives in common. This is a hard lesson for us today. In recent decades we have seen, on a larger scale, a process not dissimilar to that which split Edinburgh in two in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century. The rich have become richer, their lives ever more remote, their wealth unimaginable to the vast majority of ordinary people and their grip on politics, the professions, the arts and the higher reaches of the education system increasingly firm. At the same time, as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation warned this week, insecure, low-paid work is putting record numbers of working families in poverty. Two-thirds of the people who have found work in the past year are employed in jobs paying less than the living wage (with many on zero-hours contracts with no guarantee of minimum hours). Between 2008 and 2013 average pay for the lowest paid fell by 70p per hour for men and 40p per hour for women, while the richest 1,000 Britons increased their wealth by more than £155 billion. Growing inequality unsurprisingly correlates with declining upward mobility. Life chances are increasingly dependent on who your parents are. The education system, one of the key means by which we might reduce poverty and narrow the income gap, is, at the same time, becoming more and more polarised, with a broad liberal education - another fairly basic requirement of human flourishing - increasingly the preserve of the children of the rich, while the less advantaged make do with training which may give them skills but falls some way short of providing them with an education. As Michael Young foresaw in his satire The Rise of the Meritocracy, an education system which confers approval on a small minority of its population (and qualifies the success of everyone else) effectively hands that minority control of the means to reproduce itself. To see the consequences of this you might compare, as Young later did, the social origins of members of Atlee’s post-war cabinet with those of Tony Blair’s - or with those of Ed MIliband’s shadow cabinet. Little wonder then that the political class has become less plural and politics a much narrower business in which most fundamental questions - including those about the conditions in which people can best flourish - are off limits. Austerity politics has become a most effective cloak under which to pursue often fairly radical ideological goals to which human ends are secondary - all largely unchallenged by a compliant media with an equally strong and undisclosed ideological commitment. It is depressing indeed, but perhaps unsurprising, that in times such as these a party of closed-mined xenophobes - a coalition of the rich, the ignorant and the desperate - should be considered a compelling, even progressive, alternative. Patrick Geddes recognised that people, like any life form (Geddes was also a botanist), thrive in the right conditions. Politics should be about identifying and helping improve these conditions for everyone. As those great theorists of adult education John Dewey and R.H. Tawney also saw, at the heart of this must be the idea of a common life - a life which embraces all in a community, treats every member as free and equal, and attaches equal value to the needs and aspirations of all. Sadly, we are fast becoming not one but two countries - divided by wealth, opportunity and prospects for advancement. Working-class people are not only unrepresented (fulfilling Michael Young’s prediction of the consequences of educational selection) but, by and large, unheard, except in contexts which demean or diminish them. As Geddes realised, only by being immersed in the lives people lead can you begin to understand them. The government’s boasts about the resilience of the economy mean little when the lives of so many are getting worse, with little out there to give them hope of something better in the future. I doubt many members of the current political class have much understanding of how utterly demoralising and damaging it is to be branded a failure by the education system and then denied the means of turning things around and making your life better. It seems that everywhere you look second chances are either disappearing or becoming unaffordable to most. Geddes showed that people can build communities which are rich, vibrant and fulfilling, but we must first create conditions which, in the enduringly brilliant words of Raymond Williams, ‘make hope practical rather than despair convincing’.

It won’t grab many headlines, even in the specialist education press, but there is a growing crisis in adult participation in education and training, with stark implications both for our economy and our democracy. If the trend continues it will soon be necessary to reinvent from scratch a part of the education system which has taken over a century to build up. The government yesterday released its latest figures on adult participation in further education and apprenticeship training - and the news, predictably enough, was bad. They revealed an 11 per cent fall in adult participation in state-funded learning overall between 2012-13 and 2013-14, a nine per cent drop at Level 2 (GCSE or equivalent), and an 18 per cent decrease at Level 3 (A-level or equivalent), the point at which qualifications begin to make a significant difference in terms of future earnings and life chances (and lifting people out of the low-pay trap). The numbers are even starker for older adults. There were 27 per cent fewer adults aged 25 and over in Level 3 provision and 34 per cent fewer in Level 4 provision (equivalent to Certificates of Higher Education). In addition, the sector saw a nine per cent drop in adults (19-plus) on government-supported maths and English courses. This follows a similarly dramatic decline in mature participation in higher education in the UK, and particularly in England, following the introduction of the coalition’s HE reforms, which in effect trebled the cost of higher study and replaced grant funding with financing through loans. The extension of loans to some part-time students was hailed as a step forward in terms of levelling the playing field between full-time and part-time, but a combination of increased fees, debt aversion among older adults, and a tough economic climate (unemployment, low pay, rising costs of living, and a squeeze on employer training budgets) has seen numbers plummet. There was a 46 per cent drop in part-time undergraduate entrants - the vast majority of whom are mature students attempting to develop new skills or improve existing ones while juggling family, work and other commitments - between 2010-11 and 2013-14, with full-time mature student recruitment also failing to keep up with enrolments among younger students (which have remained stable). As I’ve argued before, part-time mature study is one of the big unsung success stories of UK higher education - the outcome of much toil and inspiration, often against the grain of public policy. It had been in decline for a number of years before the government introduced the latest fees and funding reforms, in large part due to the Labour government’s notorious ELQ rule, which withdrew state support for students studying for a qualification at a level lower than or equivalent to one they already possessed, and represented the final straw for many university lifelong learning departments. While the coalition has relaxed the policy for subjects adjudged economically valuable (STEM subjects), it still excludes a large majority of part-timers from access to loans. These students are still obliged to pay the significantly inflated part-time fees upfront. And even for those students who can access loans the increase in fees makes higher education an altogether riskier and less attractive proposition. Little wonder than that we have seen such a huge collapse in numbers among this group of students. There are lessons to be learned from this but it is clear the government has not learned them. Despite repeated warnings from within further education the coalition opted to pursue the same high-risk strategy in a sector which had already seen a steady decline in adult participation, as well as a pronounced shift in support to courses with narrow basic skills or employability outcomes. From 2013-14, funding was withdrawn for a range of courses for over-24s and replaced with a system of government-backed loans for learners aged 24 and over undertaking qualifications at Level 3 or higher. We have begun to see the impact of this intervention. In 2012-13, more than 400,000 people aged 24-plus took courses at Levels 3 and 4. Figures for 2013-14, show that only 57,000 students aged 24-plus took up loans at this level. Subsequent figures show that only 43,830 applications for the loans were made between April 2014 and September 2014. This suggests both that there has been a very substantial drop in participation among older adults at this level and that recruitment is showing no signs of recovery. Worryingly, the government is already consulting on expanding the loan scheme. The latest participation figures should make ministers think again - and hard. Budgetary pressure on the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills has, of course, been enormous, and, despite the best efforts of secretary of state Vince Cable to defend the sector, the cuts have been eye-wateringly deep. While new money was found for apprenticeships, the government’s February 2014 skills funding statement included a 19 per cent cut to the adult skills budget by 2015-16. This meant an overall fall in adult skills funding from £2.8 billion in 2010-2012 to £2 billion in 2015-16 (before inflation is taken into account). The budgets for offender learning and community learning, while unchanged, have remained static for many years, meaning their real-term levels are much reduced. Meanwhile, the Department for Education reduced spending on 16 to 18-year-olds from £7.7 billion in 2009-10 to £7 billion in 2013-14, with a swingeing 17.5 per cent cut to the funding rate for 18 year olds from September this year. Perversely, as Vince Cable told a fringe meeting at this year’s Liberal Democrat party conference, these outcomes represent something of a ‘result’ for the sector. In 2010, he told delegates, he had personally blocked a move to withdraw all state funding from further education (a step, civil servants assured him, ‘nobody will really notice’). With direct state funding being consistently withdrawn from core areas of adult learning and skills, many providers will be looking ahead to next week’s autumn statement (due on 3 December) with apprehension. Coping with year-on-year cuts and instability has become a day-to-day concern of managers and leaders in the FE sector. As Vince Cable’s anecdote suggests, further education continues to be little understood in the corridors of Whitehall - not surprising given the depressingly narrow social make-up of our senior politicians and civil servants. Few will have experienced further education or have any understanding of the critical importance of second chances to so many in our society. Yet it should be obvious, even to those with limited understanding of the sector, that the provision of opportunities for adults to continue learning throughout their lives is of immense value - a necessity rather than a nice-to-have. A cursory look at the challenges we face as a society should suffice to demonstrate that. To begin with, the UK faces a major skills challenge - one complicated and made more acute by the undeniable but equally largely unacknowledged reality of demographic change. According to the OECD, England’s young people are among the worst in the developed world in terms of literacy and numeracy - with England the only one in which the generation approaching retirement is more literate and numerate than the youngest adults. The OECD’s 2013 skills survey found that around 8.5 million adults in England and Northern Ireland, 24.1 per cent of the population, had such basic levels of numeracy that they can manage only one-step tasks in arithmetic, sorting numbers of reading graphs. This compares to an average of 19 per cent of adults with such basic numeracy levels across the developed world. The OECD warned that the ‘talent pool of skilled adults’ in England was likely to shrink relative to other countries and called for more ‘second chance’ opportunities for low-skilled adults to learn.  This is particularly troubling in the context of an ageing society in which a high proportion of the jobs of the future will be taken by the workforce of today. Some 13.5 million vacancies are expected over the next 10 years, with only seven million new labour market entrants to fill them. At the same time, the UK has a significant problem with productivity, linked to low pay and low skills. Productivity is 30 per cent higher in France, Germany and the USA than in the UK and is four per cent lower here than it was in the first quarter of 2008, its pre-recession peak. A recent report from Labour think-tank the Smith Institute found that countries with better productivity records ‘have more high-skilled employment and less unskilled employment’, citing research from the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development which shows that a third of UK workers are overqualified for their job. Unsurprisingly, given the economy’s bias towards low-skilled jobs, low pay is an acute problem in the UK (as the Joseph Rowntree Foundation highlighted this week). Some five million people are paid below the living wage. And, for the first time, the majority of people in poverty in the UK live in households in which at least one adult is working. Employment is on the up, but most new jobs are low-paid and insecure, with outsourcing and zero-hours contracts on the rise. Wages are falling in real terms and 1.3 million people are working part-time because they cannot find full-time work. Addressing the problem of low pay demands not just more jobs, but better jobs, with skills development at their core. There is growing recognition of the importance of skills to this agenda, and of the need to develop a strategy for skills linked to employment and economic policy. This was borne out in this week’s report from the UK Commission for Employment and Skills, supported by the CBI and the TUC, which called for radical change to the skills system. Yet as the latest drop in adult participation in FE shows, government reforms are making this change harder to achieve and more remote. The prospects for a high-productivity, high-performance economy, in which adults have opportunities to retrain, upskill or change career at different points in their lives, look bleak indeed. At the same time, the vision articulated in the early days of the last government, of a learning society in which education for citizenship, social cohesion, and personal development and fulfillment was valued alongside education to find and get on at work, has receded so far that it barely registers in the collective memory of a sector battered by continual cuts and bewildered by near-constant reform. As Vince Cable has hinted, unless we find ways of increasing the resources flowing into further and higher education, more and deeper cuts are inevitable, making inclusive, sustainable growth and the development of a better, happier, more resilient, engaged and cohesive society, increasingly unlikely.