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The appointment of David Hughes to head the UK's leading campaigning body for adult education has raised many eyebrows. To the casual observer the man who has been senior executive of two national funding bodies is more readily associated with some of the harshest cuts to further and adult education in recent decades and a huge switch of funds from general learning to skills training, which cost colleges 1.4 million places.
So, what was it the board of the National Institute of Adult Continuing Education saw in Hughes, the former London regional director of the Learning and Skills Council (LSC) and currently a national director of the successor Skills Funding Agency (SFA)? The list of candidates to replace Alan Tuckett as Niace director was said to be formidable.
Hughes says Tuckett – who, 20 years ago, on a budget of £5,000, created Adult Learners' Week, which grew from being a local award scheme to a Unesco-endorsed international celebration of learning success in 55 nations – will be a tough act to follow, and is aware of the initial reactions to his appointment – summed up by the label "poacher-turned-gamekeeper-turned-poacher". "I'm looking to the new role [of poacher] with great enthusiasm," he says.
Having started in the voluntary sector in the late 1980s, training tenants in Liverpool's housing co-operative movement to speak up for their rights, he extended such work fighting for the rights of Australian aborigines. He returned to the UK to work with the National Council for Voluntary Organisations in Nottingham, joined newly created Learning and Skills Council in 2000 and rose rapidly.
The Niace board, it is understood, did not see Hughes as a hatchet man or political apparatchik, but as someone who had persuaded ministers that ex-offenders and many unemployed should be entitled to funding for "units" of study. Also, the government's decision to give the lowest achieving and least skilled adults fully-funded entitlement to progress from entry level 1 to level 2 (taking them to good GCSE-equivalent standard) was partly thanks to Hughes's efforts.
Another thing that is understood to have impressed the board was Hughes's success as a fundraiser for the voluntary sector during the repeated "efficiency" cuts under the Conservatives in the 1990s.
Much of what Hughes still wants for adults has echoes of New Labour's aspirational 1998 green paper, The Learning Age, authored by the then education secretary, David Blunkett. It includes learning entitlements at all stages of life, a robust adult qualifications system based on units accumulated over time, with short courses to help achieve certification. His aims are built on hard evidence, not whimsy, he says. "I know, for example, that by funding some units for offenders and the unemployed we enthuse them and bring them back into learning." But he also knows that times have changed. "We have three ministers who are passionate about adult learning, but we need to reposition the whole debate at a time of fiscal tightening."
So, what is his vision for Niace as he prepares to take over in August? "We need a more decisive push on higher education entitlements for low earners and part-timers," he says. "We also need to look more closely at what is happening with apprenticeships. There is a huge expansion programme (to over 400,000 places) and new standards for how they are to be designed and managed. I don't think any agency has critically appraised what this means for adult learning. Niace can fill that gap. For example, should a 16-year-old be doing the same as a 35-year-old?"
Similarly with the Wolf review of 14-19 vocational qualifications, "there is a need to consider whether the curriculum for a 16-year-old should be the same as for an adult returning to learning after five or 10 years in the workforce," he says. "We need to look much more closely at the implications for adults arising from changes in compulsory learning."
Niace has had an immense impact on areas of thinking and policy, he says. "For example, on English for speakers of other languages (Esol), Niace has made the case with government internally in a way no other agency has been able to. It must maintain its focus on disadvantage and disability and keep up the challenge to ministers, based on evidence. If there is one big challenge, it is to make Niace a lot more muscular on what it is good at."
Beyond a broad sweep of new ideas, Hughes says he want most of all to listen. "Niace is a membership organisation. That's its strength and source of persuasion. It would be very easy to come in and scare the horses with ideas of change."
Hughes was brought up on a north London council estate, but went to Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge University, and got a 2:1 in geography, together with a postgraduate degree in housing studies.
Professionally, he soon found that "listening" was the key to influence. Particularly in his role as a national executive for the SFA: if his aspirations for adults were driven by New Labour thinking, how could he influence a coalition government FE and skills minster such as John Hayes? The answer was to go with the tide of thinking, such as Hayes's now oft-repeated personal belief in "bite-sized chunks of learning to inspire the disadvantaged to learn".
His experience at the LSC taught him to weather change and disappointment. "When I went to the LSC, in my early 30s, I saw the vision in the Blunkett letter with The Learning Age and said: 'I can buy into this'. But the LSC never quite got to grips with it." Individual learning accounts, which gave people small grants to buy education and training, were closed in 2002 amid allegations of abuse and fraud. The demand for evidence to show that colleges and other providers had hit their targets led to mounting bureaucracy and red tape. Then, in 2006, the Leitch review of UK skills shortages led to big cuts in general adult education as up to £1bn in public funds switched to work-based training.
"My last three years there were spent dealing with issues around educational maintenance allowances, crises over capital spending and the creation of the new SFA," he says. "When I saw the Niace job, I got excited at the possibilities. It was time to move on."
- The Guardian, Tuesday 3 May 2011
