Inclusive Practice in the Lifelong Learning Sector

Jonathan Tummons, Sharon Powell

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780857251039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Adult Education

Inclusive practice is a crucial component of professional practice in the Lifelong Learning Sector. This accessible text includes comprehensive coverage of key areas and explores what inclusive practice means for teachers and learners in the sector. The book begins by examining definitions of inclusion and goes on to cover specific educational needs. Chapters covering the learning environment, college-level planning and teaching and learning practices offer the reader practical advice on how to anticipate the diverse needs of their learners. Guidance on inclusive planning and assessment is given alongside detailed coverage of the legislation surrounding inclusion.

1

Defining inclusion

By the end of this chapter you should:

• have a developing understanding of the terms, ‘inclusion’ and ‘inclusive practice’;
• begin to develop your own ideological and philosophical viewpoint about inclusion and inclusive teaching practices;
• begin to be able to evaluate the personal, political, economic and social influences that can impact upon access to further education and training;
• have a developing ability to relate your growing understanding of inclusion issues and inclusive practice to the planning of your teaching and learning activities;
• be able to evaluate the constraints and some of the issues around providing an inclusive curriculum.

Professional Standards

This chapter relates to the following Professional Standards:

Professional Values:

AS 2 Learning, its potential to benefit people emotionally, intellectually, socially and economically, and its contribution to community sustainability.

AS 3 Equality, diversity and inclusion in relation to learners, the workforce and the community.

Professional Knowledge and Understanding:

AK 3.1 Issues of equality, diversity and inclusion.

DK 1.1 How to plan appropriate, effective, coherent and inclusive learning programmes that promote equality and engage with diversity.

Professional Practice:

AP 3.1 Apply principles to evaluate and develop own practice in promoting equality and inclusive learning and engaging with diversity.

Inclusion and inclusive practice

In this chapter, the key terms ‘inclusion’ and ‘inclusive practice’ are introduced, explored and then critiqued. This chapter aims to provide readers not only with a thorough understanding of the practical meaning of ‘inclusion’ and ‘inclusive practice’, but also a critical account of how these meanings have been formed. The chapter will encourage us to critically evaluate how inclusive our teaching practices are and will help us to reflect upon when and how we might adapt our classroom practices to make learning as accessible as possible. Before we discuss inclusion and inclusive practice, it is worth taking some time to reflect upon who our students are and where they have come from.

REFLECTIVE TASK

Before progressing through this chapter, spend some time reflecting upon who your students are. Try to identify what their reasons might be for attending their particular programme of study and make a list of these. Following this, try to categorise the reasons as personal (I want to do the programme), professional (I need it for my job), social (I want to have fun and make new friends), economic (I want to improve my employment prospects and earn more money) or political (I have to attend a programme of education or my benefits will be cut).

As tutors and trainers it is important that we have an understanding of the reasons (or drivers) people have for attending programmes of education and training. The next section of this chapter spends some time exploring this.

Who are the learners and what are the drivers that lead them to attend Further Education?

The student body is continually changing; who they are, where they have come from, their reasons for being in education, what they need/want to learn and why. More often than not, the students we find sitting in front of us are just as likely to have arrived as a result of external influences, such as political, social and/or economic drivers, as for any intrinsic, internal desire to learn. The current 14–19 education and training agenda means that the majority of the students we teach may be on vocational programmes that exist to provide trained workers for industry on the completion of the course of learning, or we may be delivering training programmes to adults in work who need the qualification for their job and are there ‘because they have to be’. Both of these groups of learners are different in many ways, for example, age, motivations, where they are in their careers, why they are on the programme of learning in the first place, but they have one thing in common: they are all attending education and training partly due to external influences. As tutors and trainers we cannot underestimate the influence that, for example, government policy decisions have on the demographic of the student body. Why does the student demographic change so much and why do we need to know about it? As trainee tutors and trainers it is important for us to be aware that as our careers progress the profile of the learners we teach will change, and if we are to remain inclusive in our practices our approaches to learning and teaching should change with them. Because of this it’s worth spending a little time looking at some examples of how further education (FE) provision has changed over the past 18 years or so as it will help us to contextualise what is happening today and will also help to demonstrate how government policy changes education and training provision in the UK.

The 1990s

The incorporation of Colleges of Further Education

The incorporation of FE colleges in 1993 led to the removal of Local Education Authority (LEA) control over funding to colleges and the introduction of The Further Education Funding Council (FEFC), a non-departmental public body of the Department for Education and Skills (DfES). This effectively centralised control over funding to colleges. This action had significant influence on the curriculum offer colleges would make as:

• colleges no longer had to agree the programmes they would deliver with the LEA and be funded from the delivery of these. What was to be delivered locally was to be brought into a centralised funding system;
• it introduced the marketplace into FE with colleges often choosing to offer the programmes which attracted the most FEFC funding. These were often the same programmes as their rivals and therefore they were in direct competition with each other to attract the same students. Colleges had to think very carefully about competitors and how they could sell their programmes most effectively to recruit students. They also looked at niche markets which would attract FEFC funding but were specialist in some way, thus reducing the potential for competition;
• it led to a marked reduction in programmes that were considered ‘recreational’. Programmes such as cake decorating and flower arranging attracted little or negligible FEFC funding, leading to colleges often removing them from their curriculum offer, or if they were offered, they had a significant fee attached. This changed the face of FE provision as colleges naturally gravitated towards programmes that would provide them with the most financial gain. As a result of this, FE became much more sharply focused on providing vocational training (where the funding was) and less focused on recreational programmes. What did still exist under this new regime was funding to provide programmes of education for learners with learning difficulties and/or disabilities. This funding was used by colleges to offer discrete programmes of learning. At this point in time the inclusion of learners with moderate to severe learning difficulties into mainstream provision in post-compulsory education was uncommon.

The Inclusive Learning agenda

The Tomlinson Report (1996), or Inclusive Learning, played a key role in the post-compulsory sector’s widening participation agenda. The Tomlinson Report investigated widening participation specifically for learners with learning difficulties or disabilities. Tomlinson found that students with special educational needs were underachieving in the post-compulsory sector; were unable to access the wider curriculum; and were, for the most part, lacking in confidence, possibly because of their previous school experience of education and learning. The Report found that learners with learning difficulties or disabilities were historically excluded from mainstream opportunities in the post-compulsory sector. It also found that this form of exclusion affected the culture of learning providers such as FE colleges. Tomlinson recommended that the responsibility should be on the educational institution to empathise with and respond to the individual, and to address the needs of that individual learner. Among the Report’s recommendations was a requirement that institutions should publish their own disability statements, with information regarding entry and openness of access, which should operate regardless of age, gender, ethnicity or disability. The Report envisaged that such a focus on inclusive learning would improve the quality of learner experience for students with difficulties or disabilities and, indeed, change the culture of educational establishments by focusing on planning with, and supporting the needs of, individuals.

The Widening Participation agenda

Widening participation first became a major focus of attention for FE colleges with the publication of Learning Works by Helena Kennedy QC in June 1997. This paper was developed in response to the FEFC drive to promote access to FE for people who do not participate in education and training, but who could benefit from it. This put widening participation firmly at the centre of FE training from 1997 onwards, as colleges that could demonstrate they had recruited effectively from these under-represented areas were provided with additional funding. Therefore, it was (and still is) in an FE college’s best interest to be actively engaged in the widening participation agenda.

2000 onwards

The Skills for Life Strategy

In 2001 came the Skills for Life Strategy, the Labour government’s drive to develop the basic communication, literacy and numeracy skills of 2.5 million adults between 2001 and 2011. This was a major government initiative which was extremely high profile. TV and radio adverts were used to promote the strategy, access to basic skills classes was free of charge, there was flexible access to the programmes and additional money for innovations in delivering basic skills provision to those potential learners who were ‘hard to reach’. As with all high-priority government education initiatives, the financial incentives to institutions delivering good-quality provision in these areas were high. The strategy would build on the inclusive learning and widening participation initiatives and once again changed the balance of the student demographic. Target groups for the Skills for Life Strategy were:

• the unemployed and people on benefits, to assist them in developing skills that would help to get them back into work;
• prisoners, in order to raise their employment opportunities on leaving prison;
• criminals supervised in the community;
• public sector employees;
• people in employment but classed as having low skills;
• young adults;
• parents;
• people living in disadvantaged communities;
• other groups at risk from exclusion as a result of having poor basic skills.

The 14–19 agenda

More recently other government initiatives have influenced the student profile of those accessing FE. For example, the change in FE being focused on the 16-plus age group to encompass students from the age of 14, the advent of the vocational diploma and more recently an increasing focus on the vocational training of learners in the 16–19 age range have once again changed the profile of the FE curriculum offer.

Higher Education in FE settings

It is also worth mentioning that in the last decade FE colleges’ collaboration with Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), in order to enable them to offer the higher level FEHQ awards (level 4 and 5 primarily, such as Foundation Degrees), has increased. This means that more students than ever are studying higher education qualifications in FE colleges. HEIs work within The Higher Education Funding Council for England’s Strategic Plan and aspects of this plan relate to the widening participation agenda. HEIs have to demonstrate that they are providing ongoing opportunities for different social groups and under-represented groups to access higher education, specifically disabled students, mature students, women and men and all ethnic groups, whether they are attending higher education at the university or with a partner college.

The 2010 change of government

When the Conservative-led coalition government was formed following the May 2010 election, the country was warned of unprecedented cuts in public spending, and education has been hit particularly hard. The removal of the cap on higher education student tuition fees and the abolition of the Education Maintenance Allowance (EMA) designed to support learners from poor backgrounds in accessing FE are examples of these. What impact will the removal of the EMA have?

CLOSE FOCUS

In 2010 the coalition government announced the withdrawal of the EMA commencing academic year 2011. This led to many student protests across the country in early 2011, with many students reporting that without the £30 a week allowance they could not afford to stay in FE. The government argue that only 12% of students reported that they would have to leave education as a result of the withdrawal of the EMA and that 88% of students would remain in education regardless. The government concluded that this was too high a percentage of wastage, i.e. money that did not have to be spent to keep students in FE. However, the Institute for Fiscal Studies found that the EMA significantly increased participation rates in post-16 education among young adults who were eligible to receive it. In particular, it increased the proportion of eligible 16-year-olds staying in education from 65% to 69%, and increased the proportion of eligible 17-year-olds in education from 54% to 61%. Based on these impacts, and on estimates of the financial benefits of additional education taken from elsewhere in the economics literature, their study concluded ...