Professor Vicky Duckworth and Professor Rob Smith

From a conversation the authors had with Eddie Playfair as part of the Association of Colleges Quality, Teaching and Learning conference in December 2022.

Eddie Playfair: I’m delighted to welcome Vicky and Rob today.

Vicky Duckworth is professor of Further Education at Edge Hill University and has an international reputation for research in adult education and literacy and has always been very committed to challenging inequality through critical and emancipatory approaches to education, widening participation, inclusion, community action and social justice.

Rob Smith is Professor of Education at Birmingham City University. His work explores the impact of marketized systems on education and he’s researched and written extensively about FE and adult education skills policy and its impact on practice, often in collaboration with practitioners. As well as academic articles and reports he’s also published fiction – very intriguing!

We’ve planned this session as a conversation rather than a presentation and I want to start by saying that your book is absolutely brilliant. One of the reasons I loved it was because, as with the ‘Transforming Lives’ project that that you led, you start from the learner experience and learners’ stories told in their own words. In the book you also share your own narratives of FE. So perhaps I could ask each of you to tell us a little bit about your journey and your FE story.

Vicky Duckworth: Well, FE has been a real place of empowerment for me. I left school at 16 with minimal qualifications and worked in the local factory and really, I didn’t think that somebody like me could ever gain qualifications. You know, I was first generation, and the idea of going to college or university never entered my head.

But after working a while at the local factory, I realized that I wanted more. I didn’t know what that ‘more’ was, but I couldn’t envisage my lifetime of work within for the next 40 to 50 years, working within the factory. It’s important to say that I was no better or worse than the people I worked with. I had huge admiration for them, but for a 16-year-old working in a factory just wasn’t the life that I wanted. So I went to the local college; Moston College in North Manchester.

I’d always thought about being a nurse. My mum always wanted to be a nurse, but having 3 younger brothers, she never had the opportunity to pursue a career. So the idea of being a nurse and utilizing my caring capital because I was very much hands-on at home helping my mum out.

So, I started at Moston and I did a pre nursing course, and it absolutely transformed my life. The teachers didn’t speak at me, they spoke to me. It was really dialogic and they were role models, and it was just so exciting, and they instilled hope within me.

And after leaving FE College with this renewed hope and a real zest for the future I trained to be a nurse and midwife, and I was the first in my family to go to college or university or gain qualifications and it’s had an impact on my family; my parents, my brothers and my own children. It’s had an impact on the community, and really it was that experience that drove me to become an FE teacher and teach literacy to adults, and actually want to make a difference.

This also gave me the realisation that we’re not actually in a meritocratic society. Lots of young people are labelled and pathologized, and they leave school with this idea that they’re not clever and lots of the people in our study, said  “Oh, I’m stupid” but are far from stupid. Structural inequality, class, gender and ethnicity, coming from socio-economically deprived areas hadn’t equipped them with the dominant resources they needed, and actually FE and gave them that chance to actually reclaim their identities like it did for me. So it was wonderful to work with Rob and to be part of this project and be part of the book, because it’s something that’s very dear to my heart.

Rob: My educational journey was very different and more traditional. I went to a comprehensive school in Birmingham called Queensbridge on the outskirts of Moseley and King’s Heath. I did A levels and then went on to university. I trained to teach secondary English and my learning in further education was after my move from secondary school to further education in 1992. Those of you with the historical knowledge will know that was when incorporation happened. I saw the impact of marketization, and this has driven a lot of my work.

It seems to me that the way teaching and learning happens is so prescribed by the way funding works, and what in the book we call the ‘Funding Accountability and Performance regime’.

So, I was educated into further education and, as with Vicky, some of my most rewarding experiences were in ESOL, adult literacy, English GCSE or Key Skills classrooms and, of course, Access to HE.

I was very privileged to go around colleges all over the country with Vicky and talk to teachers and students about their experiences, and what made further education transformative. And it was astonishing, the number of times we heard people talking about belief, an individual relationship with an individual teacher “she believed in me”. We didn’t prompt them. These are the words they used in our research. It’s about sincerity and connection; and you can’t BS Further Education students, they see through you if you try!

Eddie: The great thing about the Transforming Lives project is how you managed to get people to talk about their experience of transformation. We talk about education transforming lives and sometimes it’s framed in very economic terms: getting a good job, earning more money moving up the ladder, etc. But actually to hear learners really thinking about, and trying to describe, what transformation means is very insightful. The project interviews are still online, and people can listen to these. What did you get from that from when you put all those conversations together as a piece of research? What did you learn about what transformation is?

Rob: For me, there’s an unacknowledged role that further education plays, and it’s connected to the way our education system has evolved over 25 years, since the early nineties.

But schooling has been so fixated on assessment and a third of young people come out without that magical 4 or 5 GCSE grade 4’s so a lot of the work happens at the beginning of the college year when teachers start to build confidence in their students because they feel like they’ve failed.

The fact is, our education system has become very rigid and there’s an assumption that not everyone has the potential to achieve ‘academic’ qualifications. What people should have learned is prescribed each level and yet as teachers we know, as a pedagogical principle, that people learn a different rates and some people might take longer.

It’s ridden rough shod over in schools. It’s very institutionalized and students come into further education and suddenly there’s a kind of a freedom. they perhaps feel like they’re not good at learning but that’s wrong – they are good at learning. But it takes quite a lot to get that belief going Once that belief has started, you hear people saying: “I’m addicted to learning, I’m obsessed with learning, I can’t stop, I want to learn more.”

So it’s about trying to flick that switch, and do things that aren’t measurable within the existing cultures of what we’ve called the Funding Accountability and Performance Regime. You can’t have a metric for how you feel, who you are, what you believe in. It’s not measurable. These are human qualities.

I was very struck by the last speaker who was talking about compassionate education. It’s an extension of the same thing. It’s relational, isn’t it? It’s about sincerity; connecting with your students and the assumption that you can communicate with them as human beings. So, I think that’s the starting point for transformation.

Eddie: There’s also the phrase ‘social justice’ in the title of the book, and this permeates everything. Is there a connection between personal transformation, the kind of journeys of personal transformation that you’ve researched, and wider social transformation; the connection between individuals being able to change their lives and being able to bring about wider social change.

Vicky: Absolutely. I think it’s really important to say that when we think about education being framed in economic terms; getting a good job or earning more money, we found that education was much more than that.

It was intergenerational: we had a number of mothers and fathers who struggled with literacy, arrived at the college and gained the confidence and the skills to read and write. That, of course, had a ripple impact on their children and the children became more confident. They were able to help the children with reading and writing homework and that really broke that cycle of deprivation. The parents spoke how they became role models for the children and indeed role models for their community.

If we take one participant, Marie, who lived on a big housing estate, and because her story was journaled in the local newspaper, the other mothers would knock on her door and ask her: “How can I enrol at college? What steps do I need to take?” So, they become role models on the estates they lived on, as well as for their community, and their family.

Another participant, David, had never voted and returned to further education. Gaining skills, he was able to vote for the first time, to become part of the community and take action. That was so important for him and the way he viewed himself. So, a lot of these elements are not measured and yet they were vital in empowering them and shaping their trajectory and hope for the future.

When we consider Marie learning to read and write, that became the catalyst for her to enrol on an access course and become a nurse. And now she’s a senior staff nurse who’s really making a difference in her community and in the local hospital.

And it’s this ripple impact that makes a huge difference and drives social justice. Often this impact remains invisible and that’s what we wanted to make really clear.

For learners it was often the first time that they’d shared their stories with anybody, and it validated their journeys, and it was so important for them. And they didn’t just share the stories with me and Rob, they shared them within the classroom with each other, and that became a trigger for empowering them. And then, of course, there were the videos and the website, and the other arenas where they could share their work. That was very empowering for them. We can underestimate the power of storytelling. It’s a powerful tool for social justice and emancipation.

Lots of the teachers who were involved in transformative teaching and learning. shared their own narratives with their learners, and they were role models within the classroom. They were brave teachers and offered learners the confidence to share their own stories, including the barriers that they faced. What they do is look at ways where they could address those barriers and that was so important. That first step was getting confidence and hope by sharing stories, by dialogic engagement in the classroom and the teacher knowing their learners. And that catalysed the learners’ trajectory into very many different avenues which empowered them and the families.

Eddie: And those things are very hard to quantify and turn into metrics, it feels like an alternative way of describing the benefits of education. You are critical of the idea of teaching as a mechanical process which can be systematized, packaged up and transferred. How do we support teachers to develop their practice?

Vicky: We encourage teachers to look beyond focusing on a curriculum that centres on assessment. The pressure is on to look just at that. Ideally, teaching should be broader. But if that pressure is difficult to resist, then we should encourage teachers to make the most of the informal space and time around lessons: make sure you engage with your students as human beings, then they are much more likely to engage with the teaching and learning. Underpinning all that is the mantra: Get to know your students.

Eddie: You’re also critical of the ‘neurological turn’ with its emphasis on the need for teachers to understand ‘how the brain learns’. What are the problems with this approach?

Rob: The problems are huge. There appears to be an assumption that learning is like a chemical or electrical process. The language used often sounds to me like the language of computing. For example, memory is talked about as though it has a size like the RAM in your laptop and that division between long term storage and Random access also seems to have come from computer technology. Well, the brain is not a computer: it’s much more complex and more powerful than that. In addition, it’s connected to a human body a man, woman or person who has a religious, class and cultural background and a skin that may be light or dark in colour. All those things impact on the way the human being interacts with others in a social environment: and the classroom is a social environment. The latest fad of cognitive load theory wants to pretend that none of this matters and that if only we know how the brain ‘works’, we will have the answer to how to teach.

It’s a myth. It’s as useful as not overwhelming your students with lots of new ideas and content all in one go. Better to get them to focus on a few things and gradually build. We don’t need a pseudo-scientific set of metaphors to understand that.

More dangerous is how the ‘neurological turn’ attempts to overlook the social conditions like poverty, and the social structures like race, gender and class, that powerfully influence educational outcomes. This isn’t some kind of excuse teachers deploy because they don’t want to be ‘held accountable’ (whatever that means) for their students’ educational achievements. It’s an acknowledgement that for some teachers (and those teaching in further education are right near the top of the list) the work is harder, the challenges are greater and their labour is made more difficult when government underfunds and under-resources the provision they work in. Our education system currently produces social injustice. Focusing on ‘the brain’, as though such a focus will provide the answers to all the issues we face when we engage in teaching and learning within our diverse classrooms, appears to simply be a way of ignoring that. If a young person has had no breakfast, positioning cognitive load theory as the most important pedagogical knowledge for teachers to mobilise doesn’t and can’t help. 

Eddie: I always turn to the final ‘What is to be done?’ chapter where we get the authors policy recommendations. Can you briefly summarize your manifesto for FE – for instance the idea of FE as the ‘non-linear’ model of education?

Rob: We think that further education needs to be de-centralised. Strangely, this has started to happen as, last month, colleges were moved back into the public sector.

I think there is a bigger lesson in this. It is an implicit acknowledgement that incorporation, as an idea and a way of organising further education has not been successful. I think it was originally conceived of as being a ‘skills delivery system’ that could be steered by central govt through funding incentives. In fact, colleges, it was thought, could become little entrepreneurial organisations that would soon be weaned off depending on govt money. It hasn’t happened. Colleges are still funded around 90% with public money.

Along with that, that non-linear idea is so important. New Labour championed the idea of lifelong learning – opening the door to people returning to education and to keep being open to new educational experiences and qualifications. But for me, that is part of a broader picture of how the educational landscape might change. We assess our children and young people more than most countries in Europe. It appears to be about performance and ‘standards’ but actually this mania for assessment turns many of our young people off. It fixes their idea about their abilities too early and in many cases this can be damaging.

What’s extraordinary is that the job that college teachers do to start with is often about trying to undo that damage. That means engaging with students, believing in students so that they regain their confidence as learners and can begin to harness their experiences of education to a plan and to hopes for the future. Imagine if further education pedagogy didn’t have to start by addressing the fact that many students have been totally turned off education?

So what happens in schooling, and how assessment is organised and how we think about the movement from full-time education to work and the ongoing relationship between work and education needs a massive re-think.

The government appear to see further education as a skills factory. It’s so much more. That narrow view does us all a great disservice. And most of all it does a disservice to the people who work and study in further education. They are not cogs in the huge impersonal machine of ‘the Economy’ that the government is always referring to. They are human beings with aspirations, individuals with unique gifts.

Further and adult education should be a service for community cohesion that is accessible to all. It should be a service that adults can return to, to learn new things to develop themselves personally, to have fun, to enjoy learning, as well as to gain new skills in order to make a career change. It should and can be a rich resource.

For that to happen, we need a totally new approach from government in terms of the way further education is funded and in terms of the ludicrous amounts of accountability paperwork that colleges have to produce annually.

Eddie: I want to finish with one of the other words in the title which is ‘hope’. Could you share with us where you see the signs of hope for the future? Times are very hard for staff, for students, for the sector and for society as a whole. So I wonder where you think educators can find the hope they need, not just to keep going, but also to move forward?

Rob: I think that the hope comes from the fact that if anything provides social mobility in our education system, it is Further Education. But it is unrecognized by government and for the last 12 years it’s been funded appallingly – we know that.

But it’s also conditioned by the skills discourse that Further Education is often viewed through; around skills, national productivity, skill gaps, gross national product – the kind of language used for the whole economy.

We’re not denigrating the importance of income or the dignity of employment as an aim. These are important goals, but colleges are not just a factory for producing skills on a production line. And most teachers don’t view it as that.

And the model which objectifies people and talks about them as if they are some kind of component, does not work. Actually, it’s been broken since 2009 and it’s limped on. But we can see now that it’s not working. It’s still broken, and it’s a global thing as well. It’s about the whole way international finance works.

I just wanted to say that before that view of further education as a skills factory there was something else in place. I believe that those holistic ideas of education being about personal development and relational contact still burn in the heart of human beings, and in 10, 20 or 50 years’ time there will still be people teaching on that basis when this cycle of neoliberal discourse around skills is dead.

So for me that is the hope. I’ve been in it for 30 years and we need to cling on to it and we’ve got to pass it to our students to carry the torch. I can see that those values resonate with people, they know what you’re talking about and that’s where the hope is.

I trust and believe that we’re coming through the cycle and Further Education has an important role in lifelong learning and providing a new way of thinking about education.

Eddie: We started this conference talking about social justice, and we’ve come back full circle. But we’ve also covered innovation, compassion, hope, love, optimism and, of course, learning. What a great place to finish; on a hopeful note. thank you so much Vicky and Rob for giving us a flavour of the book and I strongly recommend it to everyone.

See also:

Transformative Teaching and Learning in Further Education (Policy Press, 2022)

Education, social justice and survival (July 2022)