Filed under: meetings | Tags: DIUS, education, England, politics, research, volarts
On Friday I have been at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in London to take part in a stakeholder workshop to introduce and discuss a new BIS-funded Informal Adult and Community Learning (IACL) Learner Survey, commissioned as part of the current IACL review. The IACL Learner Survey will be a telephone survey of 4,000 learners to explore their routes into learning, their motivations for learning and the impacts they experience as a result of learning. In particular it will aim to capture the impact of IACL learning in relation to the objectives set out in the Government’s New Challenges, New Chances publication. BIS has commissioned the social research agency TNS-BMRB to carry out the research. In Friday’s workshop we looked in detail at the areas the telephone questionnaire will cover. We were also given details of separate BIS-commissioned research into Adult Learning and Wellbeing.
Robin Simpson.
Filed under: meetings | Tags: DIUS, education, England, funding, politics, volarts
On Thursday I was at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) in London to take part in a meeting of the Informal Adult and Community Learning Stakeholder Reference Group. On 1 December the Government published ‘New Challenges, New Chances’ – a Further Education and Skills System Reform Plan. This plan includes a brief reference to community learning, promising that “BIS funding will continue to support a universal community learning offer, with a wide range of learning opportunities available to all adults in England”. Specifically it says “in the 2012/13 academic year we will pilot different locally-based ‘community learning trust’ models to channel Adult Safeguarded Learning funding and lead the planning of local provision in cities, towns and rural settings”. A prospectus for these ‘community learning trusts’ is due to be launched in Spring 2012 and our meeting was the first opportunity for the Department to hear the views of a variety of stakeholders about how this new system might best work. I suggested that the ‘community learning trusts’ will need to involve self-organised learning groups such as voluntary arts organisations to help to link together the various aspects of informal adult and community learning, rather than just concentrating on learning providers that receive direct Government funding.
Robin Simpson.
Filed under: meetings | Tags: education, England, funding, politics, research, volarts
I was in London on Tuesday to meet Liz Lawson, Team Leader, Informal Adult & Community Learning at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. We discussed the Government informal adult and community learning consultation which is about to go live. This will consider how the £210m Adult Safeguarded Learning budget could be best used to support the vision for informal adult an community learning set out in Skills for Sustainable Growth. I also updated Liz on several Voluntary Arts initiatives including Epic Awards, Voluntary Arts Week, the Healthy Social Creative website and our Connected Communities research project into the impact of grassroots arts activities on communities.
Robin Simpson.
Filed under: meetings | Tags: DCMS, education, England, politics, vcs, volarts, volunteering
On Thursday I was in London to take part in a meeting of the England Volunteering Development Council. We heard from Nick Chambers, Director of the Education and Employers Taskforce about the new ‘Speakers for Schools’ scheme which is due to be launched in October. This will encourage inspirational speakers (including politicians, business and voluntary sector leaders, broadcasters, artists and sportspeople) to volunteer to talk to young people in schools across the country. More details at: http://www.speakers4schools.org. Sally Knock from NSPCC updated us on the planned changes to safeguarding and disclosures enshrined in the Government’s Protection of Freedoms Bill. These include significant changes to the Criminal Records Bureau scheme, changes to vetting and barring and changes to ‘regulated activities’. The Bill is currently passing through Parliament and is scheduled to receive royal assent by the end of the year. In the afternoon we had the opportunity to hear from the Shadow Minister for Civil Society, Roberta Blackman-Woods MP. She emphasised that the Labour Party is still at an early stage in developing new policies. She said that “volunteering and the whole range of issues around it are really central to our agenda”. The Shadow Minister thought that Labour’s record on supporting volunteering was “pretty good: we recognised there needed to be an infrastructure of support for people who were volunteering”. But she felt the agenda has now shifted with the Government’s introduction of the Localism Bill, its Giving White Paper and the Big Society. On the Big Society she said “I’ve been a volunteer for most of my adult life: this Government didn’t invent the Big Society – it was already there. But we have to acknowledge that the Government has hit on something: people do want to have more say in services delivered in their area.” She concluded by saying “we haven’t got the answers and the policies yet: we are absolutely in listening mode”.
Robin Simpson.
On Tuesday I was at the British Library in London to speak at the NIACE Adult Learner’s Week Policy Conference, ‘Culture, Community and Inspiration in Informal Adult Learning’. The conference saw the launch of ‘Tough times for adult learners’ – the NIACE Survey on Adult Participation in Learning 2011 – which concludes that there has been quite a dramatic drop in the last five year period in the numbers of over 19s taking part in LSC-funded learning. I spoke, as part of a panel session, about the vast numbers of people engaged in informal learning through voluntary arts groups. Mary Lowe and Helen Jones from Voluntary Arts England ran a ‘learning zone’ within the conference, focussing on VAE’s work on arts participation and health and wellbeing. It was an interesting and thought-provoking day.
Robin Simpson.
Filed under: meetings | Tags: arts, DCMS, education, England, politics, research, volarts
On Tuesday I was at DCMS in London to meet Darren Henley who is conducting the Government’s Cultural Education Review. Following his recent review of music education, Darren (the Managing Director of Classic FM) has been asked by the Culture Minister, Ed Vaizey, to look at all aspects of cultural education. He said he was speaking to around 60 opinion-formers over the new few weeks and would also be inviting written submissions. The key areas he is keen to address include: the Big Society; wellbeing and happiness; ‘Great Britain plc’; in-school and out-of-school education; formal and informal education; and paid-for and voluntary education. Our discussion, which also involved Selina Mehra from the National Campaign for the Arts, ranged widely but included a specific focus on how amateur arts groups can act as catalysts to seed interest from young people.
Robin Simpson.
Filed under: meetings | Tags: DIUS, education, England, funding, OTS, politics, vcs, volarts
I was back in London on Friday for a Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) roundtable consultation about The Big Society as part of the programme to reform and refresh informal adult and community learning (IACL). This was the second of a series of roundtable events. We looked in detail at how BIS-funded IACL provision currently supports the development of the Big Society vision and what more BIS-funded IACL could do to help build a Big Society. We also talked about how self-organised groups, including the tens of thousands of voluntary arts groups, could support the Big Society. I was interested to hear that the new Cabinet Office definition of Big Society now includes 5 ‘themes’: 1. empowering communities, 2. encouraging and enabling people to play a more active part in society, 3. transferring power from central Government, 4. supporting co-operatives, mutuals, charities and social enterprises and 5. publishing Government data.
Robin Simpson.
On Wednesday morning I was at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in London to meet Stuart Edwards. Stuart is Deputy Director of the Quality Improvement Division at BIS and is responsible for the Department’s informal adult and community learning reforms which will consider how the £210m Adult Safeguarded Learning budget can best deliver the vision set out in the Government’s Skills for Sustainable Growth white paper. They will also look more broadly at how to create the conditions that will promote and support the vision for informal adult an community learning set out in Skills for Sustainable Growth. Stuart and I talked about the important contribution of the voluntary arts sector to informal adult and community learning and discussed how the contribution voluntary arts groups might make to joining up informal adult learning within communities.
Robin Simpson.
Filed under: meetings | Tags: DIUS, education, England, politics, volarts
On Friday afternoon I took part in the second meeting of the Informal Adult and Community Learning Reform Stakeholder Reference Group at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills. The focus of this meeting was to plan a series of ‘policy roundtable’ consultation events which will take place over the next few weeks. These events will look in detail at specific aspects of informal adult and community learning, including: funding, infrastructure, access, Big Society, impact, progression and quality.
Robin Simpson.
I was in Cardiff on Friday to meet members of the steering group for our Connected Communities research study into ‘the role of grassroots arts activity in communities’. Daniel and I had a fascinating conversation with Hamish Fyfe from the University of Glamorgan, Jane Milling from the University of Exeter and Hilary Ramsden who has been appointed as the Research Assistant for our project. The study is looking at the impact that amateur arts activity has on the communities in which it happens. At this meeting we provided a range of relevant ‘grey literature’, including newsletters and magazines produced by some of the national voluntary arts umbrella bodies, to add to the academic reports and articles that Hilary is gathering.
Robin Simpson.
