Communities: Change Through Learning

5. Vision into policy

5.1 The Working Group was set up to consider the future of community education and given a remit which referred specifically to "a national strategy for community based adult education, youth work and educational support for community development." The Group's view of the future for community education is not wholly encompassed by these fields and the report does not, therefore, set out to provide a comprehensive statement for these fields.

5.2 An understanding of the following principles should under-pin policy development. Community education should:

continue to be recognised as an educational process;

be seen as an instrument of social policy and positive social change, promoting group and community benefit and social cohesion, as well as inclusion via individual development;

start with the learners rather than with a subject or syllabus, making issues and inter-disciplinary work central to its operations and recognising that the foci of interest will change or evolve and that learning programmes will be negotiated not pre-determined;

help institutions and the operations of public bodies to be inclusive;

maintain the values spelled out in CeVe training documents;

have policies which are clear and open to question, and whose implementation is transparent;

have a strong emphasis on demonstrating and reporting results;

be clearly accountable and governed in ways which are open to influence by parties whose interests it aims to secure, including the community itself and a range of professional disciplines.

5.3 In order to give structure to the development of its work, the Group believes that 3 fundamental dimensions of community education practice should be recognised universally. It is important to focus on the functions which community education fulfils, not the fields to which it may be specially relevant - that would merely reinstate the constraints of an administrative definition. Community education's functions are:

to promote personal development to build community capacity to invest, and secure investment, in community learning

5.4 Policy for community education should establish the aims which these 3 functions are to achieve in relation to wider social policies. For example, general expectations of community education's personal development contribution to lifelong learning should be spelled out nationally, in terms of contact, motivation, access and essential skills, leaving the particular approaches, balance of resource commitments and collaborative arrangements to be negotiated locally. While the key policies at present are lifelong learning, social inclusion and active citizenship, others such as Agenda 21 or rural development, should be encouraged to articulate their own community education requirements. Any policy which has a community involvement aspect or aim to get people to work together for the benefit of the community, will have community education requirements. Since participative governance is becoming more pervasive, the scope for community education's way of working is growing and with it the need to ensure that the skills needed are available.

5.5 Policy for community education should be to ensure that the learning needs of communities, especially those in which many people experience social exclusion, are assessed and that priority provision is made accordingly, by whoever is locally most appropriate. Promotion of local learning should aim to achieve maximum coordination, to minimise overlap and extend the availability of opportunity. Equally there must be sufficient and appropriate field-work resources to sustain the community education operations needed to implement government policy. These must include effective training, development, support and research services which themselves must be available, relevant and accessible to all providers. There must be effective target-setting monitoring, evaluation and reporting of results.

5.6 The re-definition of community education and the levels of difficulty being experienced in some parts of the country in making provision, makes it imperative for the government to adopt a strong line when setting out its ambitions for community education.