| 8.
Recommendations |
| 8.1 A new Scottish Office Circular should be
published which firmly promotes community education as
described in this report and which requires the
production of local authority community learning plans
(see below). |
| A strong
statement on community education is required at national
level and this should be in the form of a Scottish Office
Circular to local authorities, representing a shared
agreement. At present the only formal statement is SOED
Circular 6/95 and this should be replaced. The new
guidance should, however, clearly apply to all fields
which are relevant to community education; a statement
which only seemed relevant to local authority education
departments would not suffice. Commitment to and
involvement in community education should be clear in
such fields as health, planning or social work. The new
statement should emphasise that, through its
concentration on promoting personal development, building
community capacity and investing in community learning,
community education will contribute to the achievement of
Government objectives in lifelong learning, social
inclusion and the promotion of active citizenship. Local
government responsibilities should include their own
contributions to community education and their creation
of the circumstances which yield effective community
learning plans. |
| 8.2 Community learning plans should be built
from the bottom up; the timescale for completion of the
first version - it will be continually renewed - must be
realistic in this regard. Targets, target-setting
procedures and monitoring should be very clear. |
| Within the
understanding described at paragraph 4.4 of this report,
the precise nature of individual community learning plans
should be determined in the light of local
interpretations of community planning and the operation
of the Best Value regime. They should represent a process
of continuing dialogue among providers and between them
and participants, and not deteriorate into a chore for
annual completion. They should refer to the contributions
of all providers, and the plans should have a clear and
practical reality for those who benefit from them. Their
key purposes should be: |
to identify where the
main responsibilities for using and developing
community education approaches lie, especially with
regard to the authority's development of its
corporate and community based operations, and its
relationship with other public and voluntary bodies;
to involve communities
in a continuing process of planning, implementing and
reviewing provision for community learning, drawing
in all relevant agencies in order to maximise their
complementary contributions and responsiveness to
need;
through this process,
to provide an analysis of learning needs and
resources in communities, particularly in
disadvantaged areas, and baseline data on key topics
for the purposes of target-setting;
to maximise the
contribution of community education to lifelong
learning, social inclusion programmes and the
promotion of active citizenship, ensuring mutual
support with key institutions and partnerships and
giving particular attention to practical
developments, such as local learning centres;
to ensure that FE
colleges, schools, HEIs, other appropriate bodies and
partnerships such as adult guidance networks and
local learning partnerships, are fully consulted in
the creation, implementation and monitoring of plans;
to ensure that
voluntary organisations are fully consulted in the
creation, implementation and monitoring of plans for
community education and to that the resource
implications of that involvement are recognised;
to ensure that targets
are set for community education against clear
baseline data and that these are reviewed regularly;
to ensure that there
is effective monitoring, evaluation and reporting,
and that this takes full account of Best Value.
|
| 8.3 The main interests should be asked to
agree on the overall approaches to be taken to evaluation
and reporting, so that Ministers, councillors and
voluntary sector management committees can have a clear
understanding of the criteria for success. |
| A very high
priority is required for the evaluation of, and reporting
on community education, and this should include
assessment of inter-disciplinary operations. There should
be a commitment to involving communities in the processes
of monitoring and evaluation. Attention should be given
to longer-term evaluation of community education
strategies for combating social inclusion, developing
lifelong learning and promoting active citizenship. |
| 8.4 Those responsible for community planning
should use the skills and insights of community education
to achieve effective community involvement. |
| The SO/CoSLA
report on community planning recommended that a serious
commitment be given to community involvement. Within
community learning plans, the voice of the communities
should be clear and well developed. Specifically,
communities should have a key role in formulating plans
for community education contributions to social
inclusion, lifelong learning and active citizenship. The
commitment of resources to enable people to be effective
participants in the affairs of their communities is of
the greatest importance. |
| 8.5 All community education providers should
adopt procedures which seek the maximum involvement of
the users of their services in decisions about how they
plan and operate. |
| Although it
is not possible to legislate for attitude, it is possible
to create structures which reflect particular beliefs and
approaches. It is the Group's belief that the learners
and communities should be seen as the starting point for
planning rather than just the end users of services. This
should be reflected in structures and funding
arrangements. |
| 8.6 The Scottish Office should discuss with
CoSLA, SCEC, the voluntary sector and others the steps
which can be taken to ensure that community education, in
the terms set out in this report, is accorded high
priority in delivering the Government's policies on
social inclusion, lifelong learning and active
citizenship. |
| The problems
created by the current lack of continuity of funding for
both statutory and voluntary providers of community
education require attention. Research is needed to
establish the extent and characteristics of central and
local government and other funding of the voluntary
sector in community education as defined by the Group.
The process of review should draw in representatives of
other providers of community education, such as further
education and health education, as appropriate. |
| 8.7 Having agreed on community education's
priority as a method of delivering key policies, The
Scottish Office and CoSLA should agree an approach to
secure and monitor all expenditure which covers the new
agenda, aiming for its clear identification,
transparency, continuity, priority and collaborative
funding commitments. |
| The Group's
proposals call for a new approach to funding and
financial monitoring which does not rely solely on the
current GAE3 allocation for community education, as this
will not reflect expenditure on the range of activities
which should grow as part of community education in the
future. All of the fields and agencies contributing to
community learning should identify their commitments and
doing so should be accorded a high priority by
Government. The total will represent the shared priority
which the Government and local authorities give to
community education's contribution to social inclusion,
lifelong learning and active citizenship. There is a need
to track this expenditure as, unless this is done, there
will be no monitoring of the new community education
agenda. At the same time, acknowledgement by Ministers
and by CoSLA is required of the priority for community
education as proposed by the Group in order that
appropriate commitments from the fields and agencies
concerned can be drawn together, through the community
learning plans, into a coherent and significant
endeavour. Achieving continuity will be as important as
appropriate levels and sources of funding. Priority is
now acknowledged for social inclusion, lifelong learning
and active citizenship, which have long been the concern
of community education, but without shared priorities and
joint commitments, the community education approach will
not achieve the momentum that is required. |
| 8.8 The Scottish Office should consult with
relevant interests, perhaps using the good offices of the
appropriate umbrella organisations, to explore their
needs and the best ways of continuing to meet them within
community education as now defined. |
| The new
configuration of community education proposed by the
Group may raise concerns among some organisations, such
as those in the voluntary sector which regard their work
in adult education, youth work or community work as
coming under the community education banner. |
| 8.9 The Scottish Office should ensure that
responsibility is allocated nationally to appropriate
bodies for the development of joint policy statements
among the fields which already play, could play or should
play a larger role in community education as now defined. |
| The new
agenda for community education emphasises that its
approach is the concern of many. It will take time and
effort to achieve understanding of this, and the
subsequent commitments to joint action. Relevant fields
should be actively encouraged to recognise their place in
the new approach and to have recognised the work that
they already do. |
| 8.10 The Scottish Office and providers
should make the maximum possible allocations to the
programme of inter-disciplinary in-service training. |
| There is an
immediate and considerable in-service training
requirement, the response to which should be
inter-disciplinary in nature, to reflect the integration
and values which are to be achieved at local level and
give immediacy to learning about working in partnership.
The creation of a programme of a sufficient scale, which
may have implications for staff cover, will require a
high level of co-operation among the main interests. It
should involve the professional community education
training organisations, assisted by staff from selected
organisations acknowledged as demonstrating good
practice. Senior staff from all authorities, the major
voluntary organisations and interested FE colleges should
be invited to attend, with the expectation that they
would follow-up with in-house courses covering the same
ground. The programmes should cover government policy,
community planning and Best Value, inter-disciplinary
work and the roles of community education in promoting
personal development, community capacity building and
investment in community learning. |
| 8.11 Training for community education should
be reviewed in the light of this report. Initial training
should contain a strong and effective commitment to
inter-disciplinary work and should be relevant to a wider
range of context. Approaches to quality assurance should
be reviewed. |
| The
longer-term implications of this report for pre-service
training for community education are considerable. They
will not just be the concern of the NTO which is expected
to be created for community education but will also be of
direct interest to other NTOs e.g. for the voluntary
sector, social work and libraries and to training for
schools and further education. The development of
inter-disciplinary training is an increasingly common
theme and one which should not in any way undermine the
needs of particular interests, such as those of the
voluntary sector. Training should encompass the wider
range of contexts to which the report refers and be
accessible to other professions needing to extend their
skills. It is also essential that training adapts to
changing circumstances, requiring quality assurance
procedures which reflect the realities of the work which
graduates will do. Consideration should be given to the
inspection of training for community education. |
| 8.12 An enhanced concern with and a coherent
approach to research should be promoted
in order to produce good information and effective
analysis at all levels. |
| The need for
good research to inform practice and the presentation of
well-founded argument within policy development has
received insufficient attention in community education
local projects, providing organisations and policy-makers
should expect research information to be available to
them but there is too little done and too little access
to the resources which exist. |
| 8.13 The Scottish Office should continue to
extend the development of its own arrangements for the co-ordination
of action on matters of corporate concern. It should
ensure that its organisation and procedures are clear and
accessible to the interests covered in the report. |
| The Working
Group strongly welcomes the Government's commitment,
through the New Deal for Communities, to a general
strategy of support for community involvement and cross
sectoral working. The commitment to the
inter-disciplinary working necessary to support such
approaches has been shown by the Scottish Office in its
work on social inclusion and related topics. Such a
commitment is also required in other fields of direct
relevance to community education, such as youth issues.
The group recognises that community involvement and
inter-disciplinary working can present administrative
difficulty but believes that solutions must be found to
meet the multi-dimensional needs of communities. |
| 8.14 In due course the Scottish Executive
may wish to consider any possible legislative
requirements. |
| The new
agenda for community education will be of signal
importance to the new Scottish Parliament for it provides
a mechanism for supporting democratic renewal at the
level of local communities. Its effectiveness will depend
on serious commitment by the fields and agencies referred
to in this report and this, and their effectiveness, will
require to be monitored. Given the importance of the
issues, continuing dependence on discretion any provision
may merit review. |
| |
| 3 Grant Aided Expenditure - the amount that
the Government think that local authorities need to spend
in total on the provision of services |
