Labour-power production and the skills agenda in lifelong learning: A critical policy analysis of the Skills and Post-16 Education Act 2022

Abstract

This article considers how neoliberalism has created a reductionist view of lifelong learning in the UK focused on upskilling workers for the labour market. This critical policy analysis uses Marx’s theory of labour-power, as conceptualised by Glenn Rikowski, to examine the Skills and Post-16 Education Act, 2022 and to identify its ideological roots, its distribution of power, resources and knowledge, and the potential effect it will have on inequality. Findings indicate that while the Act aims to make it easier for adults to study more flexibly, not all adults will have the labour-power attributes and financial resources to access the higher-level qualifications prioritised for funding. This article argues that the Act represents a general deepening of neoliberalism in lifelong learning that will further stratify adult education and increase inequalities. This article concludes that policy has shifted from widening participation in lifelong learning linked to social enrichment and the development of democratic citizenship, to widening participation in higher levels of education and training aimed at enhancing labour-power for the capitalist labour market.

Keywords

Adult education lifelong learning UK education policy neoliberalism educational inequalities critical policy analysis

Introduction

Adult education and skills policy has become a top priority for the UK government with a range of recent reports emphasising the extent of skills shortages. The 2019 Employers Skills Survey (ESS) found that 24% of vacancies were caused by skill shortages, highlighting discrepancies between supply and demand in the UK labour market (Winterbotham et al., 2020). While the ESS reported that technical and practical skills contributed to 84% of skills shortage vacancies, basic skills (including literacy, numeracy, and digital) show unfavourable comparisons to other European countries (OECD, 2019). Trends such as increased automation, decreased immigration, and an ageing population are likely to lead to a shift in the demand for diverse types of skills, with the Confederation of British Industry (2020) estimating that 25.5 million people will require upskilling and 5 million will require retraining by 2030.

Pursuing policies to boost the UK’s skill base, the government has underlined its desire to create a post-16 education system in England that provides opportunities to access education and training throughout the lifetime. The Department of Education (2022) passed the Skills and Post-16 Education Act into law in April 2022 which introduces a Lifelong Loan Entitlement (LLE) equivalent to 4 years of student loans for level 4–6 qualifications (higher technical and degree levels) that individuals can use flexibly across their lifetimes. The Act envisions employers playing a greater role in the post-16 skills system through Local Skills Improvement Plans (LSIPs) in conjunction with education and training providers.

While the government has recently committed additional funding for adult education (individuals aged 19+ outside higher education), this comes in the context of a decade of sharp and sustained cuts. The economic crash of 2008 and the advent of an austerity agenda left an indelible mark on the adult education landscape (O’Leary and Rami, 2017). The Institute for Fiscal Studies (2021) reported that overall spending across adult education fell by 35% (£1.9 billion) in real terms between 2009-10 and 2019-20. This was accompanied by a decline in the number of learners from 3.2 million in 2010-11 to 2.1 million in 2018-19, with the largest fall in numbers among learners taking low-level qualifications (English and Maths, IT, Skills for Life). Concurrently there was a reduction in workplace training (UKCES, 2014).

Material poverty and income inequality grew starkly during this period (2008–2020) which had a concomitant effect on the educational opportunities of the working-class (Cahill, 2015). The Learning and Work Institute’s (2021) adult learning survey found a significant social class divide with adults from lower socio-economic groups twice as likely not to have participated in learning since leaving full-time education than those in higher socio-economic groups. The uneven funding landscape necessitates many adults to apply for a loan to cover their course fees. Access to adult education is highly stratified, exposing the myth of ‘second chance’ learning as not all adults have the economic resources and personal capacities to return to education (Grummell, 2007; Kosyakova and Bills, 2021).

The alignment of adult education toward labour market activation in the Skills and Post-16 Education Act reveals the extent of how neoliberal ideas shape current education policy in the UK. Though promoters of neoliberalism advocate less government involvement in the lives of individuals, they acknowledge that economic growth is contingent on investment in human resources development to meet its labour needs (Fleming, 2010). Allais’ (2014) research on the development of neoliberal education policies over a 20-year period found their direct contribution to the rise of outcomes-based qualifications in the UK, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. She argues that these qualifications have a strong focus on tightening links between the labour market and education, with learning outcomes becoming a checklist against which employers can measure the employability of graduates. This is similar to Holborow’s (2012) argument that the primary function of education under neoliberalism is to meet the requirements of capital and to produce ‘human capital’ – the knowledge, skills, and creativity of people – for the labour market.

Adult education and lifelong learning are no longer perceived as a public good by policy makers, but a consumer good whereby the qualifications that are funded and prioritised are the ones that can be measured against employment statistics and GDP (English & Mayo, 2012a, 2012b). This article will use England as an educational policy testbed to outline how neoliberalism has created a reductionist view of adult education focused on upskilling workers for the labour market. This agenda has intensified since Brexit and the COVID-19 pandemic has caused a sharp fall in total employment (De Lyon and Dhingra, 2021). A critical policy analysis (CPA) was conducted on the Skills and Post-16 Education Act, through the theoretical lens of Marx’s theory of labour-power as conceptualised by Glenn Rikowski, to identify the policy’s ideological roots, its distribution of power, resources, and knowledge, and the potential effect it will have on inequality. This article will argue that the Act represents a general deepening of neoliberalism in adult education.

Neoliberalism, vocationalism, and lifelong learning

Over the past four decades neoliberalism has become the dominant ideology in public policy and discourse. Neoliberalism is characterised by the marketisation, commodification, degradation, and privatisation of public services (Hill et al., 2013). It promotes open markets, unfettered free trade, and the reduction of the public sector: ‘leaving the free hand of the market to rule’ (Torres, 2013a: p. 97). Discarding social democratic policies, the state has increasingly lost its welfarist function as it participates less in the provision of social services (including education, health, and housing) and proposes that these services should be privatised. The public sector is considered to be inefficient and wasteful, while the private sector is seen as more responsive to changes in demand and supply (English & Mayo, 2012a, 2012b; Torres, 2013a). Shamir (2008, p. 3) described neoliberalism as:

a complex, often incoherent, unstable and even contradictory set of practices that that are organized around a certain imagination of the ‘market’ as a basis for the universalisation of market-based social relations, with the corresponding penetration in almost every single aspect of our lives of the discourse and/or practice of commodification, capital accumulation and profit-making.

Neoliberalism became the dominant form of capitalist economic relations in the UK since the election of Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government in 1979. So pervasive has this ideology become, Harvey (2007: p. 3) concluded: ‘Neoliberalism has, in short, become hegemonic as a mode of discourse’. Torres (2013b: p. 23) reads neoliberalism through a Gramscian lens and argues that it has created a ‘new common sense’ that has permeated into all public and private institutions, including institutions of education. This new common sense positions education as a conduit for developing problem-solving learners and workers for the globally competitive economy (Allatt, 2019; Gouthro, 2022; Torres, 2013b). Amongst many individuals, there is an ‘internalisation of the notions of flexible, mobile lifelong learner that typify neoliberal constructions of the workplace, in which learning is primarily constructed in relation to employment’ (Crossouard and Aynsley, 2010: p. 113). Vocational qualifications, with its reliance on the capital of ‘employability’, are still seen as the route for those who are branded as failures in the academic arena. Lucas (2018: p. 145) argues that this sharp division between vocational and academic education is a representation of the divide of cultural capital and social class:

The system serves the elite well, while those who do not succeed either drop out of education altogether, or are marshalled into forms of vocational education that offer no real chance of employment, or into apprenticeships that lack meaningful substance.

The division between academic and vocational education predates neoliberalism. The Labour Prime Minister James Callaghan’s speech at Ruskin College in 1976 sowed the seeds for the vocationalisation of education when he criticised the traditional liberal approach to education and claimed that there was insufficient focus on numeracy and literacy, accusing the curriculum of being out of step with the needs of industry (Phillips and Harper-Jones, 2002). Tuckett (2017: p. 234) argues the main policy ramification resulting from this speech was an ‘increasingly narrow focus on courses with an explicit utilitarian labour market value’. Callaghan’s questioning of the post-war education settlement was a precursor to a full-frontal assault by consecutive Conservative governments between 1979 and 1997. The Labour government at the time was beset with economic problems that enabled the neoliberal critique of the welfare state to gain a foothold (Ball, 2013).

The Conservative government’s Consultation Document on Lifetime Learning (DfEE, 1995) explicitly linked adult learning to human capital formation with an emphasis on individuals taking responsibility for investing in their own skills and knowledge enhancement. Human capital is a core plank of neoliberal ideology and is based on the premise that the more an individual invests in their education, the greater the economic return (Holborow, 2012). The neoliberal repurposing of education has shifted the discourse in lifelong learning from ‘learning to be’ to ‘learning to be productive and employable’ (Biesta, 2006: p. 172). Lifelong learning is increasingly lacking in critical concern and any commitment to social justice (Bagnall, 2000), but is instead envisioned as a mechanism for upskilling where an individual must be able to apply those skills effectively to participate in a fast, transient knowledge economy (Allatt, 2019; Duckworth and Smith, 2018). Gillies (2011: p. 225) argues this discourse reduces the individual ‘to “human capital,” not as life to be lived, but as mere economic potential to be exploited’.

People are therefore expected to ‘invest’ their own money on continuing education and those who cannot afford to are blamed for ‘not seeing to their own learning requirements’ (English & Mayo, 2012a, 2012b: p. 80). This individualistic focus in neoliberal educational policies purposely ignores the economic and social circumstances of the individual, thereby reproducing divisions and inequalities rather than developing any meaningful counteraction against them. Policy focuses on a ‘reliance of on supply-side intervention in the labour market’ (Duckworth and Smith, 2018: p. 2), but ignores the dynamics of the labour market and neoliberal economic activities that have eroded living conditions for working-class people (Ingram and Gamsu, 2022). Reductions to funding mean participation in lifelong learning is lower among adults who live in areas that have the highest levels of multiple deprivation (Boeren, 2016; Egglestone et al., 2018). Even when adults can afford to access lifelong learning, Goldthorpe (2016: p. 89) shows that an increase in educational credentials does not significantly change the link between origin and destination: ‘thus calling into question the belief that education policy is key to promoting mobility’.

Theoretical framework: Marx’s theory of labour-power

Following the principles of CPA noted in the methodology below, this paper employs Marx’s theory of labour-power as conceptualised by Glenn Rikowski to provide a textual examination of the Skills and Post-16 Education Act, 2022 .

Marx (1867: p. 164) described labour-power as ‘the aggregate of those mental and physical capabilities existing in a human being, which he exercises when a produces a use-value of any description’. This includes our knowledge, skills, capacities, and abilities which become classified as economic commodities linked to productivity: ‘the greater its outcomes, the greater its value’ (Holborow, 2012: p. 101). As labour-power cannot be separated from personhood, we become capitalised, taking the form of human capital – the capacity of workers to work and produce surplus value – which is bought by employers in the capitalist labour market in the form of wages and contracts (Rikowski, 1997, 2021).

Frustrated by the fatalistic determinism (functionalism) of the base/superstructure model in Bowles and Gintis (1976) and the individualistic, passive acts of resistance promoted by Willis (1977), Rikowski (1997) boldly called for the dissolvement of Marxist sociology of education altogether. Instead, he proposed that labour-power should be the starting point for an analysis of the relationship between education and capitalism. Marx (1878: p. 210) was clear that ‘education produces labour power’. Vocational courses in FE, for example, involve specialisation in relation to capital through emphasis on the knowledge, skills, attitudes, and other labour-power attributes required to work in a specific industry. Reduced to the level of a commodity, a person’s potential to learn becomes quantifiable in terms their knowledge and skills can be bought on the labour market (Holborow, 2012; Rikowski, 2002a). As education and training are essential elements in the social production of labour-power, they are also involved in the ‘capitalisation of humanity’ (Rikowski, 2001a, 2001b: p. 34).

As the globalisation of capital progresses, the social drive to enhance the quality of labour-power has been ratcheted up. With Britain’s social and economic progress believed to be contingent on the general ‘upskilling’ of the labour force, successive UK governments have sought to make UK capital more competitive by emphasising human capital development in adult education policy. While lifelong learning on the surface can sound appealing, for Rikowski (2004: p. 568) it represents ‘a horrific capitalist social form as a kind of “learning unto death,” where individuals fearfully prepare themselves for the next twists in the labour market by upskilling and reskilling themselves’. This narrow, economistic focus on developing knowledge and skills for an imagined job is an alienating representation of what well-rounded educational experience should be (Holborow, 2012).

Rikowski (2018: p. 143) stresses that, ‘Marxism is a theory against society, rather than just another theory of society’. It is concerned with locating the weak points of capital. While educators are complicit in reducing learners to labour-power through education and training, awareness of this process is the first step to challenging this status quo. As educators are involved in production of labour-power – the weakest link in the domination of capital’s rule – they have an important strategic role in developing an educational ‘politics of human resistance’:

“The significance of a politics of human resistance is that labour-power, as a phenomenon is capital’s weakest link, in a double sense. First, the transformation of labour-power into labour in the labour process by labourers creates value and surplus-value, the latter being the first form of capital. The whole system depends on labour-power. Secondly, labour-power is an aspect of personhood, and hence under the sway of a will potentially hostile to the social domination of capital in education and indeed the whole of social life. Thus, an anti-capitalist education of the future might embrace a politics of human resistance to the capitalisation of humanity through education and training being implicated in the social production of labour.” (Rikowksi, 2004: p. 574)

Rikowski (2002b) states this ‘politics of human resistance’ calls forth a number of key tasks for Marxist educational theory, including the following: showing the role of education and training in the generation of labour-power; exploring the links between social class, education, and value creation in contemporary capitalism; examining the ways in which gender, race, age, sexuality, etc. is conditioned by social class and value production; and highlighting the significance of revolutionary pedagogy for breaking capital’s reliance on labour-power.

Critical policy analysis as methodology

Educational policy research has tended to operate within a positivist paradigm and reinforced the perspectives that ‘empirical research can access the information needed to understand, design, plan, problem solve, and implement effective educational policies and practices’ (Diem et al., 2014: p. 1071). In response to traditional positivism downplaying the role of power and ideology in the policy process, critical education scholars began to scrutinise the policy process, examine the players involved in policy process, and reveal policy constructions (Diem et al., 2019). With an orientation toward equality and social justice, CPA emerged to explore policy roots; how policies in reality differ from political rhetoric; how knowledge, power, and resources are distributed inequitably; how policies reproduce stratified social relations; how education settings institutionalise them; and how individuals resist or acquiesce to these social and institutional forces (Diem et al., 2014).

CPA is deployed in this article to analyse the Skills and Post-16 Education Act and the following: its ideological roots; its concern with distribution of power, resources, and knowledge; and the potential broader effect policies focused on skills acquisition for the knowledge economy will have on inequality (Appleby and Bathmaker, 2006; Knight and Crick, 2021). Researchers coming from the CPA perspective aim not to only understand policy, but to challenge the status quo. This article will engage the policy critically in line with the threat Ozga (2000: p. 96) defines as ‘the economising of education as a potential contributor to exclusion’.

Ball (2006: p. 18) criticises the ‘rampant ahistoricism’ in reviewing one education policy in isolation while Apple (2019) notes all education reforms have particular histories driven by ideological visions of what education should do and whom it should serve. Recent policy developments in lifelong learning are best seen within the history of adult education in the 19th and 20th century, including the economic, social, and political contexts from which they emerged. This article will include a historical and system analysis that attempts to track the trajectory of adult learning from the liberal adult education that dominated England through most of the 20^th century, punctuated by radical community education projects with a clear working-class orientation, before an increasingly utilitarian focus on qualifications and skills emerged with the birth of neoliberalism in the 1970s.

A literature review was also conducted to explore recent adult education reform in England, leading to the primary analysis of the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill (2021a; 2021b) and the Skills and Post-16 Education Act (2022). Several close readings of the Skills and Post-16 Education Bill, the policy summary notes (DfE, 2021b), and the updated impact assessment (DfE, 2021c) revealed additional primary sources to include in the analysis such as the Post-18 review of education and funding: independent panel report (commonly known as the Augar Review) (DfE, 2019) and the Skills for Jobs White Paper (DfE, 2021a). These documents were chosen as representative of current policy in adult education.

A key distinguishing feature of CPA is the relationship between theory and method as CPA scholars have drawn on a range of critical perspectives and methods in their exploration of policies and their impact (Diem et al., 2019). Following the principles of CPA noted in the Methodology above, this article will apply labour-power theory (Rikowski, 2000, 2004, 2021) to provide a textual examination of the Skills and Post-16 Education Act (2022). Following the analytical processes applied by Mansfield and Thachik (2016) in their CPA of Closing the Gaps 2015 in Texas, this article will analyse the primary sources inductively, producing the narrative that emerged from close readings of the policy without consideration of critical theory, before employing a deductive approach using labour-power theory as a lens to view the narrative more critically (Apple, 2019).

Policy background

In 2018, the then Prime Minister Theresa May announced a review of Post-18 Education and Funding to be led by Phillip Augar. The Brexit referendum decision heightened concern for this area because the UK was facing a shortage of skilled and unskilled labour when they withdrew from the EU. The review acknowledged the 45% real terms cut to adult FE funding between 2009/10 and 2017/18, stating that it ‘cannot be justified in terms of either economics or social equity’ (Hubble and Bolton, 2019: p. 14). Augar outlined a range of proposals in the Post-18 review on education and funding: independent panel report (DfE, 2019) to enhance the skills of adults, with a differential emphasis on disadvantaged young people. It also noted that there had been no significant improvement in social mobility in over half a century.

The headline recommendations of the Augar report included the introduction of a lifelong learning loan allowance for tuition fees at Levels 4–6, maintenance grants for disadvantaged students at Levels 4–6, and a first free full Level 2 and 3 qualifications for all adult learners. £3 billion would flow to FE colleges and other vocational training providers in an attempt to rebalance the post-18 system (HOCBL, 2019). The Government initially stated it would consider the recommendations when it was published in 2019, but did not publish a response until almost 2 years later when it reaffirmed its commitment to ‘building a skills system which offers a genuine choice between the academic and technical, which truly supports employers and the economy’ (DfE, 2021d: p. 9). This would be supported through the introduction of a Lifetime Skills Guarantee providing adults with funding for their first Level 3 in a ‘subject area with strong market outcomes’ (DfE, 2021d: p. 4).

Between the publication of the Augar report and the Government’s response, the COVID-19 pandemic took grip in early 2020 and deeply affected access to adult education. The state’s ability to respond to the crisis effectively had been hindered by decades of neoliberal cuts to public services. Nevertheless, the social justice imperative of adult education was highlighted during lockdown as services and staff reacted quickly to produce online responses reducing social isolation and improving wellbeing. Support also included setting up foodbanks and making PPE for local hospitals (James and Theriault, 2020). However, the scale of the unprecedented shock inflicted by COVID did not lead to a post-pandemic ideational shift in education (Shaw, 2021). In January 2021, the Department for Education (2021a) published a White Paper titled Skills for Jobs limiting policy discussion of lifelong learning to labour market considerations in Britain’s post-COVID economic recovery.

The Skills for Jobs White Paper contained a number of proposals for reforming the FE sector including a Lifelong Loan Entitlement (similar to the lifelong learning loan allowance recommended in the Augar review) to accumulate skills throughout the working life and a £2.5 billion National Skills Fund (NSF) to be spent cumulatively between 2021-22 and 2024-25. The Institute for Fiscal Studies (2021) calculated that this would reverse just over one-third of adult education cuts since 2009-2010 and the total spend would be comparable to the level it was in 2014-15. The £375 million commitment from the NSF earmarked for 2021-22 includes additional funding for traineeships and restoring free entitlement to Level 3 courses in high-priority economic sectors (e.g. hospitality, childcare, health, and social care) for adults without equivalent qualifications (DfE, 2021a).

While fully funded Level 3 courses could potentially reverse the decline in learner enrolment numbers since it was removed in 2013, it is notable the government did not implement the Augar Review’s recommendation to provide full funding for first Level 2 courses for adults of all ages (IFS, 2021). Alongside its emphasis on individual learners gaining qualifications, the Skills for Jobs paper stated that employers should be ‘at the heart of post-16 skills’ (DfE, 2021a: p 9). It is envisaged that local enterprise will play a leading role in developing new LSIPs which shape further education and technical skills provision so that it fulfils the needs of the local labour market. This would be supported by a £65 million Strategic Development Fund which would contribute toward the establishment of College Business Centres to enhance collaboration between colleges and employers. Employers would also play a vital role in designing almost all technical courses by 2030 to ensure that education and training is directly linked to skills required for jobs (Hubble et al., 2021a).

Policy narrative

The Skills and Post-16 Education Bill (DfE, 2021b) was introduced in the House of Lords on May 2021 and had its first reading in the House of Commons in October 2021. The Bill formed the legislative underpinning for Skills for Jobs White Paper (Hubble et al., 2021b). The main policy objective of the Bill is to ‘ensure post-16 technical education and training is better aligned to employers’ skills needs’ (DfE, 2021b: p. 6). The former Secretary of State for Education, Nadhim Zahawi, underlined the importance of the Bill in the country’s post-pandemic recovery as well as providing a route for adults from learning to earning:

By enabling people to meet the challenges of a labour market that is rapidly changing, we will not only make the country more prosperous and competitive, but also fairer for everyone…this is levelling up in action. (Zahawi, 2022: no page)

The Act, later passed in the House of Commons in April 2022, had four parts and thirty-six substantive clauses addressing skills and education for work (Part 1), quality of provision (Part 2), protection of learners (Part 3), and miscellaneous and general (Part 4). This policy narrative will report the patterns of discourse that emerged from a close textual analysis on specific parts of the Act relevant to adult education and lifelong learning. Three distinct themes became apparent during the analysis: 1) the involvement of local employer groups is essential to the success of the Act; 2) the Act will meet local labour market needs; and 3) the Act will provide loans to support choice in lifelong learning.

Employers at the heart of the post-16 skills system

The Act (clauses 1–5) will provide a statutory underpinning for the LSIPs which was first mooted in Skills for Jobs. The LSIPs put employers at the ‘heart of the post-16 skills system’ (DfE, 2021b: p. 16), drawing on their views ‘to summarise the skills, capabilities and expertise that are, or may be in the future be, required within the specified [vocational] area’ (Skills and Post-16 Education Act, 2022: p. 3). The Department of Education’s impact assessment of the Act further clarifies that leading role employers will have ‘in setting standards, the design of qualifications and shaping local provision in collaboration with other colleges and providers’ (2022: p. 7).

Clause 1 of the Act places duties on local education and training providers to cooperate with employer representative bodies to develop LSIPs, while Clause 2 outlines that the Secretary of State has the power to designate employer representative bodies (Hubble et al., 2021b; Skills and Post-16 Education Act, 2022). The LSIPs will be employer-led and will hold education and training providers to account in responding to employers’ skills needs:

“Employer representative bodies are well positioned to engage and convene employers, gather intelligence, and articulate their skills needs and help them navigate the skills system to drive greater employer involvement. They are therefore best placed to lead the development of the plans”. (DfE, 2021b: p. 7)

This will be similar to statutory partnership arrangements between employers, governments, and providers in countries such as Germany and Switzerland where governance of vocational education and training is organised in terms of corporatist decision-making bodies. However, unlike those countries, trade union organisations are excluded from the current partnership arrangement in the UK (Clarke and Winch, 2007; Emmenegger and Seitzl, 2020). As a result of employers playing a central role in shaping post-16 education and training, they will ‘have the skills they need to support productivity growth in their local area, create jobs and build the industries of the future’ (DfE, 2021b: p. 10). The policy discourse highlights the importance of realigning post-16 technical education and training to employers’ skills needs which will ‘support the government’s Plan for Growth’ (DfE, 2021b: p. 6). This new Plan sets out the Government’s goals to support economic growth post-pandemic and further underlines their ambition to align technical education with employer demand (Treasury, 2021).

Meeting local labour market needs

One of the main elements of the Act is that skills provision should be better aligned with local needs. Clause 5 in the Act introduces a new duty for FE providers to ‘review how well the education or training provided by the institution meets local needs’ (Skills and Post-16 Education Act, 2022: p. 6). The Act introduces extended powers for the Secretary of State to intervene when providers are deemed not to be complying with this. Local needs reflect a combination of factors relating to both employer skills and learner needs (DfE, 2021e), but the policy discourse in the Act is focused on how provision can meet local labour market skills needs. The DfE’s impact assessment of the Act states that a core benefit to learners is improved learner outcomes through training that meets the needs of employers:

“Courses on offer locally better matching employer needs following the articulation of needs through local skills improvement plans and the duties on providers to consider local needs when reviewing provision. As set out in the case for change, there are well-documented shortages in technical skills as well as STEM and digital skills”. (DfE, 2022: p. 22–23)

The Act views lifelong learning through the lens of labour-power and the economic imperative. Although there has been numerous research exploring the wider benefits of lifelong learning in the UK (Goldstraw et al., 2021; Hall et al., 2022; Schuller, 2017), it is notable that other indicators of local and learner needs such as health and wellbeing, community participation, and essential skills (e.g. communication and critical thinking) linked to adult community learning are not directly addressed in the Act.

Learners as consumers

The Lifelong LLE in Chapter 3 is the flagship policy of the Act (Skills and Post-16 Education Act, 2022). The policy, included in Skills for Jobs, would entitle adult learners to 4 years’ worth of post-18 education (Levels 4 and 5) to use over the lifetime. The underlying logic of the LLE is to improve the skills of people as the country ‘builds back better’ from the COVID-19 pandemic. Helping individuals to upskill or retrain alongside existing work commitments, the LLE will fund smaller periods of study such as modules in a degree programme as well as a full qualification, providing an adaptable and skilled labour force to make the country competitive in the globalised economy. Providing opportunities for further learning can also lead to better job security, increased life skills, and improved pay. The discourse of marketisation is employed with the positioning of learners as empowered consumers making rational choices to optimise their own economic potential:

“It is intended that learners (or consumers) of technical provision in participatory FE institutions are positively impacted as a result of securing better jobs within their local area.” (DfE, 2022: p. 68)

The LLE provides no funding support for learners studying below Level 4. The NSF is funding Level 3 qualifications in certain subjects for adults who not already have one, but for second Level 3 qualifications and many Level 2 qualifications adult learners are expected to pay. Learners unable to afford a Level 2 qualification may be unable to progress to Level 3. Instead, the Government has stated it will begin consultations on reforming Level 2 and below qualifications soon without providing any indication what those reforms could entail (DfE, 2021b).

Counter discourse

The discourse in the Skills and Post-16 Education Act continually emphasises requirements for education and training providers to be more responsive to the labour-power needs of employers. While the proposals for employer-led LSIPs were warmly welcomed by the Confederation of British Industry (CBI) for giving a ‘voice to voiceless employers’ (2021: p. 3), written submissions to the Public Bill Committee from organisations representing FE colleges and adult learning providers affirmed the need for education and training providers to play an active role in co-constructing LSIPs. Both the London Institutes for Adult Learning (2021) and the Workers Educational Association (2021) welcomed the inclusion of an amendment that stated LSIPs should ‘draw on the views of local authorities and providers in the area’ (Skills and Post-16 Education Bill, 2021b: p. 3), but this concession further underlined the primacy of employers as the key stakeholder in the LSIPs.

The lack of ‘street level policy actors’ (Mansfield and Thachik, 2016: p. 16) including educators, students, and local communities in drawing up LSIPs is a significant policy outcome. Simon (1983) noted that Marx held that education should be a community function controlled by people in the locality, but the Act elevates employers as ‘experts’ and gives them unprecedented influence over education and training provision that increasingly subsumes learning under labour-power production. Rikowski (2002b: p. 22) previously identified the growing influence of employers on the process of transforming labour-power into labour:

“As the potential labourer within practical education moves nearer in social distance towards the labour process, then the labour-power attributes can be enumerated with more precision and less generality. Employers also typically have more direct control regarding what goes into the syllabuses and on matters touching on the ethos of the courses followed as compared with general education.” (2002b: p. 22)

Both the Skills and Post-16 Education Act and the Skills for Jobs White Paper define local needs in terms of delivering technical qualifications to meet the skills employers need. The London Institutes for Adult Learning (2021: p. 3) criticised the Bill’s emphasis on local needs as seen ‘through the lens of the needs of local employers’. They argue that local needs should be extended to include a greater range of outcomes such as health and wellbeing, community participation, and other social and economic outcomes. The reduction of adult education to ‘skills’ ignores the importance of the community adult learning as an important lever for supporting social justice and social cohesion (Duckworth and Smith, 2019). The increasing emphasis on the skills-for-jobs perspective in lifelong learning underlines how adult education has been reduced to a subsector of capitalism: ‘the relationship between education and work has been reconfigured on the basis of capital as vocational preparation’ (Rikowski, 2004: p. 573).

The LLE will open up tuition fee loans for adults taking Level 4–5 qualifications and places the onus on individuals to investment in their own learning. Embracing neoliberal values, the policy discourse celebrates student-consumers determining their own individual learning trajectories in response to labour market demands. However, both the Association of Colleges (2021) and the Workers Educational Association (2021) argue that many adults will be unable to take up these opportunities because there is no additional support for living costs. Clause 17 of the Bill would have enabled adults in receipt of Universal Credit to access the qualifications and retain their entitlement, but this was removed during the Committee Stage of the Commons. Section 4(1)(d) of the Welfare Reform Act (2012) states that a person receiving Universal Credit must not be receiving education which is a significant barrier to access (Lewis, 2022).

Although FE has traditionally assumed a ‘social inclusion role’ in providing prevocational and low-level vocational qualifications for adults marginalised from the academic track (Hodgson and Spours, 2019), there are a number of financial barriers impacting low-income, working-class learners wanting to take Level 2 and Level 3 qualifications. While the NSF is already funding first Level 3 qualifications in a limited number of subjects, many people undertaking a second Level 3 qualification or a Level 2 qualification are expected to pay, but adult enrolments on full Level 2 courses have fallen by 87% between 2012-13 and 2017-18 since the Government withdrew full funding (Centre for Social Justice, 2020). The Workers Educational Association (2021) argues that without financial support, some learners cannot afford a Level 2 qualification which would enable progression to Level 3 qualification and beyond. The Level 4 and 5 qualifications that are funded through loans have an emphasis on skills upgrades that are more aligned to labour-power needs at the local level than lower-level qualifications. This emphasis on lifelong learning prioritising economic competitiveness over social inclusion and civic participation shares parallels with Germany, the Netherlands, and Switzerland where direct employer involvement has promoted the acquisition of work skills for adult learners (Emmeneger and Sitzl, 2020; Hoggan and Kloubert, 2020).

Discussion

There has been a noticeable shift in policy discourse from liberal lifelong learning promoting widening participation, social justice, and reflexive citizenship (Kennedy Report, Fryer Report) towards the acquisition of particular skills to participate effectively in the ever-changing labour market. In the neoliberal imaginary, adult education policy can be caricatured as ‘human resource development in drag’ (Boshier, 1998: p. 4). The narrow vocationalist discourse of lifelong learning in the Skills for Jobs White Paper and the Skills and Post-16 Education Act focuses on individualism and labour-power development: the ‘freedom’ for the adult learner to succeed and fail (Cahill, 2015; Rikowski, 2021).

The UK economy is experiencing extreme turbulence. Both Brexit and COVID have caused a major restructuring of economic activity and widespread labour shortages (Dhingra and De Lyon, 2021). In response, the government has shifted its focus toward the development of homegrown skills (Hodgson and Spours, 2019). It is clear that the former Education Secretary Nadhim Zahawi saw lifelong learning being tied more tightly to labour-power production. In a speech to the Association of Colleges, he describes the transformation of education into a site of commodity production turning people into labourers for capital:

To my way of thinking – education and the economy are inseparable. We are in the business of dealing with the most valuable asset in the country – our people. Our economic recovery will depend on getting people with the right skills into jobs and this in turn will depend on employers telling us what those skills needs are, so that we can tailor education to meet them. (2021: no page)

From early 2020, Rikowski (2021) argued the COVID-19 pandemic created a ‘Great Interruption’ in labour-power production in education through lockdown and institution closures. The pandemic exposed entrenched inequalities but also highlighted the interconnectedness of society. As public services – decimated through decades of sustained cuts – struggled to cope with the crisis, mutual aid groups played a crucial role in providing support beyond the capacity of national and local government. As well as disrupting labour-power production, the ‘Great Interruption’ saw adult and community learning at its most responsive as educators quickly developed online resources to check on the welfare of learners and reduce social isolation. Many educators – and learners – used the time during lockdown to help set up foodbanks and make PPE for local hospitals (James and Theriault, 2020; Michie et al., 2021).

As the country moved out of lockdown and policy discourse shifted to restoring the UK’s global competitiveness, the government argued that lifelong learning should support local business needs with a renewed focus on technical education (Level 3 and above) and advanced apprenticeships. The Department for Education (2021c: p. 13) stated that one of the key weaknesses of the current skills system is ‘too much learning is done in subjects with relatively low economic value’ such as the arts and humanities. While these subjects do make a considerable contribution to the economy, Rikowski (2021) argues this line of defence does nothing to challenge the reality that these leaners are being moulded for capitalist labour processes in the creative industries.

There is little acknowledgement of socially purposeful learning and non-qualification learning (e.g. community learning and family learning) in the Skills and Post-16 Education Act even though it tends to include the most disadvantaged learners furthest from the labour market (UCU, 2021). The Act’s lop-sided focus on skills development and gaining qualifications at higher levels will benefit those who left school with good GCSEs or equivalent qualifications (IFS, 2022). It overlooks the broader liberal vision of adult education which is more effective at engaging working-class and other marginalised groups. Many adults who have had previously negative experiences of schooling require learning opportunities relevant to their own life experiences and achieved over time (Fryer, 2010; Gilbert and Appleby, 2005; Tuckett, 2017).

A two-tier system with a strong distinction between fully funded higher-level skills at Level 3 (and above) enhancing employability and less valuable lower-level skills will create inequalities disproportionately affecting working-class learners, older women, ESOL learners, and refugees (Appleby and Bathmaker, 2006; Grummell, 2007; Kosyakova and Bills, 2021). Social class and closer proximity to the labour market remain the key predictors of participation in lifelong learning, with those in the AB social grade and working full-time most likely to say they are current learners (Hall et al., 2022). It is those groups most likely to benefit from the restoration of public funding for Level 3 qualifications and the extension of student loans to those taking Level 4 and 5 qualifications. With no restoration of public funding for low-level qualifications on the agenda, the main interventions for helping those with few qualifications is through untested programmes like ‘Multiply’ and skills bootcamps. Both are unlikely to lead to formal qualifications (IFS, 2022). Therefore, those adults who need qualifications and learning the most are ‘caught in a perennial trap of disadvantage and marginalization’ (Shah, 2020: p. 24).

The Lifelong Loan Entitlement, worth the equivalent of 4 years of post-18 education, will burden learners with a loan that roughly amounts to £37,000 in today’s fees. This positions adult learners as consumers of education. The neoliberal policy of marketisation, which demands that educational institutions act like businesses, deems education a financial investment for the learner and a vehicle for serving the needs of capital (Maisuria and Cole, 2017; Mintz, 2021). Despite this growing marketisation, the neoliberal state continues to play a direct role in the configuration and funding of education. Too much state withdrawal could create a crisis of reproduction of labour-power (Holborow, 2012), especially as there has been a steep decline in employer training and contribution toward fees over the past decade (Belgutay, 2021; Hall et al., 2022).

The establishment of employer-led LSIPs highlights the instrumentalisation of education in the service of economic competitiveness. Through these plans, employers will play a central role in ensuring education providers produce the labour-power to support productivity growth in their local area. This reduces education to a social good whose primary value lies in its economic utility to capital (Morrison, 2017; Rikowski, 2004). Given the multifaceted crises facing working-class communities today, the question is whether lifelong learning can reimagine its social purpose in the coming years? While employability skills remain an important function of adult education, they should only be seen as one ‘part of the whole task of learning to be human in its richest and most fulfilling sense’ (Macmurray, 2012: p. 662). Learning for ‘life’ should be equally valued. Free, publicly funded, community-based adult education provision can help widen participation following a decade of cuts and potentially reduce the gap between the most and least educationally active, but it is insufficient on its own to the task of transforming the social relations that reinforce marginalisation. The challenge is to shift lifelong learning beyond a univocal concern with capital accumulation and repurpose it as supporting active citizenry, developing political literacy, and learning that many of the problems confronting society can only be resolved by people working together (Ranson et al., 2001; Shah, 2020).

Conclusion

Adult education and lifelong learning have become characterised by the dominant discourse of human capital development and competitiveness, becoming increasingly focused on UK-based skills development and sustaining capital’s expansive power. Policy has shifted from widening participation in lifelong learning linked to social enrichment and the development of democratic citizenship, to widening participation in higher levels of education and training aimed at enhancing labour-power for the capitalist labour market. CPA in this article explored the roots of these neoliberal policies in England and, through the lens of labour-power theory, was a useful analytical tool for exposing relationships of inequality and power in the Skills and Post-16 Education Act.

Not all adults will have the labour-power attributes (e.g. skills and knowledge) and financial resources to access the higher-level qualifications prioritised for funding in the Act. Rather than improving life chances, it is worsening the cycle of deprivation for the most marginalised adult learners (O’Leary and Rami, 2017). Following Rikowski’s (2000) perspective, this paper argues say neoliberalism stimulates the hierarchical reproduction of labour-power within adult education, thereby sharpening further social class differences. Rikowski makes clear that Marxism is a theory against society. Therefore, studies delving into the social production of labour-power in education must contend with the question of ‘human liberation from the social domination of capital’ (Rikowski, 2002b: p. 27). Future research into the Act could include interviews with ‘street level policy actors’ to explore ways educators and learners resist the process of self-reduction to labour-power (human capital). Further critique of the Act would benefit from a longitudinal approach following its development and implementation.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Dr Melis Cin (Lancaster University) for her feedback on an earlier draft. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers for their comments on this paper.

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Darren Cogavin

Darren Cogavin is a doctoral student in the Department of Educational Research, Lancaster University. He has two MSc in Equality Studies and Rehabilitation & Disability Studies from University College Dublin. His main research areas are in the fields of the Marxist educational theory and educational inequalities. He currently teaches A Level Politics at USP College and has previously worked in adult community education.

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