Foundation learning – jam-making for the future

I love making jam. My recently-made plum jam joined my selection of berry jams to look great in the cupboard. Such a selection to choose from! Being spoilt for jam was the subject of another conversation I was part of this week – this one about foundation learning.

Like jam, foundation learning is a very sticky subject. Only teacher practitioners really understand the nuances of terminology: bridging education or foundation learning, adult literacy or numeracy, whatever, it’s “catch-up” learning for adults. It’s what you do as an adult when you haven’t got the skills to do a diploma or a degree and you need the pre-requisite to enrol. Success for foundation learners is a mire of honeyed possibility – food for future success; or a trap for the unwary. 

The outcomes for foundation learning are getting renewed attention here. Why? There is a connection between skills and productivity, economic growth and wellbeing – a key issue for New Zealand.  

Bruce Vandal, from the States Education Commission of the US, was the guest speaker at an event hosted by Ako Aotearoa  in Auckland this week in support of the Ako Aotearoa project to increase educational attainment for “priority learners”.

He told us that President Obama’s goal is for the US to have the highest % of the population with post-secondary credentials by 2025 – in other words, win back America’s place as the world’s Number One in education. To reach Obama’s goal, they have to increase “production” of credentials by a whopping 53%.

Nevertheless, there’s been decreasing public investment in the adult learning sector. More “efficiency” is required in the pathway offerings for low-level learners (the jam sales table!)

The failure rates in the US for second-chance and “remedial” learning are very high (possibly higher than here). Instead of Moving On Up, most of these learners never Get Past Go. 

Bruce Vandal had a wonderful diagram describing the “slow leaks” for these learners as they progress through “remedial” and “pre-programme” courses in order to finally graduate with a certificate, diploma, or degree. The diagram prompted discussion about the capacity in the tertiary education system here to collect and analyse data about what is happening for learners.

Mr Vandal made the point that if the goal is increasing credentials, then the pathway sequence needs analysis; not just the outcome for different courses.  How many passed is only half the answer. How many enrol in the next step?

To understand progress against the goal, you need good metrics. He put it like this:

• Measure enrolments in foundation education
• Measure the success that learners have in these courses
• Measure the success that learners have in their “first” year Diploma or Degree programme
• Measure the rate of credit accumulation that learners have. (Too slow, and they may never finish).
• Measure retention rates
• Measure degree completion rates

New Zealand has a Tertiary Education Strategy which places importance on “priority learners” -Maori and Pacific people. It’s a statement from the government that the foundation level part of the system needs to work well – better than it has. There are very large numbers of learners undertaking foundation-level learning; high numbers of them are Maori; they are mostly in Polytechnics and Wananga; they are mostly older (than 40); and more than ever they are undertaking learning for specific vocational purposes, rather than looking for “generic” skills.  This level of participation is a good news story for the country. But the more part-time they are, the more challenging it is to Get Past Go and on to higher level learning.

How important for Auckland. Priority learners are among the 450,000 adults in Auckland with low or very low numeracy and literacy skills. They constitute both our present and future workforce. I think it is worth paying attention to the idea of understanding the broader Auckland picture of who enters Level 1, 2 and 3 programmes, whether they complete, and where they go to next. 

Scarily, the completion rates for foundation learning programmes at various institutions across the country are highly variable. How it that across New Zealand completion rates can be as high as 80% at one institution and at another as low as 19%? As taxpayers we are funding that?

A way forward for tackling Auckland’s skill challenge emerges from this. What do we understand about the city picture for foundation learning?

In Auckland, we need to connect support for “priority learners” to the aspirations of the Mayor contained in the about-to-be-drafted Auckland Plan.  A Leadership Goup is needed to set goals about foundation learning for Auckland; to lead a process for measuring outcomes against those goals; and to advocate for commitment to high quality, well-resourced, foundation learning in the city. It’s about translating economic potential into value-for-money jam for the future.

How to use welfare reform as a circuit-breaker for Auckland’s urban poor

 The word “Welfare” is interesting. For a generation it was connected to kiwi understanding of ourselves as being part of a Welfare State. My parents were post-war migrants and I was brought up in a family that took full advantage of government-provided health and social security and education. My parents would be horrified to think of us as a “dependent” family. Dad worked hard to put bread on the table. He never became rich, but he certainly provided adequately for a wife and five children. He could do this because of the system underpinnings which provided a universal fortnightly fixed payment to Mum (the Family Benefit), under-wrote the Plunket and Doctor’s visits, and enabled us to be educated at low cost at our local convent school and state high school. That was the Welfare State that made New Zealand attractive to so many in the post-war years.

Today, the word welfare seems synonymous with the receipt of a benefit that is a mark of failure. The Minister of Social Development has put together a Welfare Working Group, which produced an Issues Paper on benefit dependency – its central idea seems to be how to get people off it.  It basically calls for a total rethink of welfare services in New Zealand.

There is something slightly disturbing in the Welfare Working Group discussion that co-opts the term ‘welfare’ for use in an almost pejorative way. Welfare is no longer a system of safety nets.  It has now officially become something that you need when the bad times come – a form of unlimited personal insurance which the rest of us are rather unwisely paying for.  In other words, a Bad Thing.  

Now, there’s no doubt that a system overhaul is needed. Income disparities in New Zealand have widened, and benefit signals are as confusing as the entitlements themselves. Poverty is a feature of the urban landscape of Auckland, is concentrated in pockets, and benefits are not a passport to the future but a stamp of failure. The “distressed neighbourhoods” in the urban wastelands of American and European cities are emerging in Auckland.  In the south and west of the city there are whole suburbs and communities characterised by disempowered and disadvantaged people living on benefits.

 Now, I am as uncomfortable as any taxpayer with the idea that generations of people are living on my back. But life is more complicated than that. Rather than focusing on the challenges of the ‘sticky’ clients in the system, and penalising them for their situation, the Welfare Working Group could concentrate on the way the system can positively equip people for better futures.  

Long-term benefit receipt arises because the total package of social services does not change the circumstances of families or individuals. It keeps them trapped in poverty. It’s the lack of integrated service provision that results in system inefficiency and ineffective interventions. There is strong local and international evidence that shows the life-time consequences of low literacy[1]. The circuit-breaker for inter-generational welfare dependency is to improve the education level of the mother[2]. But fair go, the social welfare system is poorly connected to health and education services. Many parents find penalties to self-improvement.  The underground economy is more rewarding than being in the mainstream.

Life is like a vaccination programme. Protection against harm builds up over time, and is only certain at the final inoculation. Giving people a carrot-bag full of options to achieve a graduated shift off a benefit will be better than waving a stick about getting into work and penalising people for their family and cultural circumstances. Service design should be customised to the needs of families and communities, creating opportunity for families to “change gear” and take up new opportunities in a flexible, affirming approach that rewards effort. The most effective route out of long-term benefit dependency and unemployment is education.

The Welfare Working Group asked a leading question about the sustainability of paying out benefits to people long-term. There is no evidence to suggest that the benefit system is any more socially and economically unsustainable than superannuation, or education, or health services. All cost money. What is not sustainable is the loss of  potential in high-poverty communities. This is particularly critical in Auckland, where poor skills (especially language, literacy and numeracy skills) contribute to dependence on benefits and undermine the economic development aspirations of the city.  The most unsustainable solution is not to invest in skills enhancement, particularly among young people and working age adults.

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[1] Parsons, S., & Brynner, J. (2007). Illuminating disadvantage: Profiling the experiences of adults with entry level literacy or numeracy over the life course. London: NRDC. Institute of Education.

[2] Wylie, C., Hipkins, R., & Hodgen, E. (2009). On the edge of adulthood: Young people’s school and out-of-school experiences at 16. Wellington: New Zealand Council for Educational Research.

Related Articles

• John Armstrong: Going where National has never gone before (nzherald.co.nz)
• The final disembowelment of the NZ Welfare State? Maybe, maybe not… (peter-petterson.blogspot.com)

Playing the literacy and numeracy game

Ancient Japanese game, via Wikipedia

Game-playing is such a great learning tool. Monopoly was part of my childhood experience, and draughts, and Ludo and cards. I had forgotten how much playing games contributed to my education until we started playing games in our office.

Last week we experimented with a game involving decision-making about money. Like Monopoly, the person with the most at the end, wins! The purpose of playing a game during office hours – yes, there was genuine business purpose to this game – was to provide sample feedback to a game developer about how such a game might work in the community we serve. We listed vocabulary and assumptions and skills (literacy and numeracy skills!) as part of the catalogue of challenges that the game presented: and we had fun.

Games came up again a few days later when we started thinking about how people get messages about social issues. I was drawn to this not-for-profit website about game development, called Games for Change, which promotes the use of digital games to address things like poverty, education, human rights, and so on.

There’s this game which is based on the lives of a typical Caribbean family, the purpose of which is to see who can get the most family members educated! It’s quite a depressing game: mostly, health issues for the parents and the children get in the way, and it becomes clear how very difficult it is to get past the circumstances that can bedevil an ambition to become educated. It sure makes you think about the challenges of life somewhere else! Called Ayiti, the game was sponsored by Unicef, and was developed in a partnership with a group of high school students with the support of a company called Gamelab. A school-business partnership at its very best.

These gaming encounters have left me with the idea that there are exciting new ways of getting messages across. The old-fashioned board game has some value. But learning via gaming technologies might be an interesting avenue to explore – what would it look like if we played a game about someone with very low literacy and numeracy skills in South Auckland? The best design input here would be from the community that lives it – adding the kinds of options that really take people to the next level, or prevent them from getting there!

Imagine the game ‘card’ that says the digital equivalent of: “your workplace picks up on the city campaign for numeracy and invites you to a stocktake training day which improves your estimating skills…advance three spaces.”Or, “productivity gain means your employer wins a new tender…earn bonus of $500.”

Literacy and numeracy – see, its everywhere!

• Gardening ‘can boost literacy and numeracy’ (telegraph.co.uk)