“I may not agree with what you say but I will defend to the death your right to say it” – attributed to Voltaire.
In his book Good Education In An Age Of Measurement, Gert Biesta explores, among other things, the impact of national league tables on the choices politicians make in relation to education. He describes a situation where current discourses place most emphasis on education leading to the achievement of qualifications and he points out that good education has a number of other attributes, including creating good citizens who can challenge given solutions and come up with new solutions to problems. Few of us working in further education would disagree with this.
The work of employers, their representative groups, LSIPs and many others stress the need for us to ensure individuals have “human” skills (for example, collaborating, evaluating, exploring, interpreting information, and being resilient). Most of us recognise the challenge of creating a curriculum (for those on study programmes, apprenticeships, re-training or any other type of learning on any type of funding stream we end up engaging with), a fact first articulated by Stenhouse in his seminal 1974 book - and most of us recognise the impact that stretched funding has on achieving this.
While the current Education Inspection Framework operated by Ofsted does take a view that the impact of our work should stretch beyond achieving qualifications, there is not a national framework for us to consider long term “impact” beyond employability and further learning. Indeed, if we return to Dewey’s work on democracy in education, a huge work that has messages for us all (on how we can problem find, problem solve and critique work (to quote Stenhouse)), we are reminded that “education is not preparation for life, it is life itself”. Therefore, how we measure the long-term impact of the work we do should be central.
