Final Report: Change Forces

We have identified the primary “change forces” during each of the four policy phases and examined how important each of these have been at different points as the field developed. They are:

• Campaigning groups /advocacy involving stakeholder groups including employers, Trade Unions, government based “champions” ; practitioner and learner-led networks

• Media mobilisation has been a pervasive feature of the field throughout the period of our study, both at national and local level

• National policy changes in adjacent domains as listed above

• Research evidence hardly existed at the start of the 1970s but quantitative estimates of need and benefit had become a major part of the policy rhetoric by the time of the Moser review

• Globalised goals of international agencies, mediated by national policy

• Strategic vision and influence of national agencies, such as the Basic Skills Agency

• Tools of government regulation such as funding methodologies, structures of consultation & decision-making, discourses; legislation, audit, performance indicators, tests and accreditation

• Diverse funding sources

Whilst pressure groups and the national media were important in the 1970s, the LEAs and a national development agency, ALBSU took over the role of change agents in the 1980s. LEAs lost their power as a result of broader political changes, and after the 1992 F/HE Act, further education colleges became major players while the ALBSU (later the BSA) took on more of a quality control function. Considered for much of this time to be a marginal aspect of further and adult education, ALLN has been affected by other, more powerful overlapping social projects such as policy for unemployment, immigration or post-16 reform generally. It was only with the advent of the Moser review in and Skills for Life policy at the end of the 1990s that a co-ordinated national strategy was specifically designed to promote change in the field.